Sweet Dreams Aren\u2019t Made of This<\/p>\n
According to recent reports, using Facebook makes you live longer (Hobbs et al, 2016), but, if you\u2019re 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.<\/p>\n
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\u2019s phone. They weren\u2019t interested in overall screentime, but, instead, focused on how much time users spent staring into their blue-lighted screen just before falling asleep.<\/p>\n
Apparently, those blue lights in our screens aren\u2019t good for our brains\u2019 melatonin production \u2013 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.<\/p>\n
What\u2019s 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\u2019t sleep. This could be a classic chicken\/egg question. What comes first: we use our screens and then can\u2019t sleep? Or, we can\u2019t 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.<\/p>\n
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.<\/p>\n
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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<\/p>\n
<\/p>\n
Oaklander, M. (2016, Nov 10). If You Do This Before Bed, Your Sleep Will Seriously Suffer.\u00a0Time.<\/em>\u00a0Retrieved from\u00a0http:\/\/time.com\/4565122\/smartphone-screen-time-sleep\/<\/p>\n Hobbs W.R., Nicholas M.B., Christakis A., \u00a0Fowler J.H. (2016)\u00a0Online social integration is associated with reduced mortality risk.\u00a0PNAS 2016 : 1605554113v1-201605554.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Sweet Dreams Aren\u2019t Made of This According to recent reports, using Facebook makes you live longer (Hobbs et al, 2016), but, if you\u2019re 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 […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2038,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-615","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized","post-preview"],"acf":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/ctlsites.uga.edu\/heal2016\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/615","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/ctlsites.uga.edu\/heal2016\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/ctlsites.uga.edu\/heal2016\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/ctlsites.uga.edu\/heal2016\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2038"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/ctlsites.uga.edu\/heal2016\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=615"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/ctlsites.uga.edu\/heal2016\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/615\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/ctlsites.uga.edu\/heal2016\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=615"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/ctlsites.uga.edu\/heal2016\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=615"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/ctlsites.uga.edu\/heal2016\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=615"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}