The last thing you look at before going to sleep (and the first thing you see upon awakening) may be your phone, how might this contribute to insomnia ? Should you sleep with your phone in the bedroom? What are the potential harmful effects of keeping a phone near you in bed?
Consider how sleeping near a phone may impact your ability to sleep, or causes Insomnia and changes that you can make tonight to help yourself to sleep better.
You can phone calls, send text messages, map a route, surf the Internet, respond to emails, and interact via social media like Facebook and Twitter. You can also play games and use apps to perform a stunning array of tasks. It should be no surprise that these functions may also have the potential to intrude upon our sleep.
Exposure to blue light can affect your internal body clock and throw off your circadian rhythm. This rhythm is in tune with light and dark. It’s why you feel more tired at night when the sun starts to set and why you feel more energized in the morning when it’s light.
Reducing Sleep or Insomnia
Many of these activities may prompt a compulsive desire to continue refreshing, checking, responding, reading, scrolling, posting, clicking, or playing. It feels good and there is a limitless opportunity for additional stimulation.
It may be tough to stop and put the device away. This alone may lead to a delay in bedtime and reduced total sleep time.
Phones are designed to prompt your response. There may be rings, alerts, alarms, or lights that catch your attention. This is useful when awake, but troublesome in the night. It takes you to Insomnia. Insomnia can lead you to many physical issues.
These may provoke an awakening. If you have already fallen asleep, but forget to place your phone in a night or airplane mode, random text messages or calls may wake you.
This can fragment sleep quality. It might also wake you enough to elicit a response, without fully waking you, resulting in incoherent speech or even sleep texting.
What may seem like a harmless habit to you — jumping into bed and opening up your phone — can actually have a big impact on your overall health.
Doomscrolling, for example, can distract you, which keeps you awake, or cause Insomnia, stimulates your brain and delays REM sleep. In fact, when your brain revs up, it can keep you awake for hours beyond your normal bedtime.
However, it’s not just that you’re on your phone that can disrupt your sleep. It’s more what you’re doing with the technology that makes a difference, like actively using your phone.
Smartphones are designed to make our lives easier and more productive, as well as entertain us and provide information. But the smartphone era has forced us to feel like we can never really log off, even when we’re sleeping. That can have a negative effect on your health, and here’s why.
It keeps your mind engaged
When it’s time to turn off the lights and go to sleep, the last thing our brain needs is more information and stimulation.
“Checking your phone stimulates your brain,” Dr. Drerup explains. “You’re more active and awake. Even just a quick check can engage your brain and delay sleep.”
Your mind can stay active and engaged long after you’ve scrolled through social media or responded to a few work emails.
And it’s not just the alertness you get from late-night social media sessions either. It’s thinking about or feeling your phone going off under your pillow. It’s listening for that email chime letting you know a project is moving along.
So it is high time to take screen time limits extremely seriously as Insomnia is not a small issue.
Reference:
https://www.verywellhealth.com/reasons-why-you-should-not-sleep-with-your-cell-phone-4140997
