Sweet Dreams Aren’t Made of This
According to recent reports, using Facebook makes you live longer (Hobbs et al, 2016), but, if you’re doing all that social networking before bed on your smartphone, a separate, unrelated research team shows how you may be compromising your sleep quality. No good deed goes unpunished, as the saying goes.
Indeed, most Americans are glued to their smartphones and check them all day, right up until their last yawn. A team of researchers from UC-San Francisco, led by Dr. Gregory Marcus, directly measured the screentimes of smartphone users by monitoring use in a background app installed on each user’s phone. They weren’t interested in overall screentime, but, instead, focused on how much time users spent staring into their blue-lighted screen just before falling asleep.
Apparently, those blue lights in our screens aren’t good for our brains’ melatonin production – something we need to fall asleep and, more importantly, STAY asleep through the night. You actually want your body to produce its own melatonin in high quantity right before you go to bed. However, by looking into those blue lights illuminating our facebook pages as our heads are atop our pillows, we are actually suppressing melatonin. Look into your screen, suppress melatonin, and sleep worse.
What’s less clear from this article and from the source research, is to what extent people are looking into their screens in bed BECAUSE they can’t sleep. This could be a classic chicken/egg question. What comes first: we use our screens and then can’t sleep? Or, we can’t sleep so we use our screens? This study only measured the relationship between screentime at bedtime and quality of sleep, and it cannot tell us definitively which causes which.
So, the bottom line is this: While you are giggling at the latest cat videos in bed, know that chances are good that you may end up counting more sheep and losing sleep. For that reason, it is probably a good idea to go to sleep the old-fashioned way: In the dark.
Christensen M.A., Bettencourt L., Kaye L., Moturu S.T., Nguyen K.T., Olgin J.E., et al. (2016) Direct Measurements of Smartphone Screen-Time: Relationships with Demographics and Sleep. PLoS ONE 11(11): e0165331. doi:10.1371/journal.pone.0165331
Oaklander, M. (2016, Nov 10). If You Do This Before Bed, Your Sleep Will Seriously Suffer. Time. Retrieved from http://time.com/4565122/smartphone-screen-time-sleep/
Hobbs W.R., Nicholas M.B., Christakis A., Fowler J.H. (2016) Online social integration is associated with reduced mortality risk. PNAS 2016 : 1605554113v1-201605554.