Using Cell Phones Before Bed

Personally no matter how much I sleep, I always find myself super exhausted when I wake up in the morning. I tried to do some research to make sure I take full advantage of my sleep.

I’ve gotten into this bad habit of falling asleep while using my phone in bed and waking up with my phone right by my pillow. My mother always told me this was bad for me and I always acknowledged, but never really considered why. After lots of research I am very surprised with what I found.

In a study conducted it was found that people who use their phones after they turn the lights off, are significantly more tired and have side effects.

The null hypothesis in this study is that there is no relationship between using your phone past the time you turn your lights our and how tired you are. The alternative hypothesis is that there is a relationship between how tired you are and if you used your phone after the lights are out.

young cell phone addict man awake at night in bed using smartphone for chatting flirting and sending text message in internet addiction and mobile abuse concept

 

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This experiment consisted of 258 students to do a stratified random sample. The participants had a mix of males and females of different marital statuses, occupations and ages. The people were prompted to answers questions about who they slept and felt. The results were amazing!

The relationship between cell phone use after lights out and how tired a person was resulted in p-value of .04.

The relationship between cell phone use after lights out and stress, the quality of sleep resulted in a p-value of .001

In both of these cases, you would reject the null, and accept the alternative hypothesis which was that there is a relationship between how tired you are and if you used your phone after the lights were out.

It is important to note that the file drawer problem can be ruled out because there was a finding that resulted in a p-value of 0.23. This finding was the relationship between using cell phones after lights out and sleep quality. In this case you would accept the null hypothesis which goes against the other results, and rules out bias findings.

A logical person from these finding can take steps to better their sleep. One way you could better the way you sleep is by not going into your bedroom until you are completely done using your phone, or not turning off the lights until you are completely done using your device. Another way to help you sleep better is to turn your phone off completely when going to bed, put it on airplane mode, or consider charging it on the other side of the room.

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4733306/

http://www.iflscience.com/health-and-medicine/how-smartphone-light-affects-your-brain-and-body/

5 thoughts on “Using Cell Phones Before Bed

  1. Caroline Sorrentino

    I used to sleep with my phone plugged in and right under my pillow, but my physics teacher scared me out of it. She said that phones cause a ton of radiation that can even be seem and predicted. As well as that, I read something on how a girl who wore a sports bra and put her phone in it when she went running had developed cancer in her breast in the exact same spot the phone was every day. This article talks about why you should keep your phone out of your sports bra due to the microwave radiation.

  2. Melissa Fraistat

    I recall hearing a couple of years ago that it is in fact true that being on your phone before bed can make you not as tired compared to as if you weren’t on your phone. Apparently this is due to the blue light the phone gives off. Ever since I learned this I always put my phone on NightShift and it seems to help. Here is an article discussing why the blue light affects us so negatively at night, which is specifically due to the fact that the blue light imitates the blue light the sun emits.

  3. Angela Maria Napolitano

    I’ve heard the same thing a bunch of times! I know part of it has to do with the fact that light in general makes it harder for us to go to sleep and to sleep well once we do. It’s always better to sleep in the complete darkness. Our bodies associate light with being wide-awake, which means that even the slightest bit of light is going to mess with our ability to sleep. This article actually talks a bit more in depth about this:
    https://sleepfoundation.org/sleep-news/lights-out-good-nights-sleep

  4. Nicholas E Schneider

    For quite a while now I have had problems similar to yours when it comes to sleeping. Not only have I found it hard to fall asleep until some ungodly hour in the middle of the night, but I, like you, often feel tired and poorly rested no matter how many hours of sleep I got the night before. I’ve always viewed my phone as a something to keep me occupied when I am unable to fall asleep, though now I’m realizing that maybe the exact thing I thought was helping me is actually the source of my sleeping problems. Over Thanksgiving break I went to Aruba for vacation and was disgruntled when the only suitable outlet to charge my phone was located across the room from my bed in a very inconvenient spot. Annoyed, I plugged my phone in across the room and decided to read a magazine in bed rather than scroll through social media. Much to my surprise and happiness, I seemed to become increasingly tired very quickly and within minutes was so tired that i turned the lights off and immediately fell asleep. This pattern continued for the rest of my vacation and as a result of how well rested I felt during that week, I’m most likely going to continue sleeping a safe distance from any distracting technology.

  5. Daniel J Lehecka

    I think there’s a lot of reasons that you might wake up in the morning, and I’m definitely not ruling out the use of phones. One thing that I know is true is what point in your REM cycle that you wake up in. If your body gets up at a time that it wasn’t ready to, you might feel more groggy in the morning. Also, I know that blue lights can be harmful for falling asleep at night because they trigger the release of chemicals in the brain that make it hard to fall asleep. I would recommend using NightShift if you have an iPhone, Twilight if you have an Android, or f.Lux if you’re on a PC late at night, it turns the screen to an orange hue that is less straining on the eyes!

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