Just one hour of doomscrolling in bed can have devastating consequences on your health
Topics: Health, News, Sleep, Technology, Phones
Gerrard Kaonga
Featured Image Credit: Getty Images/Dmitrii Marchenko
Topics: Health, News, Sleep, Technology, Phones
A new study has explained why late night doomscrolling isn’t doing any favors for your health.
Since phones are now an every day piece of tech that we all use, sometimes it can be hard to know exactly when to put it down.
Most people tend to have their phone on them at all times and rarely go more than a few minutes without doing something with the handy gadget.
However, a new Norway study has found that late night use isn’t ideal for people’s health.
Advert
So, you might want to cut back that bedtime doom scrolling for hours before you actually put your phone down.
A survey of 45,202 young adults in Norway have discovered that using a screen in bed drives up your risk of insomnia up by 59% and cuts your sleep time by 24 minutes.
But social media wasn’t the root cause here, as the study found that simply using the screen was the greatest issue.
Dr Gunnhild Johnsen Hjetland of the Norwegian Institute of Public Health, lead author of the article in Frontiers in Psychiatry commented about the study.
They said: “The type of screen activity does not appear to matter as much as the overall time spent using screens in bed.
“We found no significant differences between social media and other screen activities, suggesting that screen use itself is the key factor in sleep disruption — likely due to time displacement, where screen use delays sleep by taking up time that would otherwise be spent resting.”
A press release also explained how screen use ultimately negatively impacts a person’s sleep. It stated: “Notifications disturb sleep, screen time replaces sleeping time, screen activities keep you wakeful so you take longer to fall asleep, or light exposure delays circadian rhythms.”
Not exactly groundbreaking conclusions, but its good to have your initial assumptions about disrupted sleep ratified by experts.
Beyond this, Hjetland also noted it was important to not just focus on decreasing late-night screen time for young people, as adults are also at risk of ruining their sleep.
He continued: “Sleep problems are highly prevalent among students and have significant implications for mental health, academic performance, and overall well-being, but previous studies have primarily focused on adolescents.
“Given the widespread use of screens in bed we aimed to explore the relationship between different screen activities and sleep patterns. We expected that social media use might be more strongly associated with poorer sleep, given its interactive nature and potential for emotional stimulation.”