The BJJ Cavewife and I recently updated our iPhones to the newly released operating system, iOS 8. One of the features that I was excited to make use of was the ability to change the display to grayscale, eliminating all the colors except for black and white.
Since one of the main reasons to avoid electronic displays (TVs, iPhones, iPads, computers, etc.) before going to bed is because the blue light emitted from those displays trick your body into thinking that the sun is still out, and causes suppression of melatonin release (the main sleep hormone), I reasoned that if my display was only black and white, there wouldn’t be any blue light emitted to screw things up!
I started digging around a bit and… well… what I found left me a bit disappointed.
It turns out that the way color displays convert into grayscale is by some optical-mathematical-magic to combine the red, green, BLUE light of the display into black and white.
So even when my iPhone looks like it’s black and white, there’s actually a certain amount of blue light shooting out of it right into my eyeballs and pineal gland!
Looks like I’ll have to continue with what I’m doing now which is minimizing use of my phone prior to bed, while maximizing use of these and sometimes using these.
If you want to read more about the color to grayscale conversion thing, you can look here and here.