A new study suggests that using Night Shift on your iPhone at night might not actually help your quality of sleep.
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By Tucker Bowe
If you’re an avid late-night gadget-user who’s also worried about the quality of your shut-eye…well, we have some bad news for you. If you’ve been using Night Shift on your Apple iPhone or Mac — or really, any kind blue-light-killing feature on your smartphone or computer — there’s a chance that it might not work like you thought it did. In fact, it might not actually work at all.
A new Brigham Young University study published in Sleep Health has concluded that, as it relates to a person’s quality of your sleep, Night Shift has no real effect. The study took a group of 167 people (between the ages of 18 and 24) and divided them into three groups. One group used their iPhone for the hour before going to bed with Night Shift turned on; one group did the same thing with Night Shift turned off; and the last group didn’t look at their iPhone at all.
Yet, according to the study, “there were no significant differences in sleep outcomes across the three experimental groups.”
This, of course, is very different from what other studies have been saying for years — which has been that looking at the blue light (created from our smartphones and computers) at night can make it more difficult to fall asleep and it can negatively effect the quality of your sleep, too.
The conclusions by the BYU study might be frustrating for those who have been using Night Sight (or a feature like it) for years. That said, there’s no doubt that the effect, which gives your screen a orangish hue, makes it feel easier on the eyes. It’s kind of cozy, too. And for some people, that’s more than enough.
If you haven’t tried Night Shift on your iPhone, you can easily try it out by opening your Control Center, pressing and holding the brightness control icon, and then toggling the Night Shift icon on/off.
