Mobile phone: Out of sight for a good night’s sleep
View(s):The next time you can’t sleep, your brain whirring over shopping lists, tomorrow’s meetings and whether or not you locked the back door, the solution could be simple – move your mobile phone off the bedside table and out of your bedroom altogether.
Eight out of ten of us keep our mobiles on overnight according to Ofcom, and around half use our phone as an alarm clock, a survey found. But experts are concerned about the effect this is having – at the very least it makes us ‘hypervigilant’ so our sleep is more likely to be disturbed and we end up not getting enough of the restorative sleep we need. But it might also trigger insomnia and other sleeping problems.
Most people will sleep better if the bedroom is kept free of mobile phones and other electronic devices, says Dr Guy Meadows, insomnia specialist at The Sleep School, London. Dr Meadows leaves his smartphone in the kitchen at night. More controversially, there are suggestions that sleeping with your mobile by your bed may cause dizziness and headaches. The main problem with mobile phones in the bedroom is light, particularly the kind produced by the bright, high-quality screen on modern phones.
It interferes with the body’s natural rhythm, effectively tricking our bodies into believing it’s daytime, according to Dr Charles Czeisler, a professor of sleep medicine at Harvard University. Light stimulates cells in the retina, the area at the back of the eye that transmits messages to the brain. The light-sensitive cells inform our body what time it is, explains Dr Meadows.
‘This controls the release of the hormone melatonin, which makes you feel sleepy, and the waking hormone, cortisol.’All artificial light, whether from standard light bulbs or fluorescent strips, is thought to inhibit the release of melatonin, keeping us awake longer. But light from mobiles may have a greater effect.Why? Most of us think of normal light as white, but it’s made up of different colours of varying wavelengths, explains Professor Debra Skene, a neuroendocrinologist at the University of Surrey.
And the light emitted by phones, tablets and e-readers contains a great deal of blue – this means it has a more stimulating effect.
© Daily Mail, London