The Impact of Using Smartphones Before Sleep

Most of the people of this generation are advised not to look into their electronic devices before bed. It stresses us out and disrupts our sleep.

But, what harm could checking Facebook and Whatsapp before bed has on my health other than changing my biological clock ¹a little?

People are constantly exposing their eyes to the light from electronic devices. The light from a smartphone releases a photon stream, which tells our brain not to secrete melatonin — the chemical that makes us feel tired. This stream of photons basically tells our brain – “stay awake; it’s not the time to go to sleep yet.” So, we stay awake and continue to browse our smartphones.

This leads us to clock in fewer hours of sleep each night.

Are we getting enough of the right kind of sleep?

Scientists are beginning to discover how important sleep is to maintain our physical and mental well-being. During deep sleep, we actually clean out all the sludge from our brains. The brain is observed to be very active during deep sleep; it also does unconscious mental processing.  So, deep sleep increases the activity of those genes which are responsible for removing toxins from our body. Also, in a deep sleep, we relieve psychological stresses². The more we try to sleep with stress, the harder it would be for us to sleep. There’s new research that shows a protein that gets activated – that’s a part of the epigenome, which never sleeps.

Deep sleep is basically cleaning up our bodies of accumulated stresses and toxins. If we are sleep-deprived, we have a high risk of obesity because certain hormones (leptin and ghrelin) change our hunger and satiety levels. Also, they change the metabolism of steroids. So, even if we don’t eat too much, we may still get belly fat.

Belly fat acts as an endocrine organ. It messes up the metabolism of steroids³. Therefore, deep sleep is associated with inflammation of the leaky gut⁴, loss of creativity, loss of energy, and risk of many inflammatory disorders.

Deep sleep means seven to eight hours of sleep every night without taking drugs or alcohol. Natural good sleep is essential for our body to remain in good health, to remove the amyloid from our brain as it causes premature dementia⁵, and to self-regulate the cellular activity in our entire body.

New sleep research finds that natural, good sleep is essential to have good health. When we go to sleep, there should not be any distractions, and we need to make sure that we had a good active day. The more we exercise, the better sleep we get. Scientists recommend giving ourselves an hour buffer between our electronic screens and bedtime.

So let us minimize the usage of electronic devices during bedtime. Sleep well, and stay healthy!

Stay away from those screens!!

1. Foster, Russell G. “Shedding light on the biological clock.” Neuron 20.5 (1998): 829-832. ↩︎
2. Lazarus, Richard S., James Deese, and Sonia F. Osler. “The effects of psychological stress upon performance.” Psychological bulletin 49.4 (1952): 293. ↩︎
3. Schriefers, Herbert. “Factors regulating the metabolism of steroids.” Vitamins & Hormones 25 (1967): 271-314. ↩︎
4. Camilleri, Michael, and Adrian Vella. “What to do about the leaky gut.” Gut 71.2 (2022): 424-435. ↩︎
5. Keene, Janet, et al. “Death and dementia.” International journal of geriatric psychiatry 16.10 (2001): 969-974. ↩︎

Last Updated on March 24, 2024 by NamitaSoren