Melatonin. It’s that naturally occurring hormone that regulates our sleep pattern but that doesn’t always seem to work. The science on melatonin is varied—you can boost your levels if you take it in pill form, and some voluntary lifestyle changes like slowing down on booze and coffee can help too. But one thing that decreases our melatonin levels that we don’t have much control over is, surprisingly, the light that comes out of computer screens, cell phones and pad devices.
That’s right—that screen most people with a desk job are staring into at least 8 hours a day, and then probably at home for a few hours after (you know that hour you spend before bed looking at random stuff—or the new season of House of Cards—on your iPhone or iPad ). Turns out, it uses a form of blue light rays that particularly excite your brain and stops the production of melatonin. So, ironically, blame your lack of sleep on your that digital device you can’t spend more than a few waking hours looking at.
A new company called SleepShield has developed a screen cover that bends the sleep depriving blue rays away from your eyes so that you can get a decent night sleep. It’s made from a Japanese PET film, that without getting all technical on you, scatters the blue light at ranges of 380 to 430 nanometers away from your direction. The product is a slight film, not unlike a screen protector—peel away the protective plastic and lay over your screen.
The effects are instantly noticeable with a less iridescent-like light coming from your computer. It’s hard to say with these things what is working exactly—still we sometimes have a poor night sleep, sometimes not, but we can say with certainty that our eyes are much less stressed out after a long day of work.
SleepShield comes in various sizes for MacBooks, iPads, iPhones, Kindles, Samsung Galaxies, PlayStation Vita and Nintendo 3DS devices. From $19.95 at sleepshield.com
