Peninsula Daily News
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More than one out of three adults gets less than seven hours of sleep a night, and 38 percent report unintentionally falling asleep during the day at least once in the past month, according to the Centers for Disease Control’s Morbidity and Mortality Weekly Report issued this week.
And the annual Sleep in America poll by the National Sleep Foundation, released Monday, suggested that the cause is the widespread use of electronics at night.
■ About 95 percent of people use some type of electronics in the hour before bed, whether it’s watching TV, surfing the Internet, playing video games or texting.
■ The youngest generation of adults, 19 to 29 years, are the biggest users of interactive electronics like cell phones and the Internet. They are more than eight times as likely as baby boomers (46 to 64 years to text in the hour before bedtime — 52 percent of them texted compared with 5 percent of boomers surveyed.
■ About 19% of respondents sent or received work-related e-mails before bed.
What do electronics have to do with sleep deprivation–and job performance? The National Sleep Foundation surveyed 1,508 people and found:
■ People who text before bed were less likely to get a good night’s sleep, more likely to wake up tired, to be characterized as sleepy, and more likely to drive while feeling drowsy.
■ Three-quarters of those older than 30 who reported not getting enough sleep said their sleepiness affected their work.
Those in the 19-29 age range can also blame Facebook. About 63 percent of twentysomethings use a social networking site before bed, compared with 34 percent of 30 to 45 year olds and only 18 percent of boomers. They’re also twice as likely to play video games in that hour, and much more likely to Skype, watch videos on the computer or talk on their cell phone.
It’s not just the postgrads who are losing sleep. A whopping 64 percent of all those who responded to the National Sleep Foundation survey said they woke up during the night and 61 percent said they woke up the next morning feeling un-refreshed at least a few days a week.
“Electronics are making it very enticing to stay up later,” said Dr. Charles A. Czeisler, a co-author of the survey and the director of division of sleep medicine at Harvard’s Brigham & Women’s Hospital in Boston.
“You have 500 cable channels, 24/7 entertainment and technologies, video gaming available around the clock. How bad something is for you depends on the extent to which it is captivating you and tempting you not to sleep.”
Passive technologies, like watching TV and listening to music may be more calming than interactive electronics like video games, cell phones and the Internet because they tend to be less engaging.
“The hypothesis is that the latter devices are more alerting and disrupt the sleep-onset process,” says Michael Gradisar, another co-author of the study.
But TV is more pervasive in bedrooms across the country, and can keep people up much longer than they normally would if they were just flipping through a magazine before bedtime.
Plus, artificial light—whether from a light bulb or your computer screen—suppresses the release of the sleep-promoting hormone melatonin, making it take longer to fall asleep.
