Electronic devices use before bed can cause sleep disorder: Study

Now-a-days, the craze for electronic devices including smartphones, tablets or e-readers are attracting more and more people and they exhaust most of their time while peeping into it. But none of us think that how much these devices affect our body.

Apart from other health risks, the most common problem that these devices cause is that it hurts your sleep.

According to a new study, regular staring at electronic devices before going to bed could ruin sleep very badly. The researchers said that the devices, like e-readers or iPhones, emit a kind of light that can confuse the human body.

Anne-Marie Chang, assistant professor of bio-behavioral health at Penn State, said, “Electronic devices emit light that is short-wavelength-enriched light. These lights have a higher concentration of blue light — with a peak around 450 nm – compared to natural light. They are completely different in composition from natural light and hence, can have a greater impact on sleep and circadian rhythms.”

For the study, the team of researchers involved 12 adults and monitored their electronic devices usage pattern and sleep disorder, if any, for two weeks. The researchers group carried a comparative analysis of the nights when the study participants went to bed with a book and those nights when they went to bed with an e-reader. During the study period, various sleep related factors were measured in the participants, like their quality of sleep, melatonin levels and their alertness level when they woke up.

It was found that when the participants used the e-readers before bed-time, they took 10 minutes longer to fall asleep. And when they didn’t use an e-device before bed-time, they were found falling into deep sleep in shorter periods of time.

“Our most surprising finding was that individuals using the e-reader would be more tired and take longer to become alert the next morning. This has real consequences for daytime functioning, and these effects might be worse in the real world as opposed to the controlled environment we used,” said Chang.

The study’s findings were published on Monday in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.