How To: Make Your Nexus 7 Help You Fall Asleep at Night Instead of Keep You Up

Are you staying up longer than you want to? Do you fidget with your tablet late at night before bed? Maybe you're using it to read or to watch something to help you knock out. If so, this may actually be keeping you up.

Studies have shown that exposure to blue light before sleep may distort your natural circadian rhythm and cause inability to fall asleep. Luckily for us, the developers behind a free app called Twilight have figured out how to help us addicted Android users get some rest.

What the app does is mimics the time of day and gradually filters out the blue light in your tablet with a soft, red filter, which is supposed to help you fall asleep. If you're interested in the science behind it, just look under the extensive description on the Google Play page by the Urbandroid Team before you download it—interesting stuff.

At first glance, the options seem intimidating, but I'll help you go through them and highlight what you need to know about each one.

How It Works

It's good to know how and why this works. For all you skeptics, select this option to learn about the science behind the app.

Color Temperature

This option allows you to change the shade of red that your screen will display. You can go from deep red to orange, then yellow.

Maximum Intensity

By changing the maximum intensity, you set the limit for how red your screen can get.

Sun & Location

This is something I wouldn't adjust, unless maybe you're traveling.

The default location is your own and adjusting it is a pain in the ass. Getting that red dot back to your location is difficult.

Pause in Specified Apps

Select the Auto-pause in specified apps option to choose which apps run this filter and which don't.

Stop from Status Bar

By checking the Hide from status bar option you will enable a shortcut in the notification bar which will allow you to pause the app quickly whenever you want.

Other Options

Start on boot can is self-explanatory: it starts whenever your device restarts. Fullscreen mode will allow the filter to encompass the status bar as well.

Do You Need the Pro Version?

Like many free apps, the pro version is mostly just a donation, though you do get some extra features with this one. Some of these include setting a custom sunrise and sunset, choosing a custom time, and setting the transition time to longer than 90 minutes.

The free version is perfect as is for me. I saw no need to upgrade, but if you'd like to support the developers efforts, or like some of these additional features, go pro (currently $2.49).

Hopefully this will give your eyes a break and let you catch some extra Zs. If you have any issues or want to let us know what you think, hit up the comments below.