Like speculating about who will play the next Doctor Who, getting outraged by a Top Gear stunt or relaying your weird dreams to your colleagues, complaining about being a bad sleeper is deeply boring. So, with apologies, I say: I am a poor sleeper. I’m not an insomniac, but I regularly struggle to fall asleep, or wake up in the middle of the night and can’t get back to sleep.
It was with mild, fatigued interest, then, that I noted Apple has introduced a new feature in its latest iPhone update called Night Shift. The idea is that the light emitted from your iPhone or iPad eases off as night falls.
The blue light blasted at our eyes from screens is thought to mess with our circadian rhythms, tricking us into thinking it’s still daytime and stopping us from getting to sleep. Night Shift attempts to fight this problem by changing the colour of the screen to a warmer, reddish hue at dusk and resetting to the usual blue tones in the morning.
With a new report suggesting the average Briton is undersleeping by an hour a night, maybe we all need such a help. So, could Night Shift be the panacea for my tired eyes?
I tried it out for a few days to see if it would help improve my sleep. I set it to kick in at 9pm to give me a little blue-free runway before bed.
Straight out of the gate, the softer red and orange colours of Night Shift mode are rather appealing. It looks as if you have given your whole phone a nice Instagram filter, or have been been transported to those hazy days of 2010, when chillwave gently ruled the waves with gauzy synths, soft guitar licks and sepia-toned album artwork. Looking at your phone on Night Shift is like seeing a faded Polaroid of your parents hanging out in the 70s. I think Night Shift might actually be an immersive art project that makes you feel nostalgic and a little sun-baked, which is kind of a good way to get to sleep. Give Tim Cook the Turner prize.
After two days using Night Shift, I slept like a log both nights – though that may also be tied to a preceding run of evenings where I didn’t get a lot of sleep and was residually very tired. It’s not clear whether correlation and causation are sleeping together, yet.
I also nodded off on the bus home from work at 6.30pm. I’m not sure where my iPhone figures in that sleeping arrangement.
