Ask anyone for advice on how to improve your sleep, and one of the first things they’ll usually say is to stay off your phone before bed.

Reducing our exposure to blue light has become standard ‘sleep hygiene’ advice – the idea being that the light from our phones, laptop screens and TVs messes with the production of the sleep hormone melatonin, leading to a disruption to our internal body clock.

But according to a new study, that might not be the case – or at least, it might not be as big a deal as it’s made out to be. The research, which was carried out by a team at the University of Basel, Switzerland, found that no single colour of light (along the blue-yellow axis) was any more disruptive than another when it comes to sleep.

Blue light isn’t the sleep enemy we once thought it was, according to a new study