Last updated April 12, 2019
Cell phones and computers may be contributing to sleepless nights. The National Sleep Foundation in the United States has conducted a survey which shows that around forty-three percent of American citizens are having trouble getting a good night’s sleep, with up to sixty percent experiencing some kind of sleep problem and technology may be as much to blame as stress and crying babies.
“The study, which polled one thousand, five hundred and eight Americans between thirteen and sixty-four, reveals that light emitting screens are in heavy use within the pivotal hour before sleep,” says Harvard Medical School professor and chief of the Division of Sleep Medicine at Brigham and Women’s Hospital, Dr Charles Czeisler. “Invasion of such alerting technologies into the bedroom may contribute to the high proportion of respondents who reported that they routinely get less sleep than they need.”
Moreover, the survey shows that no less than ninety-five percent of all Americans use electronics of some description, be it the radio, television, computers or cell phones, in the hour before retiring to bed. Then again, as Dan Olds, analyst for The Gabriel Consulting Group half-jokingly notes, “TV and computers have been a pre-bedtime staple for a while now. What do these National Sleep Foundation people expect us to do at night? Talk to each other?”
Cell phones are a particular cause of the problem for teenagers and those in their twenties, with one in five admitting to being woken up during the night by calls, texts or emails coming in on their cell phones.