Ok, the story is short. I drank too much water last night and, as you can imagine, I woke up early in the morning for a quick trip to the toilette. When I say early in the morning, I mean 6 AM. 2 minutes later, when I came back to bad, I mad the bad move of verifying the time on my iPhone. Since it was already unlocked, I made the second bad move of checking my emails. From there on, I started checking Twitter, Facebook and… as you can imagine, my sleeping mood vanished into thin air in the following 10 minutes. As a result, I’m probably going to be sleepy and tired all day, but at least my morning experience sparkled a question in my mind:
“Is sleeping with my smartphone around me will ruin my sleep habits?”
All the signs point to yes, since my morning experience is not unique, and it happens every 2-3 weeks. But I needed the opinion of a trusted source. That’s how I found a quote from Dr. David M. Claman, director of the Sleep Disorders Center at the University of California San Francisco Medical Center: “For people I see in their 20s and 30s, the phone is becoming a more common contributing factor to insomnia”. The Dr. Clama believes that keeping a smartphone close to your bed will led to a rise of sleep-related issues. Another study conducted in UK discovered that stress-related issues are the reason for the numerous cases of insomnia in the last 10 years. According to National Center on Sleep Disorders Research almost 15% of Americans suffer from chronic insomnia.
So, what’s the correlation between the smartphone and insomnia? Sleep researchers believe that the light coming from the smartphone’s display early in the morning is switching on the brain receptors that are meant to keep us awake and it disrupts the circadian sleep patterns.
Oh, and there is that problem with staying night late on your smartphone. Most teenagers use their smartphone when they are in bed, before sleeping, thus keeping them awake for a longer period of time. The mathematics is really simple here: late sleep + rise early = sleep deprivation = undesirable effects over mind and body.
So, what’s the solution?
I think that there is only a way to break this bad habit that ruins my sleep. I will probably switch off my smartphone over night and I will leave it in the living room. In exchange, I will use a good old fashioned clock with alarm. I’m sure this will have a huge impact on my sleep habit and I will be more productive throughout the day. I invite you to do the same, at least for testing purposes.
