Text Until You Drop—Recent Research Tells You How to Fall Asleep With Your Smartphone
Image via Flickr/ Taylor Bennett
These days, our busy technological lives may only end once we shut our eyes for the evening. From texting with long distance friends to reading books on our iPads, there’s plenty to do on our gadgets between bouts of sleep. And apparently books made out of paper no longer cut it as a pre-bed pastime.
Unfortunately, there’s a downside to this trend, and it lies in the LED screens of our Smartphones. When those bright lights spend too much time too close to our faces, they may just disrupt our sleeping patterns. And what’s the point of texting yourself to sleep if you can never manage to reach your REM cycle?
Luckily, we can combat this issue with a couple of simple steps. First, turn the brightness level of your screen down as you get closer to bedtime. Then, just hold your electronic device about a foot away from your face and you should be fine…assuming you can read the fine print of your email from that distance.
Yet the news might not be so bleak for those of us who need bring our phones with us to bed. Dr. Lois Krahn, a Scottsdale, Arizona Mayo Clinic Psychiatrist told Medical Daily that the light from Smartphone screens affects melatonin levels, higher ones of which help us get to sleep. However, Dr. Krahn reports that he “found only at the highest setting was the light over a conservative threshold that might affect melatonin levels.”
Thus, if you keep your phone at low to even mid brightness levels as you drift off to sleep while checking your Twitter, you should be able to start dreaming just fine.
