Cut out the blue light before bed

The Royal Society Te Apa¯ rangi’s report, Blue Light Aotearoa, last week confirmed what scientists have been saying for years – the LED-powered lighting revolution is messing with our body clocks. The blue light emitted from the lamps and screens we live with mimics daylight and can interrupt our mood and sleep, particularly when we are exposed to it late at night.

If you’ve sat up late in bed flicking through websites or Instagram posts on your smartphone, you may be familiar with the slight grogginess you feel the next morning.

Worried about turning their users into zombies, phone makers have responded by introducing night mode to their devices to filter out blue light, turning the screen a warmer tone.

But as one co-author of the report explained it to me, that’s a ‘‘band-aid’’ solution. We should be cutting out screens before bedtime entirely to avoid battling our circadian rhythms.

I’ve struggled to let go of the phone in bed. But I’ve replaced web-surfing and reading from a screen with listening. It seems I’m not alone in doing so.

University of Sheffield researchers have undertaken the largest study, published in the journal PLOS One, of using music for sleep, surveying 651 people in the UK about their listening habits after they hit the hay.

Nearly two-thirds of them reported using music to get to sleep, with 14 genres identified across the group. The top genre favoured by around a third of listeners was classical music, followed by rock, then pop.

I was pleased to see I wasn’t alone in preferring metal music to drift off to, with 3.35 per cent of those surveyed favouring the genre.

I don’t know what it is about metal, but if I’m not particularly tired I pull up Metallica or Nine Inch Nails on my playlist.

It works every time, I usually wake up at 4am with the music still playing on rotation.

I’ve also invested in a neat app Brain.fm, which plays ambient background music, which I find great for focusing my mind during the day.

The benefits of music listening have been established in numerous studies. It can relax and de-stress and, if you are that way inclined, I’m happy to share my metal playlist.

If I’m not particularly tired I pull up Metallica or Nine Inch Nails on my playlist. It works every time.