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It’s midnight, you know you have to be up early tomorrow to prepare for a big presentation, but you just can’t get to sleep. You tried turning Night Shift on, because you heard that blue light is bad for your sleep schedule, but you’re still wide awake, but just with an orange screen that’s harder to read. You figure that maybe the activity of using your phone is keeping your brain active, so you try to put it away, but surprise, nothing happens again. Since you’ve eliminated all phone-related problems, your lack of sleep surely isn’t being caused by your handheld electronic devices, right?
Wrong. Thanks to a new study in JAMA Pediatrics, we know that our phones are keeping us awake, whether or not we use Night Shift, and whether or not we’re actually using them at bedtime. Awesome. Oh, and it gets better – once we do fall asleep, we’ll have a much worse quality of sleep leading us to restless nights and exhaustion the next morning. Seriously, great news. I just have to go back in time to 2007 before I had an Internet-enabled phone, and I’ll get right back on track!
Dr. Ben Carter from King’s College London examined a bunch of studies and was able to come to the decisive conclusion that using our phones before bedtime definitely leads to sleeping problems. We’ve known about this for a while, so we’ve tried to combat this a little with Night Shift and putting the phone down after setting our alarms, but it turns out that’s not really enough. Apparently, just having your phone near you when you sleep is enough to send a psychologically stimulating signal to your brain, which is keeping you awake. And since 72 percent of kids and 89 percent of adolescents sleep with their phones near their beds, I’m willing to bet most of you do too.
A supposedly “easy” solution to this problem is to ban your phone from the bedroom at night, but honestly, this sounds even worse to me. On top of the problem that I use my phone as my morning alarm, I can see myself laying in bed awake without my phone wondering if I’m getting important texts or e-mails and still getting up no less than ten times to check it. If you’re as ADD and anxiety-ridden as me, you may just be SOL and doomed to poor sleep forever, but if you think you have enough self-control to get by, you may want to try plugging in your phone somewhere else tonight and seeing just how refreshed you feel when waking up for work tomorrow morning. .
[via Elite Daily]
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Steph W.
Steph W. is a new Master's degree graduate with an intern's salary and six-figure taste. She realizes her expectations far exceed reality, so she spends her days pinning away Loubs she pretends are in her physical closet instead of her virtual one. Her hobbies include attempting to trapping her boyfriend into marriage before he finds out how insane she is and pretending that Black Box wine tastes as good as the kind she could afford when she was gainfully employed. Send her tips for getting out of student debt at recruitchairtsm@gmail.com
@therecruitchair
tl;dr: this study has nothing to offer the PGP readership
Okay, the “studies” I’ve been seeing around here are getting ridiculous. At a quick glance:
1. This was a meta-analysis, which is to say a study of a bunch of other studies. Not to say that aggregating and summarizing data from a bunch of other sources is bad (shouts to every single paper I wrote during undergrad) but not promising.
2. “Okay, JAMA isn’t the worst publication out there but… wait, this was published in Peds.” What do you know, the studies this data was mined from is based on youths aged from 6-19 (the mean age here was 14.5). Poor sleep at those ages is defined (in the study) as less than 10 or 9 hours, depending on age; I haven’t slept that long in one night for about 3 years so I’ll go out on a limb and say this data doesn’t exactly fit the washed up 20-something demographic of PGP. Hopefully, anyways- otherwise there have been some very awkward “sup?”s thrown around.
3. The good: 467 studies were identified to be looked at.
The bad: 20 studies were selected
The ugly: 2 (TWO) reviewers extracted data. For those not in the research world that probably translates to “I had 2 of my underpaid and overworked techs independently review this, which means they probably threw some graphs together the two nights before I asked for them while cursing me, my general principles, and my ancestors’ judgement in continuing their familial lines” in PI-speak
4. There was a significant association between access and use of media devices and poor sleep, but no mention as to type of device, sleep/wake hours, general levels of activity during the day, or any of the myriad of activities and behaviors that could affect quality of sleep (in children)
5. Neither the word “insomnia” nor “insomniac” were used in any portion of the study itself
6. This is a recap of an Elite Daily article of a study that is a recap of 20 studies that are a sample size of 467 studies. The only thing I’m willing to get from this is that a study was done at some point by someone.
You put more effort into fact checking this article than I did most of my college papers…you have my admiration.
I’m working on a grant now, the critical scientific mindset is a hard mindset to get out of.
Dude you a Doctor?
lol
The results of this study are about as predictable as me blacking out on gameday when I go back to visit my college town
But what are the top 10 cities in which to be an insomniac as a result of my cell phone addiction?
Detroit or Cleveland are typically on the list.
Question: do people actually leave vibrate/ring on their phone when they go to bed? And respond if someone texts or emails in the middle of the night?
I put mine on do not disturb. Sleep time is precious, I don’t need anyone interrupting me, but genuinely wondering if I am alone in this mentality.
That’s always confused me. Do Not Disturb with emergency contacts enabled so Mom can call me if someone dies. Otherwise, I’ll get back to you in the morning.
Thank you for writing a quality piece. We need more of this. Good work (actual compliment not sarcasm)
boy if you don’t-