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Image used for representational purpose only | Photo Credit: Getty Images/iStockphoto
Parents of children and teenagers have long been warned about the dangers of using screens and digital devices before bedtime – the concern is that screens could harm young people’s sleep patterns.
But do screens actually harm sleep duration and quality? New Research Using screens while lying in bed was found to be worse for sleep than using screens for hours before bedtime.
Sleep guidelines recommend not using screens for an hour or two before bedtime. But we found that using screens in the two hours before bedtime had little effect on young people’s sleep. Instead, using screens after bedtime caused problems.
Using cameras to track device use and sleep, we found that device use at bedtime may be more harmful than screen time up until bedtime. These findings challenge long-held beliefs about screen time at night and could help parents improve their children’s sleep quality.
Linking sleep and screen
Many global organizations Advise teens to stop using devices Relax for an hour or two before bed, and instead do activities like reading a book or spending quiet time with family.
But these recommendations are based on research with several limitations. The studies were designed in a way that allowed researchers to link sleep and screens. But they don’t tell us whether changes in the way young people use screens have any effect on sleep duration or quality.
Most existing research has also used questionnaires to assess both screen time and sleep. It is difficult to accurately measure screen time from questionnaires, especially when you are interested in knowing how much time teens spend on their devices.
To address some of these weaknesses in previous research, we asked 85 adolescents aged 11 to 14 to wear a body camera on their chest for three hours before bedtime for four nights.
These cameras were mounted outdoors and accurately captured when, what, and how teens used their screens. Since we were also interested in screen time overnight, a second infrared camera was placed on a tripod in teens’ bedrooms and captured their screen time while in bed. Research participants also wore an actigraph – a watch-sized device that objectively measured screen time.
night time activities of teenagers
It quickly became apparent that teens spent most of their time on screens while in bed.
Our analysis looked at two time periods – from two hours before they went to bed, and from when they went to bed (obviously under a blanket) until they put down their devices and apparently started trying to sleep.
Our data showed that 99 percent of teens used screens in the two hours before bedtime, more than half used screens after going to bed, and a third used screens after their first attempt to sleep at night. Only one teen did not use screens before bedtime on any of the four nights.
The time spent on screens before going to bed had little effect on their sleep that night. However, the time spent on screens after going to bed did disrupt their sleep. It prevented them from falling asleep by about half an hour, and reduced the amount of sleep they got that night.
This was especially true for more interactive screen activities like gaming and multitasking – when they used more than one device at the same time (such as playing an Xbox on a gaming device while watching a movie on Netflix on a laptop).
In fact, every additional ten minutes of this type of screen time reduced the amount of sleep they got that night by almost the same amount – nine minutes.
Re-review of guidelines
Our research was an observational study that looked at the established screen habits of young people.
The next step to understand this better would be to conduct experiments that can actually prove that different types and lengths of screen time affect sleep.
As we said, what we found challenges existing guidelines.
Screen use at night may not be as dangerous as it is made out to be. But allowing young people to have screens in bed could be detrimental to the quality of their sleep.
So the simple message might be to keep these devices out of the bedroom.
Rachael Taylor is a Professor in the Department of Medicine, University of Otago
This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article Here
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