Yahoo Lifestyle 
How Your Phone Is Keeping You Up At Night
Modern day usage of electronic devices like smartphones, iPads, and e-readers seems to be skyrocketing, with new reports revealing that teenagers spend nearly nine hours a day absorbing media, and more and more adults complaining about “phubbing,” or “partner phone snubbing,” negatively impacting their relationships. But that troublesome addiction to electronics is more than merely rude: It could be costing you sleep.
According to a British study published in Frontiers In Public Health, our bigger, brighter mobile phones are emitting more and more light in order to display the high-contrast images we’ve all happily grown accustomed to, and it could be robbing us of an hour of sleep or more a night. In this case, however, sleep is not being lost to the seemingly never-ending work emails or all-too-tempting social media streams.
Rather, those precious zzzz’s are being lost to the blue-green wavelengths of light emitted from mobile phones, iPads, Kindles and other popular electronic devices, which disrupt the system and slow down production of the sleep hormone melatonin, something the body normally starts to produce as it begins to get dark in the evenings. Meaning, scrolling through Instagram on your mobile phone before bed could essentially prevent you from falling asleep for an extra hour…even after you’ve put the phone away.
MORE: Is sleeping alone the key to intimacy?
Using electronic devices in the evenings is “likely to make you fall asleep later for many reasons: the brightness, the blueness, the stimulation,” the study’s lead researcher, Professor Paul Gringras from the Department of Children’s Sleep Medicine at Evelina London Children’s Sleep Medicine and King’s College London, told Yahoo Health. “Assuming you need to get up for school or work at the same time, [using these devices at night causes] more tiredness and ‘sleep inertia,’” or a decline in motor dexterity and feeling of grogginess immediately after waking. “And we know that sleeping less hours than you need is associated with many poor health outcomes, including blood pressure, pre-diabetes, learning, mood, and weight.”
As new and improved cell phones and other electronic devices continue to be developed, the type of light emitted from them has changed as well. “Nearly all use very powerful LED light now that contains a lot of blue light that is alerting and stimulating,” Gringas says, stating simply that this type of light is “great during the day, but not during the evening or night.”
Smartphones “have become kind of ubiquitous in society now,” Dr Heidi Connolly, chief of the division of pediatric sleep medicine at the University of Rochester’s Golisano Children’s Hospital, told Yahoo Health. “10 to 15 years ago, there were simply not devices like this, so we’re all spending way more time in front of screens, in general. And the more time you spend in front of a screen, the more likely you are to be a short sleeper and to be overweight.”
And sadly for those who may harbour hopes that their particular brand of smartphone is the exception to the rule, no one electronic device is better than others when it comes to negative sleep repercussions, Connolly explains. “When you look at a screen, there’s light that comes out of the screen, and it’s fundamentally different than reading a paper book with a light on. The light exposure surpasses the hormones that make you feel readily sleepy, so you stay up longer, sleep less.” This is why, at night, she says, classic “paper books are better than electronic anything.”
“It’s the blue-green portion of the light that is the worst,” Dr Philip Gehrman, an Assistant Professor in the University of Pennsylvania’s Department of Psychiatry tells Yahoo Health. “LEDs peak at that frequency … and these days, almost everything is an LED screen.”
So what can you do? “The best thing is to not use a screen at all for two hours before your desired bedtime, but if you are going to, then using a device that has some sort of filtering software, like an f.lux, can help,” advises Gehrman, who also warns against trying to counteract the effects of nighttime electronic device usage with melatonin supplements. “Anything that you take is not going to be the same as producing it yourself. I’d much prefer to see someone reduce their exposure to blue-green light than continue using their screens with filtering software and just use melatonin to compensate.”
Perhaps most importantly, Gehrman warns those concerned about sleep to beware of falling into damaging cycles of behaviour. “When people have problems with sleep already, and now they’re spending time on their screens before bed, it tends to make their sleep problems even worse. But for other people who may not have sleep problems, there’s also a good chance that the screens are making it worse. So it’s probably not the only reason that people are going to bed later, but it’s feeding into the cycle. They choose to be up later, on the devices, and leads to them being up even later than intended, because now it impacts there melatonin levels. It’s a downwards spiral people get into.”
In addition to using filtering software and turning off devices before bed, Professor Gringras also advises changing the background colours on your devices to “invert mode” in order to decrease their intensity, and even recommends using a physical filter, like orange-tinted glasses, when possible. On the corporate end of the spectrum, he would ask app designers to “make apps more ‘sleep aware,’ with colours that have less impact at night.” As for the creators of the phones themselves, Gringas says hardware companies should “simply make the intensity and colour change automatic at a certain time of night that you could override if you needed to do a specific task.”
Until that happens, though, Dr Connolly urges us to just put the devices away and focus on creating a cool, quiet and dark environment for sleeping that is stocked full of “the same”: The same sleeping location, the same bedtime, the same wakeup time, the same bedtime routine, and for adults, the same sleeping partners.
“If you’re going to have [your phone] in your room in case of an emergency call, or for use as an alarm, fine,” adds Gehrman. “But keep it across the room.”
And remember: The first step is always admitting that you have a problem.
MORE: The best sleep position for your brain
This article originally appeared on Yahoo! Health
