Last week I did an amazing live with Dr Christian Gonzalez touching on simple health optimization practices we should all implement in our lives.  Christian talked about Testosterone lowering at a rapid pace for men and the major issue of infertility we see today- which is a pretty scary thought to absorb. A major take away from our convo was that Sleep is one of  the most important things for hormonal health and one of the biggest sleep disruptors is our phones! For every hour after sunsun that you are on your phone 20% of your melatonin levels have gone down. Melatonin is SO important for our systems, we don't want to be suppressing it . Melatonin helps regulate our hormones, reduces inflammation, and optimizes our immune system. This hormone works with our body's circadian rhythms which is a very important internal clock in our body- This rhythm is intune to light and darkness which  is why the morning sun helps us feel awake and energized and ready to start our day and with darkness as  Melatonin rises we start to feel sleepy  and prepared to fall  asleep. What's so important is that We NEED to subject our eyes to darkness in order for this melatonin to be released. The Blue light from our phones at night fools our brains into thinking it's daytime leaving you feeling awake and all Revved up depleted in melatonin levels. 

With all this being said, Christian highlighted how important it is to incorporate a bedtime routine into your life that avoids as much blue light as possible for proper sleep hygiene. This means dimming your lights,  setting an appropriate time to get off electronics and incorporating things like Blue blocker glasses.  

If you need to be on your phone you can actually change the Tint mode at night to a red light . Many iphone apps come with the red light mode. 

Here’s how to apply it:

-Under the accessibility options there's a “ display Accommodations”  setting that lets you change the colours your iphone displays.

-Below gray scale and the common color-blindness filters there's a fourth option -select “ color tint”. This setting will let you apply a tint to the entire iphone screen , across all of your apps.

-Then if you go to the bottom there are two sliders, one intensity and one hue. Pull the hue to the far left for the darkest red. Then, shift the intensity all the way right, and then pull it back a bit. Lower value will make the text more readable for you.  

You probably don't want this filter on all of the time so there's a quick way of turning this filter on and off which is amazing.  

-At the bottom of the accessibility options screen select “ accessibility shortcut”, then “color filters” . Once you make that selection you can enable or disable the feature by a triple click of your iphone's home button

We sometimes  forget that health really comes from the basic needs, sleep being the most important of them all.  Implementing these small things into your night routine can have such a large impact - Start tonight!