Let’s recreate the scene: it’s time to sleep; we’re in bed and we just turned off the lights. Suddenly, the light on our smartphone blinks (announcing a notification). What do we do at that time? A new study shows that all those people who check their social media accounts, be it Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, Youtube, Snapchat, Linkedin … quite frequently, are more likely to have sleep disorders than those who do so with moderation.
To reach this conclusion, researchers in 2014 conducted a study with 1,788 adults between 19 and 32 years of age to find out what association existed between sleep disturbances and the increasing use of social networks by young adults. Thus, the participants completed several questionnaires and the experts, for their part, designed a measurement system to study sleep disturbances.
The results of the questionnaires revealed that the volunteers used social media an average of 61 minutes a day and checked their accounts about 30 times a week . Regarding sleep, almost 30% of the participants had high levels of sleep disturbance.
In general, those who most frequently checked their social networks during the week were three times more likely to suffer from sleep disorders , compared to those who did very little, showing that the frequency with which we use social networks can be the best predictor of this type of pathology.
“ The strong association between smartphone use and sleep disturbances has important clinical implications for the health and well-being of young adults. Future work should aim to assess directionality to better understand the influence of contextual factors associated with the use of smartphones ”, the authors conclude.
The research, carried out by the University of Pittsburgh School of Medicine and the National Institutes of Health (USA), has been published in the journal Preventive Medicine.
