The last thing many of us see before we close our eyes is a screen. A phone held a few inches from the face, brightness dimmed but still glowing. One more episode. One more scroll. We built Mythrae to be the opposite of that, and we’d like to be honest about why — because the reasons are more interesting than “screens are bad.”
Two separate things make a bedtime screen a poor companion for sleep. One is the light. The other is the design. They are worth pulling apart.
First, the light
Your body keeps time partly by light. Specialised cells in the retina — distinct from the ones you see with — report the brightness and colour of your surroundings to the brain’s master clock, which in turn governs the evening release of melatonin, the hormone that tells the body night has arrived. Light in the evening, particularly the short-wavelength “blue” light that screens are rich in, can dampen that signal.
The lab evidence here is reasonably consistent. Ordinary room light before bed has been shown to suppress melatonin and shorten the window in which it’s released, compared with dim light.1 An often-cited study found that reading on a light-emitting e-reader before sleep, versus a printed book, delayed melatonin, pushed back the body clock, and left people less alert the next morning.2 Evening exposure to an LED-backlit screen has produced similar shifts in circadian markers and a measurable bump in alertness — the opposite of what you want at bedtime.3
We should be careful not to overstate it. Real devices held at a real distance, at real brightness, deliver far less light than a bright lab rig, and people differ in how sensitive they are. A systematic review of the field concluded that evening light does shift human rhythms, but that effect sizes vary considerably with intensity, duration and timing.4 So: a real effect, honestly modest, and easy to avoid — don’t put a light source against your face in the last hour of the day.
But the light isn’t the main problem
If light were the whole story, a dark-mode screen or a pair of amber glasses would solve it. They don’t, and the reason is the second thing: what the screen is for.
The apps most of us reach for at night are not neutral surfaces. They are engineered, with great skill and considerable budget, to hold attention — autoplay that removes the decision to stop, infinite feeds with no bottom, notifications timed to pull you back, the small variable rewards that make a scroll feel like a slot machine. None of this is accidental, and none of it is designed around your sleep. Researchers have given the result a name: bedtime procrastination — staying up not because we’re not tired, but because we can’t put the thing down.5 Reviews of screen-media use and sleep find the association runs both ways: more engaged, interactive evening screen time is linked with later, shorter, more broken sleep.6
A tool that profits from your attention can never quite be on the side of you letting it go.
This is the part we find most clarifying. A business whose success is measured in time-on-device has an interest that is structurally opposed to your falling asleep. It can add a “bedtime mode” and a soothing voice, but the underlying machine still wins when you stay. The conflict isn’t a bug to be patched; it’s the model.
So we left it out
Mythrae is audio you never have to look at. You press play — or simply ask your smart speaker aloud — and the screen can go face-down, or stay in another room entirely. There is no Mythrae app to open, no account to feed, no streak, no notification, no feed waiting underneath. It arrives as a private feed that plays through whatever you already own: a podcast app, a speaker, a pair of headphones. It is device-agnostic on purpose.
And here is the honest part. Our only real measure of success is that you fall asleep and forget the audio was ever playing — which is, deliberately, the worst engagement metric imaginable. We can’t keep you. We don’t want to. A piece has worked when you don’t remember it ending.
What this asks of us
Building this way is harder in some respects. We give up the nudges and the daily check-ins and the comforting dashboard of “active users.” We decided that was precisely the point. The screen is the one thing almost every sleep product keeps, because the screen is how those products hold on. Leaving it out is the clearest way we know to say that we are trying to do something else: not to occupy the last hour of your day, but to quietly hand it back to you, and take you somewhere that’s yours.
References
- Gooley, J. J., Chamberlain, K., Smith, K. A., Khalsa, S. B. S., Rajaratnam, S. M. W., Van Reen, E., Zeitzer, J. M., Czeisler, C. A. & Lockley, S. W. (2011). Exposure to room light before bedtime suppresses melatonin onset and shortens melatonin duration in humans. Journal of Clinical Endocrinology & Metabolism, 96(3), E463–E472.
- Chang, A.-M., Aeschbach, D., Duffy, J. F. & Czeisler, C. A. (2015). Evening use of light-emitting eReaders negatively affects sleep, circadian timing, and next-morning alertness. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, 112(4), 1232–1237.
- Cajochen, C., Frey, S., Anders, D., Späti, J., Bues, M., Pross, A., Mager, R., Wirz-Justice, A. & Stefani, O. (2011). Evening exposure to a light-emitting diodes (LED)-backlit computer screen affects circadian physiology and cognitive performance. Journal of Applied Physiology, 110(5), 1432–1438.
- Tähkämö, L., Partonen, T. & Pesonen, A.-K. (2019). Systematic review of light exposure impact on human circadian rhythm. Chronobiology International, 36(2), 151–170.
- Kroese, F. M., De Ridder, D. T. D., Evers, C. & Adriaanse, M. A. (2014). Bedtime procrastination: introducing a new area of procrastination. Frontiers in Psychology, 5, 611.
- Hale, L. & Guan, S. (2015). Screen time and sleep among school-aged children and adolescents: a systematic literature review. Sleep Medicine Reviews, 21, 50–58.