As ‘24 gets underway, let’s start off with a robust choice that could prove to be beneficial for years to come.
Let’s look at a small change that will protect your eyesight: adjusting the blue light emitting from electronic devices.
Because sleep is so fundamental for our health, any tool that can help us improve on this dimension is worthy of our attention.
And we all know the blue light from our computers and phones has the potential to negatively impact our Zs. So let’s 86 some of the strongest waves, just in case we forget our special computering glasses or simply don’t want to use them.
For the laptop, there is a fantastic free software called f.lux that acts as an eye protecting butler, shifting the display according to time of day.
You can tweak the settings to suit your preferences and then never think about taking in full blown day level brightness as you finish that last email again.
Unfortunately, Apple won’t allow this software access to the part of the phone that would be required to make an app this simple for the phone or iPad. If you have a phone that has been “jailbroken,” f.lux can be found on Cydia (the way to search for apps on jail broken phones).
Let’s not give up on the phone, though.
Apple has it’s own display color shift:
Settings > Display & Brightness > Night Shift to schedule Apple’s version of f.lux to automatically shift the color spectrum to warmer colors
Settings > Display & Brightness
Here you can select Dark mode
And also toggle the brightness down as low as you can stand
If you want to go all in on this eye protection quest, consider getting rid of the colors on your phone when you don’t really need them.
Again this is on iPhone, head to Settings > Accessibility > Accessibility Shortcut > Color Filters
By doing this, you can now switch your phone to greyscale with three quick clicks of the button on the right side of the phone.
This makes everything on the phone less interesting and much easier to put down. But if a delicious recipe or cute seeming outfit appears as you scroll, you can quickly pop it back on.
Androids are more straight-forward in Settings > Display
On this screen you can toggle the Brightness, turn their Blue light filter on, and turn Night mode on.
Accessibility > Advanced settings > Power and volume up keys > Color adjustment
allows you to switch to greyscale by pushing these two buttons at the same time.
I invite you to spend a few minutes downloading the software and faffing with your phone settings now!
Your eyeballs say thank you.