When you go to bed, your brain is preparing for sleep, but by looking at social media, you’re providing endless stimulation, signalling to your brain and body to remain active and keep engaged. Cognitive arousal: getting wound up when you should be winding down! Without melatonin signalling to us that we are sleepy, we remain awake and alert, in a state of ‘cognitive arousal’. It signals to your brain that it’s daylight, melatonin production is suppressed and sleep becomes delayed. The blue light emitted by mobile phones affects your melatonin levels more than any other wavelength does. It signals to our bodies to wind down and prepare for sleep. In the hours leading up to bedtime, as natural light levels decrease, our brains start to produce a hormone called melatonin, which causes our alertness to begin to dip. At its simplest, exposure to light tells us to be awake, so looking at a bright light from a phone just before bed is telling your body it’s still time to be awake and not sleep time.
Mobiles emit mostly blue light, and these wavelengths are particularly good at keeping us productive and focussed, so perfectly suited for daytime phone usage.Īt night-time, however, this isn’t ideal. It’s well-established that looking at phone screens can impact sleep. Mobiles and melatonin: how looking at your phone can affect your sleep 4 This equates to around 1/6th of our waking hours!īut what happens when staying connected continues into bedtime? How exactly does social media affect your sleep? Read on to see how your bedtime social media habits might be stopping you from getting a good night’s sleep. There’s also been huge increases in how long we spend on social media: amongst 16-64 year olds, average time spent has been creeping up, from 90 minutes per day in 2012, to now being about two and a half hours per day. In 2012, only 5% of adults were using social media this had shot up to 70% at the last count (2020) and it’s even higher in younger adults, at over 90%. While it might feel relaxing to lie in bed and check a newsfeed, the reality is that this constant connectivity can have major negative effects on our sleep. Polls have shown that browsing social media is now one of the most common pre-sleep activities, between going to bed and falling sleep. How many of us would admit to taking our phone to bed and scrolling through Facebook/Insta/Twitter before falling asleep? For lots of people, young and old, it’s now the norm to sleep with a mobile phone in our bedroom.
Steps you can take to reduce the impact of social media on your sleep.How social media affects our sleep habits and can lead to sleep deprivation.Why we should all try to limit screentime as bedtime approaches.So in this article we’re going to explore exactly how social media affect sleep.
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We’ve seen an explosion in the use of social media platforms over the past decade, and how we are using social media is having a massive impact on our sleep.
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