In bed with the enemy: Why is it harmful to take a smartphone to bed
Waiting for an important SMS, answer to the night to work letters or aimlessly flipping through instagram? Even the most disciplined of us from time to time find themselves comfortably seated in a bed with a smartphone in a cam - or carefully tucked under a pillow.
Judging by last year’s statistics, 63% of respondents try to keep smartphones nearby during sleep. What does this mean and what can be threatened, besides the general feeling of guilt for the senselessly lived hours of evening procrastination? Experts in areas from chemistry to sociology and psychology explain how we risk sharing a bed with gadgets.
According to various studies, from 50 to 90 percent of teenagers are not getting enough sleep. A dream of teenagers can not be studied without taking into account the pervasive influence of technology. There are three main mechanisms for influencing the pastime at the screen to sleep. First, the imbalance in the distribution of time: while you are sitting, looking at a laptop, tablet or smartphone, you could do something else. For example, such a beautiful all-consuming affair, like a dream. Secondly, the social, emotional and sometimes even aggressive nature of online content stimulates and excites the psyche. And finally, the role played by the lighting coming from the screen, knocking down the daily rhythms and having a body mobilizing effect.
Last year I did a systematic review of literary sources on the relationship between screen time and sleep among young people. Almost all 67 studies from all over the world confirmed that there is a negative impact of the first on the second. And although the data differs somewhat depending on the devices used, most of the data relating to all types of gadgets (TVs, computers and smartphones) indicates that people began to fall asleep later and sleep less, but spend more time at the screen. For the most part, all of these studies speak of the same thing, but there are several distinct aspects. For example, the power of effects on sleep and health, the individual characteristics of susceptibility to stimuli, as well as preventive measures that adolescents and their parents can take to improve the quality of sleep and well-being in our rapidly developing technological world.
The main problem of gadgets like laptops and phones - in fact, all devices with LED or LCD-display - is that they emit a large amount of artificial cold light. Thanks to him, our body is intuitively used to determine the time of day, especially the onset of morning. If we use a source of such light in the middle of the night, then we bring down the body and give it a signal that it’s time to wake up and not fall asleep. This is able to bring down our circadian rhythm - and it has been proven that if our biological clocks become out of sync with the external cycles of day and night, then this can lead to various disorders and diseases, including depression, diabetes and heart problems.
A smartphone, tablet or laptop in bed can affect both health and social relationships. One of the aspects of the impact on health is the light emitted by the screen, regardless of whether it is a screen of a smartphone or a TV. The main thing is that it is present at a time when the body needs rest. This light creates the jetlag effect, restarting the internal physiological clock, making it difficult to obtain the required amount of sleep, and leads some to solve the problem with the help of hypnotics and dependence on them.
Another counter-argument to take the phone with us to bed is that we curl up in uncomfortable postures to read from the screen, which leads to pain in the joints and muscles. When using a smartphone, we inevitably bow our heads while walking, standing and sitting - all this can create stress for the body and cause pain. A mobile phone in bed is also quite capable of destroying relationships between people who share a bed or live together. Habit not to break away from the screen day or night can cause a clock dependence on the phone and social communication online, while devaluing or completely eliminating the need and benefits of personal communication.
Using a smartphone by children and adolescents (whether playing or socializing) at the right time for sleep can affect emotional and physical health and affect learning ability. Such a relationship adversely affects the effectiveness of the relationship between the child and the parent or other relatives. Smartphones are not only harmful to social networks. They are simply dangerous to use along with other important matters that require concentration: driving a car, walking, and including staying in bed. People are not created by multitasking, especially when one task begins to dominate another, which is much more important for maintaining life and human relationships.
We all need a good dream, and this is why. It is in a dream that the brain makes a general cleaning and processing of what happened during the day; he is almost as active as when he is awake. "Cleaning" the brain consists of three processes. During the first, everything that happened during the day is fixed and that the brain has considered important, during the second, unnecessary and unimportant information about daytime events is erased, and during the third, the brain is cleared of debris of thought and other debris. All three processes are crucial. If you slept properly, it means that during sleep they proceeded synchronously and everything went well. If you slept badly and did not rest, wait for problems, because some of these processes did not end or were completely missed. Of course, it is possible to live with this - few people today are sleeping a fixed amount of time. However, we must understand that this affects our memory, the ability to absorb information and the work of the organism as a whole.
In the course of research, we found out that restless, poor-quality sleep often has two reasons: cognitive and emotional. The cognitive is associated with the processes and qualities for which the frontal lobe of the brain is responsible: decision-making, attentiveness, efficiency and self-control. Emotional is all that causes anxiety, fear of missing something important. Such anxiety arises when you realize that you haven’t looked at Facebook for a full 15 minutes, or when you remember that you didn’t comment on someone’s Instagram photo. Anxiety is always followed by an immediate desire to check what is happening there in social networks. The cognitive and emotional aspects (poor self-control and fear of missing something) mean that we do not let the smartphone out of our hands during the day, we stare at it before going to bed and even get up in the middle of the night to check for new messages and updates. All this has a bad effect on us, because each such session activates the brain: for example, if you saw that a friend posted a new photo, and wanted to comment on it, the brain will immediately become agitated, and take a nap like a hand.
Moreover, all modern gadgets emit blue light, which stimulates the production of cortisol and suppresses the release of melatonin - this is very bad, because it is melatonin that is responsible for good sleep. In general, too frequent use of technological devices leads to poor quality sleep and, ultimately, poor brain performance.
It all depends on the device and how long you used it before bedtime. It is known that modern gadgets suppress the production of melatonin - a hormone that is released in the body a couple of hours before sleep. It signals the brain that it’s dark outside and it’s time to go to bed. Thus, if you spent the evening embracing a smartphone or tablet, the screens of which properly blasted you with blue light, you most likely will not fall asleep at the usual time. And if you need to get up on an alarm clock, it means that you do not sleep enough. However, even if you try to somehow protect or reduce the light emanating from the display, you will not sleep anyway, because you will be awake until you finish reading all the interesting things that happened on the Internet in a day.
It is proved that lack of sleep leads to health problems. For example, people who have slept only five hours instead of eight for five days in a row have an increased appetite and a predisposition for diabetes. In the short term - during the day, drowsiness increases and productivity decreases. In the long term, much more serious consequences can also be expected, for example, overweight, diabetes, cardiovascular diseases and even cancer. I'm not saying that the light emanating from the screens of modern gadgets, causes cancer - this is too strong a statement. But, believe me, we all should better get enough sleep and rarely beat down circadian rhythms.
Sleeping with gadgets is not the wisest decision, at least because they lead to sleep disorders. Televisions, computers, tablets and smartphones greatly affect our ability to fall asleep on time and sleep soundly all night. No matter why gadgets do not allow us to sleep (because of light, noise, social interactions), in any case they are harmful. There are many consequences for lack of sleep and restless sleep: problems with memory and assimilation of information, cognitive and metabolic disorders, depression, weakened immunity, fatigue - these are just some of them. It is indicative that people who are used to grabbing a smartphone every five minutes will simply not be able to sleep if their favorite gadget does not lie at night next to their bed, or even better - right under the pillow.
Gadgets provide us with too many opportunities to stimulate the brain at bedtime. Before you go to bed, in principle, you should not do something that requires the active work of the brain. It is useful and important to set aside a certain amount of time each day so that the body changes from daily functioning to sleep. Moreover, in bed and in the bedroom you just need to sleep and have sex. No TVs or video games. Do not take smartphones, laptops and any other electronic devices to bed.
The photo: Snarkitecture