Watch TV at Bedtime and Still Get a Good Night’s Sleep with driftTV

Since childhood I’ve watched TV to put me to sleep. This habit carried over into marriage, but I had to drag the wife kicking and screaming. She rarely watched TV as a kid and the shows kept her mind excited and not able to fall asleep. It took a while, but she’s now as addicted to TV at bedtime as I am. There’s certain TV shows she has to go back and watch episodes again because she falls asleep before she’s able to see the conclusion.

I’ve read the reports that say watching TV at bedtime doesn’t allow someone to get into a restful enough state for good sleep, but if my Microsoft Band or Garmin vivoactive HR fitness trackers are any indication, I do pretty well. I’ll just ignore those reports, thank you. I like what I like. Plus, it took a lot of effort indoctrinating my wife that I dread the deprogramming.

Still, I’m a fitness and health conscious person, and if there’s any way to improve my sleep pattern without giving up TV, I’ll try it.

Enter driftTV from Saffron Lighting. driftTV is a small device that sits connected between your video source (ROKU, Amazon Fire TV, Blu-Ray player, etc.) and your TV and offers both scheduled and manual adjustments to the video output. What it does is removes the blue levels in the output, filtering out the harmful effects of blue light which is reported to keep anyone from obtaining deep sleep activity. You use the on-device software menu to set your sleep schedule and driftTV will start eliminating blue light an hour before the scheduled sleep time and reintroduce blue light gradually an hour before you plan to wakeup. Or, if you choose to eliminate blue light immediately, you can use the manual adjustment buttons on the front of the device.

My wife and I have been testing driftTV for the last couple weeks. It’s difficult to say if something like this actually works, but I can honestly say that I’ve had deeper sleeps during this time. I can usually get up like a whip, but I’ve had more deep sessions than I’ve ever had before. Here’s an example from Garmin Connect:

So, there you go. You can watch TV at bedtime and still get a good night’s sleep.

driftTV is just over $100 on Amazon.com: driftTV - Remove the blue from your TV to help you sleep