Screen usage before bed can still be okay for your sleep – Fighting Hawks Magazine

Through Jason Arunn Murugesu

A little screen time in front of the mattress doesn’t unduly harm the standard of sleep.

A number of studies have found that the blue light advertisements generated by laptop computers and smartphone screens before bed can make people less sleepy and affect the quality of their relaxation. One of many alleged mechanisms for this is that the blue light causes body systems to block the hormone melatonin, which normally makes you sleepy.

To go a little deeper, Christine Blume of the University of Basel in Switzerland and her colleagues wanted to check whether blue light, which only affects intrinsically light-sensitive retinal ganglion cells (ipRGCs) in the eyes, would affect subsequent sleep quality.

These eye cells are activated by light alongside rods and cones, but ipRGCs are very sensitive to blue light and are thought to play an important role in setting the body’s internal circadian rhythm, Blume says.

Researchers looked at 29 people in a outreach sleep lab for two types of symptoms. The subjects, with an average age of 23, all had a healthy sleep history. On one of the many nights they spent in the lab, the subjects were exposed to a screen of a type of sunlight for an hour that ended 50 minutes before they normally went to sleep. The common bedtime of the people was 11 p.m. A few weeks later, people had an evening out after being exposed to a uniquely mild situation.

The 2 completely different lights would have appeared practically similar to the people. However, one consisted of an excessive amount of blue light that could be taken up by the specialized retinal ganglion cells, while the other had a far lower amount of blue light and was therefore not taken up by these cells. An electroencephalogram (EEG) device was used to measure mental activity while subjects slept.

To examine how melatonin levels changed, the researchers took saliva samples from the subjects every half hour for the 5 hours before they fell asleep and also took samples in the morning. People were asked how sleepy they felt before going to bed. In the morning they were asked how well they slept and how awake they felt.

The blue light, thought to have an effect on melatonin, reduced the hormone’s blood concentration by about 14 percent compared to the opposite frequency of sunshine, but no effect on self-reported sleep quality was found. “Melatonin and sleep are most likely not as closely linked as people think,” says Blume.

She says there are a number of explanations as to why blue light may not have affected people’s sleep.

Essentially, the need to sleep at a specific time is mainly based on two elements: the effort to fall asleep, which builds up throughout the day, and the circadian clock, the body’s internal clock that regulates when we need to sleep and wake up in the 24th day -hour cycle. The interaction of these components has an additional effect.

In younger people with no explicit health problems, like those collaborating on the study, sleep stress might just overwhelm the effects of blue light on the circadian clock, Blume says.

The research also means that Blue Mild’s impact on sleep quality may also be influenced by other eye cells a little more than ipRGCs, she says. Blume says it would have taken patients longer to fall asleep if they turned on the screens closer to bedtime, but the researchers wanted to ask them and allow them to brush their enamel.

“This study shows that a cool atmosphere at night for a limited period of time does not significantly affect sleep,” says Blume. “I don’t think this study changes our overall perspective on the effects of blue mildew on sleep, it just adds a bunch of data to the prevailing evidence.”

“This doesn’t mean that blue light won’t affect sleep before the mattress,” says Stuart Peirson of the College of Oxford. “It just shows that the type of blue light they used at the depth they used didn’t work in this study.”

“I feel like what this article is about is how complicated the processes of sleeping and being awake can be,” says Hugh Selsick of College Faculty London. “Melatonin’s role in sleep-wake regulation is well established, but it is just one of several components that may be affected over time, such as homeostatic sleep patterns, mental state, physical well-being, environment and next .”

Magazine reference: Sleep DOI: 10.1093/sleep/zsac199

Signal as much as our free Health Check e-Newsletter, bringing you the health, weight loss and health information to believe every Saturday