How did you sleep last night? The fact that the long weekend had given way to the dread of heading back to the office aside, did you feel abnormally awake? New research suggests that the iPad – or tablet time in general – could be to blame.
The Lighting Research Center at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute has been doing some tests on the backlit displays found in the iPad and its tablet brethren, and have some bad news: it’s killing your sleep patterns.
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According to the results, two hours of exposure to tablet screens in the evening wreak havoc with your melatonin hormone, suppressing its release enough to keep you awake at night. It’s news that might not come as too much of a surprise to anyone who routinely puts hours into tablet browsing after work.
So what’s to be done? The researchers hope that in future, iPads and other tablets will start being made with ‘light treatment’ software built in, that would reverse the effects as you play or surf. For the mean time, we’re all advised to dim the screens as much as possible once the evening comes.
