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Using phone before bed has ‘little impact’ on sleep as study finds bigger culprit
Screen time just before bed may not be as bad as you think – scientists have identified another common habit that’s a bigger problem.
Current sleep guidelines recommend keeping gadgets away in the hour or two before hitting the sack. But that’s not enough to get a good night’s sleep.
Screen time before bed has ‘little impact’ on sleep
Smartphones and other gadgets have become an integral part of our lives. While technology has undeniably made life easier, misusing it hurts our health, especially sleep.
If you thought not using your phone or watching television for an hour or two before bedtime was optimal for a good night’s sleep, there’s a bigger problem highlighted in the new study.
The research article published in JAMA Pediatrics analyzed the screen time habits of 85 adolescents aged 11 to 14 over the course of one week to find that spending screen time in bed had a profound impact on sleep compared to using it two hours before bedtime.
The participants were made to wear a body camera with infrared cameras placed in the bedroom to capture their screen time while in bed. The results showed that people who spent a lot of time with their phones and other devices in bed experienced disrupted sleep.
Lead author Dr. Bradley Brosnan said: Our most interesting findings were that this screen time before they got into bed had little impact on sleep that night.”
However, screen time once in bed did impair their sleep it stopped them from going to sleep for about half an hour and reduced the amount of sleep they got that night,” he added.
Every additional 10 minutes delays sleep more
Furthermore, people exposed to more interactive screen activities like gaming or those who used more than one device at a time suffered greatly from disrupted sleep.
And, every additional 10 minutes of screen time in bed, whether using the phone, playing Xbox, or watching Netflix, reduced the total sleep by the same amount for the night.
Our findings suggest that the impact of screen time on sleep is primarily through time displacement delaying sleep onset rather than any direct effects of blue light or interactive engagement as we didnt find associations with sleep latency and wakefulness during the sleep period,” the researcher said.
The study challenges the current sleep guideline, which may not be as effective as fully restricting screen time in bed rather than limiting it in the hours before sleep.
