How Does Blue Light Affect Your Sleep?

As humans, we spend almost a third of our lifetimes in bed. You only have to have one late night or a night of disturbed rest to feel just how important sleep is to us. Without sleep our hormone balance suffers, our memory is impaired and our coordination goes. After a while our heart starts to be affected, as well as blood pressure and eventually we may very well suffer from hallucinations and psychosis. So without causing too much alarm, if your plan isn’t to go insane or die young, it’s a good idea to make sure you’re getting enough sleep!

Safe to say most of us get enough or just about enough sleep to function day to day, but how much sleep do we actually need? And how can we improve the quality of our sleep?

While the amount of sleep we need as adults can vary between what most studies agree is 7-9 hours, here are some widely accepted tips on how to improve your sleep:

1.  Avoid caffeine and alcohol (really?!)

Caffeine can stay in your system for hours, so try to keep any coffees to before lunch. Alcohol, although in larger quantities can feel like it helps you sleep, actually reduces your sleep quality and increases the amount of times you’ll wake up during the night.

2. Have a bedtime routine and environment

Keeping your bedtime consistent helps your body’s internal clock know what’s going on and will make going to sleep much easier. On top of this, having a quiet, dark and cool bedroom will let your body and mind relax and send the signals to your brain that it is time to sleep.

3. Exercise right

Apart from everyone’s favourite nocturnal workout… workout early in the day. This reduces cortisol production later at night which won’t keep you up and alert when you’re trying to sleep.

4. Avoid blue light before bed
   

Short wavelength blue light is great in the morning for feeling awake and alert, but too much before bed can trick our bodies into thinking it’s still daytime. This blue light will inhibit melatonin production and throw our circadian rhythm out, making it harder to get to sleep and diminish our sleep quality.

It’s best to avoid screens for an hour before bed, or use some pretty nice blue light blocking glasses…if only we knew where to get hold of those!