I Covered Every Speck of Blue Light in My Bedroom With Blackout Stickers
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Welcome to Sleep Better Week on the Strategist, where we’re helping you find everything you need to get your best rest — from testing the most comfortable mattresses to asking nosy questions about other people’s sleep routines. For more, head to ourSleep Better Week hub.
We’re now familiar with thesleepdisturbances caused by taking our screens to bed with us. The blue light signals to our brain that it’s high noon when our bodies are meant to release end-of-day hormones, making it harder for us to fall asleep and affecting the quality of our sleep once we do. There’s something more insidious flickering throughout the room. It’s on theair conditioner. Thehumidifier. The surge protector’s aggressively reassuring acid green thumbs up.
I became fixated on blocking light in my bedroom in 2022, whenstudiesbeganlinking blue light exposure during sleep to a range of health concerns, from diabetes to cardiovascular issues. It would seem to make sense: Humans evolved over millennia while sleeping in dark caves, and only began to snooze aside lit streets a century ago, and inside of electrified houses even more recently. Our eyelids, it would seem, have not yet formed blackout curtains.
No matter how little light is beaming within your eyeline, your retinas register it and communicate to your cells that the sun’s out while the melatonin in your body tries to tell it to sleep. The mixed message is like giving yourself a tiny dose of jetlag. So the advice from the studies was simple: Eliminate every point of blue light in your bedroom. If it glows, cover it.
Thankfully, it’s a pretty inexpensive instruction to follow. While shopping for blackout curtains, I mentioned this to my friend, Anna Cogswell, who runs retreats for the private members club Hampton. She had recently bought light-blocking stickers off of Amazon for less than $6 and obliterated every offending beacon in her house with what looked like chic little color-matched Band-Aids. She still had sheets to spare.
That afternoon, I coated everything that made my family’s bedrooms resemble control panels with white or black adhesive patches cut to standard sizes and never looked back. Now, when a new appliance enters the household, it gets a sticker before it gets plugged in. The rooms are unquestionably darker and more peaceful.
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