Sleep is a necessary aspect of our mental and physical health. Any lack of sleep, as research has suggested, can lead to a variety of problems like diabetes, heart disease, an impairment in attention, concentration, and more.
In fact, dropping sleep from seven to only five hours or less per night doubles our risk of death from all causes.
But what does sleep have to do with blue light or having a blue filter? Well, the truth is, as we’ve grown more and more dependent on technology, we’ve spent longer times being exposed to it.
The problem stems from the fact that the devices we use emit blue light. Although blue light is helpful, too much can cause us to stay up later and suffer from a variety of other problems too.
Why Is Technology Hurting Us?
One of the benefits of blue light is that it helps our body regulate our wake up and sleep cycle. An overexposure to blue light from technology throws that balance off of the scale.
How it does that is since our body’s cycle is determined by the exposure to light and dark, by having a monitor on, our body thinks it’s being exposed to more sunlight than darkness.
The darkness is important as once our eyes capture darkness, our body recognizes that it’s dark and produces a variety of chemicals that make us feel sleepy.
Fortunately for us though, recent updates in technology have addressed some of these concerns and they actually have some features in place to help with avoiding these problems in the future.
Adding A Blue Filter For PC
In the creator’s update in April 2017, Windows 10 was given a Night Light feature. What this feature does is that it reduces the amount of blue light that’s coming from the display screen. It does this by showing warmer colours on the monitor which reduce the amount of energy that’s coming out of the screen.
In order to activate this all you need to do is get access to the Action Center. From there, click on All Settings, then System, followed by clicking on Display. From that menu, you can choose whether you want the night light to be on or off. To configure it, click on Night Light settings.
The benefits of configuring it can allow you to turn it on or off immediately, adjusting colour temperature, and even scheduling when the night light will turn on or off.
Adding A Blue Filter For macOS
Macs also got their own blue light limiting feature called Night Shift, to activate it, open up System Preferences and find Displays. From there you’ll have a Night Shift tab where you can schedule it however you like. Whether it’s custom schedule or you can configure it to when the sun is set based on your location.
A Guaranteed Way To Eliminate Blue Light
Although these methods are free, they still do the same thing in reducing blue light instead of removing it completely. This is important to note as there are many sources of blue light, most notably from the sun.
If you want to remove that risk of blue light overexposure you should try Iris. It works on all platforms and devices and provides numerous benefits.
Users have reported that since installing they’ve gotten better sleep and that the app also removes screen flicker, reduces eye pain and removes blue light entirely
