health

Looking at Instagram in bed could make you blind.

Medical experts have been singing the same turn for a while now: using your phone just before you go to sleep isn’t good for your health.

For starters, the blue backlight in your devices seriously disrupts your sleep. Then there’s the risk of your phone catching on fire as it charges beside your head. Now, there’s yet another reason to keep your phone far, far away at bedtime: using it could make you temporarily blind.

In a recent report in the New England Journal of Medicine, a doctor detailed the case of a young woman who had trouble seeing out of one eye every night, and another who couldn’t see out of one eye for fifteen minutes each morning.

Initially, the doctor couldn’t find anything physically wrong with these women. After being directed to a specialist. who took detailed records of everything they did throughout the day, doctors found that each woman used their phones just before they fell asleep and as soon as they woke up.

how to fall asleep quicker
Using your phone in bed could make you temporarily blind. Image: iStock.
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Apparently (and this is going to get a little science-y), when you lie in bed on your side, the eye closest to the pillow adapts to darkness while the eye closest to your phone adapts to the light coming from the screen. When you turn the screen off, the eye that has adjusted to the light appears temporarily blind until it can readjust to the darkness.

So it seems we have two options: turn down the brightness on our phones (which can help to partially alleviate the problem), or.... you know. Stop looking at them all the damn time.

I'll be turning down my brightness tonight, then.

Watch Mamamia's Jessie go phone-free for a whole week.