Why your phone is messing with your body’s rhythms
we all know that we shouldn’t be sleeping with our phones by our beds at night, yet how many of us heed the advice to sleep with it in another room? My phone, which was banned from the bedroom, has somehow crept back upstairs since the start of the year. However, a recent chat with GP and TV presenter Dr Rangan Chatterjee means I’ve now banished it for most of the evening. Why? Because our phones are not just keeping us from a good night’s kip, but are disturbing our natural circadian rhythms and therefore our body’s basic functioning.
‘We’ve all heard that phones emit blue light rays,’ says Chatterjee, but what many people don’t know is that blue light is found in nature too. ‘In nature, we get blue light in the morning and also in the afternoons. It’s what wakes us up, and it’s what makes us feel alert.’ So when we are scrolling through our phones in the evenings (or worse, in bed) they send us sun-like signals that we should be awake. ‘Our brains literally don’t know when it’s time to go to sleep,’ says Milla Lascelles, holistic health and lifestyle coach.
We are also becoming emotionally stimulated at the wrong time of day, explains Chatterjee. ‘In the old days, we would be sat around a campfire with friends and family, chatting in the evenings,’ he says. ‘Today we are getting into rows on Twitter.’ That’s not all – the blue light from our phones also delays the production of melatonin (the hormone that helps us sleep) by a few hours, which may be the reason you toss and turn for two hours before you drop off. It may also be making us more anxious, says Lascelles, who says melatonin is shown to have anti-anxiety properties. ‘ This is being taken away from us by our phones,’ she explains.
What I find most concerning, though, is that our phones are altering the way we human beings are born to tick. ‘Our circadian rhythm regulates our sleep/wake cycle,’ says Chatterjee. ‘Our body’s rhythms should naturally revolve around the sun, and every single organ in the body has a circadian rhythm, from the heart to the brain. Modern life is decimating our ability to function at our natural best.’
So what to do? Chatterjee stresses the importance of switching our phones off at least an hour before bed. He is also a fan of sunrise-style alarm clocks, such as the Lumie Bodyclock Luxe (£199.99, johnlewis.com), which lights up slowly like the sun and can bring light into your day earlier in the mornings. He and Lascelles also advocate Blulite glasses (£84, blublox.com) – these stop blue light reaching your retina. Lascelles explains that these are important for children, whose retina are twice as sensitive to blue light as adults. And, if you still think you need your phone by your bed because you use it as an alarm, Chatterjee fires back: ‘You can buy an old-fashioned alarm clock for £6 on Amazon.’
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