Night Shift is of no help

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Night Shift is a feature available on iOS, iPadOS, and macOS that is supposed to improve your sleep by automatically changing your screen colors to warmer hues after dark. The feature was inspired by studies that show that exposure to bright blue light in the evening can disrupt your circadian rhythm and delay sleep. Researchers at Brigham Young University wanted to see how much the blue light reduction feature of a screen actually improves the quality of sleep. Their conclusion? Night Shift doesn’t help at all.

The researchers assessed the sleep quality of 167 young adults divided into 3 groups: one group did not use their iPhone at all, another used their iPhone without activating Night Shift and the last used their iPhone with Night Shift activated. “There were no significant differences in sleep outcomes across the three experimental groups,” the study concluded. The researchers also mentioned that mental stimulation, not screen colorimetry, plays a role in the quality of sleep for people who get regular and enough sleep. Even if Night Shift doesn’t improve sleep quality, users point out that it does reduce eye strain and that Apple should keep the feature, but adjust its description to remove any suggestion that it acts as a sleep aid.

⇨ Ars Technica, Samuel Axon, “Study: Using Apple’s Night Shift to improve your sleep? Don’t bother.”

⇨ Brigham Young University, Cami Buckley, “Is Night Shift really helping you sleep better?”

2021-05-05