Miix 510: Night mode for better sleep

A few years back several research indicated that blue light can be harmful for sleeping. It interferes with melatonin production in the brain. Are you reading a smartphone or tablet at night? Maybe even in bed right before sleeping? This might mean that it affects the sleep you are getting. This is where night mode can help you.

The good news? More and more devices support some sort of night mode or night shift mode, where the device will reduce the amount of blue light. The Miix 510 has this as well. With night mode devices try to prevent the adverse effect these screens have on sleeping. I find it also is much easier on the eyes to read in these modes when it is otherwise dark in the room.

Research

Some of these research can be found here:

• Scientific american
• Harvard health

You can find more research papers by searching for terms such as blue light sleep

Night mode on the Miix 510

The Miix 510 has a mode called Night Mode. When turned on it will reduce blue light on the display. It does this by changing the color temperature of the display. The warmer the color temperature gets, the less blue light the display produces.

You can activate it with the Lenovo Settings application. Lenovo Settings should be installed by default on the Miix 510. But you can also get it for free from the Windows Store.

You can have night mode work automatically on a schedule or you can manually enable it for a day. You can also control how warm you want the colors to become. I would suggest setting the slider to the high end, which makes the screen very reddish, but it also reduces blue light by the maximum amount.

I find that night mode will not only help me with sleep but it is also easier on the eyes. Even on lowest brightness setting, most of the devices just burn my eyes when reading black text on a white background. Some apps allow you to affect this. The Kindle has a sepia or black mode. Browsers with reading mode often support some sepia settings as well.

As a result, I often find myself activating night mode in the dark if I am reading something, even well before sleeptime.

Note that just like many things that affect us, not everybody will be bothered by blue light the same way.

Miix 510 normal mode

Miix 510 night mode

The content you read

What you read might also be important if you are looking to sleep well.

The content itself is not related to blue light or night mode. But if you are looking to sleep well, in addition to night mode you might want to pay attention to what you read as well. So if you activate night mode, but then go on to read the daily political news or the highlights on Facebook, please don’t be surprised when you won’t fall to sleep easily 🙂