 Hey there, it's Alex here from AlexFugus.com, and if you've ever wondered how much blue light your iPhone emits, then stick around because I'm going to find out in this video. So if you've been in the biohacking space for a while, or maybe you've been reading some of my articles over at AlexFugus.com, or perhaps you're just new to sleep improvements, you may have come across the connection between blue light exposure and sleep. So I won't get into the nitty-gritty details in this video because like I said I have written about it and I'll put some links to the articles below, but in a nutshell blue light, in particular a certain range of wavelengths in the blue light spectrum, suppresses melatonin, and melatonin is known as the sleep hormone, though a better term would be the dark hormone because upon the body experiencing darkness the melatonin is released. So if you're looking to improve your sleep and of course your health, what you want to do is minimize blue light exposure to the body and in particular the eye in the evenings and close to bed. And that's why you've probably seen all these new glasses, the orange and red lens glasses, you've probably seen new apps and software features on your phone and laptops, and you've probably even seen the light bulbs that companies are now selling and I'll put links to all of these products below so you can go check them out yourself. Now what I want to do in this video, I don't want to get into all those products because I'll do that later and I've got some upcoming reviews with some of these products so be sure to subscribe to see those. What I want to do instead is look at what I think is probably the most critical device that could potentially be impacting your sleep and suppressing melatonin and that's the phone, smartphone. Chances are you're using this right up to when you go to sleep or if you're not using it in bed, you're probably still using it in the minutes prior to going to bed, right? So the impact that this one device can have on our sleep is quite a lot. It's huge. I mean, if you've got the best light bulbs and you're dimming all the rooms and you're not watching TV in that, chances are you're still going to look at your phone right before bed. The cool thing is Apple have incorporated their, I believe it's night shift mode which does lower the blue light in this device and I'm also going to show you a neat hack to further improve that blue light mitigation on this device. So be sure to hang around for that at the end of the video. So what I'm going to do is I've got my spektrometer here which tests multiple things such as power, light irradiance but it also shows you a breakdown of all the light that has been emitted from a particular source such as a light bulb or an iPhone or a red light therapy panel which is typically what I use this for. What I'm going to do today is I'm going to set my phone on various settings, daytime setting, max brightness, lower brightness, I'm going to enable the night shift mode and change the brightness settings there as well and I'm also going to show you my neat hack to even further reduce the blue light exposure. So what we're going to do is I'm going to pull the camera down here. We're going to have a look at the laptop which is connected to my spektrometer. We're going to put the sensor in front of the phone screen and see what wavelengths are emitted. I've turned all the lights off in the room so we only have natural light. It is about 12 and winter time here so it's only natural light. There's no background light, no artificial blue light in the room other than the devices but we'll do our best to minimize them. And I'm also going to refer to a really good article at jimbered.com. Again I'll put a link to this below and this article is called Why Do We Block Blue Light? A Simplified Explanation. It is a really really good article if you need a blue light or you do want to dive into more of the technical know-how around blue light as in what wavelength is the most damaging not only to our eyes but also from a melatonin suppressant point of view. So I'll put a link to that below and I'm also going to pull that up on screen. Alright, let's get started. Alright, so first up I have my iPhone 12 mini. We've got brightness set to max. We have all the settings off. We have true tone off, night shift is currently not on. So what we're going to do now is we're going to get the spektrometer. And we're going to test to see how it performs. Okay, so let's test this now. Cool, it's straight away. You can see we've got a pretty good rating there. So that's all I need to see. Now let's see what this shows on screen. So remember this is for the iPhone full brightness true tone off. Now we have a peak here at 400, 458. And you can see that blue range down there, 458. And then you also have another peak here in the green yellow and then another peak here in the red. And the reason why you see these three peaks is the colors are obviously combined to create the colors we need on the screen. The other figure to note is the power radiance here, which is 3.5 microwatts at 7m squared for that particular wavelength. 450. So what does that actually mean? Well, we pull up the Jimberett article. We know that melatonin suppression peaks at 464 nanometers. And the main range is between 440 through to about 470. Now the iPhone was showing a peak of 458, which is pretty much smack bang in the middle of this. So we're just looking just off the peak of 460. So pretty much what we can tell from this data is having the iPhone on full brightness with no settings enabled like true tone or anything like that. We're getting a lot of melatonin suppressing light coming into the eyes. Not good. Alright, so now what we're going to do is we're going to go over and we're going to turn on true tone and see how that changes things. Actually, before we enable true tone, what I want to do real quick is I want to drop the brightness down and see if that changes anything. So let's put the brightness down to half and we will test the light there. And I'm expecting to see is the same wavelengths but less radiance, less power. So let's have a look what has happened here. We still see that peak at 458 nanometers, which is exactly the same. But you'll notice up here the power, the radiance has dropped down quite a lot. It is now 1.1 microwatts per centimeter squared, which is actually a third lower than the peak at 3.5 for full brightness. So that's good because the thing is when it comes to the melatonin suppressing, there's a couple of things you want to factor in. The light itself is the main thing, but also how bright that light is. If you walk into a room full of blue light or white light or any other light, it's going to have a lot more of an impact than a tiny little LED shining on you. Saying that, there has been research showing that a small LED strapped to the back of your knee and taped over had a melatonin suppressing effect. And this control for the placebo effect because some people had the tape on them and the light, but the light wasn't working. They had no idea if it was on or off because it was all sealed up. So saying that, really the main thing we're looking at is this number. Not necessarily this, but hey, it is nice to know that you are dropping the power output, which is obviously common sense. Now let's have a look what happens when we enable True Tone. Okay, so we're going to do this at a 100% brightness with True Tone enabled. Okay, the peak is still, if we see this on screen here, the peak is still at 458. Arradiance is actually higher, 3.9, effectively 4, previously it was 3.5. But what we're seeing is we're seeing a little bit more light here in the red and yellow zone. So if I do a live reading, pretty much with True Tone enabled, you're still getting the same peak in the blue light. You're just getting more of this red. So to be honest, True Tone, enabling True Tone on the phone doesn't really make any difference in terms of suppressing melatonin. Alright, now we are going to look at night shift mode. And remember, I'm going to show you a really neat hack that I'm hoping and thinking will dramatically lower this blue light. But we'll do that at the end. Alright, let's go enable night shift mode. Night shift mode. We're going to manually enable that. And we're going to go full power. Let's start it down the bottom. We'll do less warm, middle, and then more warm. We're not going to factor in brightness anymore because we know now that doesn't change. The wavelengths, it only changes the power output. So let's test less warm with night shift on. Night shift is on. Pretty much, we don't see any difference at all. Night shift enabled on less warm. And we still see that massive peak at 458. But what is happening though is the power is a little bit lower. 2.9 microwatts compared to 3.5. So that is good. Let's bump it up now to the middle setting. Alright, now we're getting some interesting data. So this is, as you can see, in the middle, the night shift mode. And guess what's happened? The peak wavelength is now over here, 620. Look what's happened to the blue light. It has dramatically dropped down. There's less blue light than the red and orange. And in fact, now we're getting a bit of green in the middle there. So you've seen a peak there at 523. Now remember when we look at the Jimberhead article, we can see that the peak melatonin suppressing range ranges from 445 to 447. So that's way down here. But blue light does extend all the way to 570, which is around here. So you are getting some suppressing effects through here. Totally mitigate any melatonin suppressing. All the light would be in this range and there would be none through here. And I'm going to show you how you can do that using your phone very soon. But before we do that, we need to test one more setting. And that is night shift mode on the full setting, on the more warm setting. So we're going to do that now. Drag that right across. And you can see the color change in the screen there. It goes to more of an orange color, which of course is what we'd expect when we drop out the blue light. All right. Let's do a couple more in here. Yes, and look what's happened here. Once we get this back on the screen. Remember this is with night shift mode on 100%. And you can see the blue light and even the green here is dropping right down. And the peak light, again it's at that 620. It hasn't changed the wavelengths here in this range. But it doesn't matter. What we're looking at is this. And there is much less light coming through here. In fact, the radiance is 0.6. Okay, so remember at 50% brightness on without true tone and without night shift mode, we would store it one and a half. We're getting double the amount of blue light here. So with a full brightness, with full brightness, my brightness is right up here. And night shift on 100%, we're getting a lot less blue light. In fact, I know I said I wouldn't, but let's test this. Let's drop the brightness down to 50%. And we'll see what the blue light radiance. Actually, we'll note the green as well. So at the moment we're at 0.6 for the blue and 1.6 for the green. So this is at 50% brightness. So blue light is, look at that. It's even dropped it even more. It was 0.6, so it's dropped at 50%. And then as we go over to the green, we were at 1.6 before, we're at 0.6. Wow, so that does make a change. So tell the light. Before I say maybe we don't need to worry too much about brightness, but I think we do. I think we really do factor them both ways. And because effectively what is happening here with the night shift mode, all it's really doing, there's still some blue light, right? But it's just dramatically lowered the intensity of that blue light. And you can also do the same thing just by simply dropping the brightness. So in a nutshell, hopefully this has given you some answers. If you're trying to minimize blue light exposure, the simplest thing you can do on your phone is to enable my night shift and put it to the max more warm setting. I personally have my schedule. I have it scheduled from sunset to sunrise. It's just simple that way. I used to have it going all the time. I just put a custom schedule and I put from 4 o'clock to 3.59 as you can see on there. So it was going all the time except for that one minute in between. But that was kind of annoying sometimes. I'd show people a photo and they'd be like, what's up with this screen? And you didn't really need it on during the day. It's more for eye health. And I don't want to look at eye health in this video. In fact, I'm looking more at melatonin suppression. So instead I just used that sunset to sunrise mode. But the other thing to note though is the brightness setting itself does make a big change. Now if you're wondering how to enable night shift, I just go into my settings. You can search for it or you just go down to settings and then display brightness. And then you've got true tone and you've got night shift. Now what was the other hack I wanted to show you? So to enable this last hack, what you need to do is go into your settings. Go to accessibility. Go to display and text size. Scroll down into color filters. And then in here we turn this on. And then we can click color tint, which is already enabled on mine. You can change the intensity. And that's changing. You can then select the color purple, green, whatever. But I want mine on red. And look at that. The whole screen goes red. So that's at full intensity. We're going to test that real quick. All right, we're going to test this up for brightness. And look at that. With that sitting enabled, we are getting pretty much no blue or green. In fact, if we go down here, the peak is at 458, the same peak. And that's at 0.1, which is massive drop off. And the blue is not much higher than that. And that's at full brightness. So if we drop the brightness down again, it would even lower that even more. And you can see all the colors coming into the red. So remember, you can enable that through this setting. So I'm going to show you one other hack as well. So be sure to say to the end. Now, personally, I find that a little bit too intense. Reading from a phone like that, watching videos, it's quite intense. It's possible if you're just reading, it's fine. But watching videos or looking at an article that has photos in it, it can be quite tricky. What I personally do is I drop the intensity down. You can drop it all the way to zero. I go, obviously, zero turns it off. I get about 80%. Maybe a little bit more. Maybe that's like 90%. And that allows you, you can make out some blue light. You can see here in the banner. If you can see that, there's a little bit of blue in there. Oh, there we go. For example, you can see some blue, but it's very suppressed. So let's see how that handles up on the spectrometer. Again, you can see the main concentration is all in that orange and red light. But there is a little bit down here in the blue. But it's only 0.4%. It's a lot lower, isn't it? And I personally find that it's like the perfect compromise. You've suppressed your blue and your green by huge amounts. You can still read and make out photos and watch videos. But you know, you're not getting that massive blue light hit. And of course, we can drop this even further because right now it's midday. So I have my brightness on full. But if I drop the brightness down, which you typically do at night, I might even go down to 20% or even 10%. That alone is going to, again, further drop. Let's test that real quick. So we're at like 15% brightness at about 80% intensity. So what's happening now is there's such little light coming in that yes, the peak looks so much higher, but it's all relative, right? That figure is actually a lot lower. You're seeing all this other light coming in here, which is just background light. Because the brightness is so low that there's actually not much light coming in. So that has dropped even though the graph has made it look different. So that is my neat hack. Now, you don't want to go into the settings each time and have to scroll through all options to enable this. What you can actually do is create a shortcut. Now, if you watch this, I press on the side a couple of times, turns it on, turns it off. Pretty cool, right? So you can actually enable that. You need to go into your display and brightness settings, enable night shift from sunset to sunrise and put it on the full, more warm setting. Finally, go into accessibility, go to display and text, go into color filters, turn it on, set the intensity to however, color tense if it's red, set the intensity to however high you want it. I personally go about there, go back, then go all the way down to accessibility shortcut and enable that for color filters. That now allows you to double click. And with that set up, what you have now is a screen that will slowly go more orange as the day goes by and you get closer to your bedtime. Then if you are going to read or watch a video, watch one of my videos while you're lying in bed or you're reading an article, you can just double tap that screen and it will turn red and then be sure to drop the brightness down as well and you're doing everything you can to maximize your sleep and maximize melatonin as a person. To the point that personally I don't even really bother wearing my blue blockers when I've got all this enabled and the light coming in, I've got all my other lights off in the room. There's so little blue light that I don't even bother sometimes wearing my blue blockers. Hey, so I hope you've enjoyed this video. If you found it useful, give me a thumbs up or a like. If you've got any questions, leave them below. I'll put some links to an article, the Jim Brady article which goes into the science behind this. I'll also put a link to my blue light article which I wrote many, many years ago which is still regarded as a great article for learning about how blue light impacts your sleep and your health. I'll also link to all the products I mentioned such as blue light blocking glasses or light bulbs and stuff that emit low blue light and I'll even whip up an article that shows you all the data we just looked at and all the steps to enable that neat red light hack that comes on at the end and how to enable night shift mode as well. In my opinion it's one of the simplest and easiest things you can do to help improve your health and of course your sleep and to be honest when you're reading your phone at night it's not too off-putting. If you've got full red light, yes it can be, well I can't read it, but if you drop it down to about 80%, 90%, you're still getting all the benefits without too much of a visual impairment, let's say. So if you enjoyed this video, again give me a thumbs up, be sure to subscribe to check out other useful health hacks and be sure to say hi.