New study claims iPhone’s Night Shift doesn’t help you get to sleep

bgrpro65 avril 29, 2021

Staring at screens all day has repeatedly been shown to have a negative impact on our ability to get to sleep and to stay asleep. Several years ago, we covered a study of nearly 10,000 young adults which revealed that using devices such as phones, tablets, and game consoles for more than five hours a day made them 3.5 times more likely to sleep fewer than five hours at night, and 49% more likely to require an additional hour to fall asleep.

About a year after we published that article, Apple debuted Night Shift for the iPhone alongside iOS 9.3. On a support page for the feature, Apple makes note of the studies that show "exposure to bright blue light in the evening can affect your circadian rhythms and make it harder to fall asleep. Night Shift attempts to address this by using your clock and geolocation to "shift the colors in your display to the warmer end of the spectrum" at sunset.

It's been more than five years since Night Shift was introduced, but according to a new study, the iPhone feature and those like it on other devices might not actually have any discernable effect on how we sleep.