Teenagers' Use Of Electronic Gadgets Leads To Sleep Problems, Study

Using electronic devices all day can set back teenagers' sleep by an hour, according to a new study published in the journal BMJ Open.

Probing the diurnal habits of 9,846 teens aged between 16 and 19, enrolled in the youth@hordaland survey in Norway showed that teenagers spent a lot of time on smartphones, mp3players, gaming consoles, television sets and tablets, according to cbsnews.com.

Mari Hysing and a team from the Uni Research Health in Norway recorded the daily screen time among the participants by calculating the total time spent on smartphones, mp3 players, gaming consoles, TVs and tablets.

The information on the teenagers' sleep routine factored their bedtime, duration of sleep required by each and the total time they took to fall asleep.

They discovered that boys spent time on gaming consoles or computers, while girls invested more time into mp3 players, smartphones and online chatting.

Participants using electronic devices in the daytime before sleeping had to postpone their bedtime schedules by an hour before sleeping.

However, the real reason behind the mechanisms is not clear. Maybe light from electronic devices could be impacting the teenagers' body clocks, or there might be less obvious effects, such as increased emotional stimulation due to chatting, according to theverge.com. The right amount of sleep is important not only to avoid bad moods the following day, but even to avoid obesity and low grades, along with overtiredness in children and problems with addiction.

"Extensive use of these devices was significantly and positively associated with long sleep onset latency and sleep deficit, with an inverse dose-response relationship between sleep duration and media use," the researchers, said in a news release.

Just an hour using electronic modern devices for just four hours a day increased the risk of experiencing long sleep onset latency by 49%.

TV viewing for more than a couple of hours after school hours lengthened sleep latency and shorter time spent in sleep.

Teenagers that required a minimum of eight to nine hours sleep at night, did not spend more than five hours if they spent most of their time in front of electronic devices.

The use of computers too is linked with less sleep time in the night. "The electronic devices may also interfere with sleep through increased psychophysiological arousal", said psychologist and researcher Hysing. Computers had the "strongest link with insufficient sleep, and were also the most widely used types of electronic devices," according to cbsnews.com.