With smartphones seemingly well-known in the industrialized world, sleep researchers have confirmed what many have already suspected – technology disrupts human sleep in ways we do not yet fully understand.
Humans, along with plants, fungi, and animals, possess a circadian rhythm, the internal clock that regulates our sleep-wake cycle.
As far as scientists can determine, most of this rhythm is maintained by the hypothalamus which releases the sleep hormone melatonin and reacts a lot to changes in the ambient light, especially around dawn and dusk.
However, artificial light can affect the dynamics of the hypothalamus, and increased exposure to blue light from electronic devices such as smartphones, laptops, and certain types of earbuds has a gradual impact on the intrinsic sleep rhythm of modern humans for almost 24 hours.
“Light mainly does two things to the clock. It sets the time of the clock and it changes the amplitude or strength of the clock,” says Professor Jamie Zeitzer of Stanford University.
An increasing amount of research indicates that artificial light can suppress melatonin production in humans and thus disrupt the natural tendency to sleep at the end of the day, which takes the time it takes to sleep away longer.
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“There is evidence that using bright screens for 1.5 hours (or more) reduces the natural increase in melatonin, and this effect can be compounded over several nights,” says Dr Cele Richardson of the University of Western Australia.
Previous studies have found that pre-sleep activity can affect the amount of time it takes to fall asleep. One study in 2014 compared e-books to printed book readers and found that the latter group had fallen asleep up to ten minutes earlier.
A separate study examined the impact of blue light filter products and found that users fell asleep up to four minutes earlier than non-users.
Another complicating factor, however, is that those who struggle to fall asleep are more likely to use technology to entertain themselves while lying awake and struggle to fall asleep, in a kind of negative feedback loop that they generally deprived of even more sleep.
“A two-way relationship between technological use and sleep is likely. That is, technological use can affect sleep over time, but individuals who struggle to sleep may increase their technological use thereafter,” Richardson added.
The exact impact of artificial light on our rather mysterious sleep cycle remains unknown, but the growing scientific consensus is that technology is having a negative impact on our overall ability to get a good night’s sleep.
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