You often hear that using your phone/tablet before sleeping is bad for your sleep. Especially young people suffer from a bad night of sleep because of this. They sleep later and  they wake up later, or they didn’t had a restful night sleep because they had to wake up early. A lot of research has been done as to whether the telephone/ tablet usage affects this. But what makes the usage of the devices have a bad influence on your sleeping?

Blue light

If you want a good and restful night of sleep, you better not use the devices with blue light before going to sleep. Because a certain amount of this light shining in your eyes, through the phone or tablet, makes you have to spend more time to fall asleep. This is due to the hormone melatonin, this hormone is a sleep hormone and is very sensitive to light. During the day the production of melatonin decreases, but in the evening it increases. However, light prevents melatonin production. This causes your biological clock to be confused and you will feel less tired, which makes it harder to fall asleep. This blue light isn’t only present in phones and tablets, it also in television and laptops.

Your brain stays active

During the day your brain had a lot of influences of outside and at night you brain wants to process this. A good night of sleep is essential, unfortunately your phone may affect this. Because you’re busy with you phone till late, several parts of your brain will stay active. Your brain has to read, click and type things. These are a lot of activities that your brain has to process during the late evening, after all the things it already had to process. If you’re reading a book, you use less parts of your brain. This means your brain is less active and you fall asleep faster.

What can you do?

Of course, it’s the best to put your phone away during evening, especially in bed. However, some of you may struggle to do so. Here are some tips and things you can try to reduce the effects: 

• If it’s not possible to put your phone away. At least try to turn off your phone an hour before you’re going to sleep. You can read a book instead of using your phone, for example.
• Dim the light of your phone to the minimum.
• An alternative solution can be: blue filter glasses or computer glasses. These glasses will make sure the blue light will not get through the glasses. You can also put your phone on ‘night stand’, if you don’t have it you can download an application.
• Put your phone on airplane mode, or put it on ‘quite’ so you can’t wake up from notifications.

Try to get a good night sleep, because you deserve it!