This is Everyday Science with Clare Wilson, a subscriber-only newsletter from The i Paper. If you’d like to get this direct to your inbox, every single week, you can sign up here.
Do you have any burning questions around science or health that you’ve always wanted answering? If so, send them to me. If I can’t answer them myself, I’ll interview an expert who can, for a new Ask Me Anything section in this newsletter.
Back to this week’s newsletter. About a decade after they became popular, I have finally succumbed and got myself a fitness tracker.
Well, I am now being sucked into looking at my sleep statistics every morning. It is fascinating. And a recent small study that suggested a simple way to improve sleep has prompted me to start experimenting on myself.
Morning light
The new research, however, has found that in the morning, exposure to blue light has the opposite effect, and helps people have a better night’s sleep the next night.
The eye cells are especially sensitive to shorter wavelengths of light, otherwise known as blue light.
Researchers at the University of Surrey asked 36 older people who had poor sleep to sit in front of a table-top light box for two hours, either at the beginning or end of the day.
Such a finding has also been seen in laboratory studies, but it’s encouraging that it was also experienced by people using light boxes at home, showing it can be a real-world help, said chronobiologist Dr Daan van der Veen, who was involved in the research. “That’s the eye opener,” he said.
And there is nothing wrong with blue light from your phone in the morning either.
That’s because as we get older, the lenses inside our eyes tend to have build-up of proteins, which filter out more blue wavelengths of light. This might be one reason that older people have more sleep problems.
I’ve highlighted the blue light study because, in contrast, it suggests we should be changing something we do in the morning. Another less well known sleep hack also tries to manipulate circadian rhythms, by exploiting the fact that our body temperature is about 1°C higher in the daytime than when we sleep.
Sleep hacking? (Photo: Peter Dazeley//Getty Images/The Image Bank RF)It isn’t the rise in temperature that makes us tired, it is the fall in temperature afterwards. This is why it is also recommended we keep our bedrooms relatively cool, at about 18°C.
Working out
“The hotter the body is during the day, the more likely it is to fall to sleep and stay asleep,” Professor Adrian Williams, a sleep physician at King’s College London, said on the website for the NHS meditation app, Headspace.
Therefore, if improved sleep is your goal, exercising between 4pm and 7pm is the sweet spot, said Professor Williams. “Timing is everything,” he said.
I’ve been watching
I’ve only just got round to watching the Martin Scorsese thriller, Shutter Island, a gripping exploration of paranoia and madness, set in a 1950s institution for the criminally insane, in the US.
Read More Details
Finally We wish PressBee provided you with enough information of ( Why blue light could actually help you sleep better )
Also on site :