Tech Shortcuts for Life
Brain Science Explains Why Blue Light Blockers Help You Sleep
Hack your brain for more energy and better sleep
Tech Shortcuts for Life is a weekly column from Thomas Smith on Debugger exploring the apps, automations, gadgets, and other tech tricks that can make your life more efficient.
While driving through San Francisco in late 2020, I saw a billboard for a curious product: Blokz glasses from tech-centric eyewear company Zenni. The glasses, which range in price from around $30 to $200+, promise to “protect your eyes from blue light,” which the company claims is responsible for all kinds of evils, from “blurred vision” to “disrupted sleep.”
Zenni’s glasses are just the latest salvo in an ongoing war on blue light. Android phones now come standard with a Night Mode which filters out blue light from the phone’s screen. Apple has an equivalent mode called Night Shift. One of the signature features on the highest-end Amazon Kindle e-reader is a mode that shifts the device’s LEDs from blue light to a nice, warm yellow at night. A 2018 article in The Observer even called blue light “the tobacco of the digital age.”
While the dangers of blue light have almost certainly been blown out of proportion by savvy marketers, parts of their…
