When your phone inhibits sleep
Mobile phone alerts that interrupt our sleep may have serious knock-on effects for our waking lives, leaving us more prone to car accidents, mistakes at work and poor mental health.
A study from across the Tasman shows that one in five Australians is being woken by texts and social media alerts, or waking up to send them, multiple times a week. For one in 20, it’s every night.
When that alert sounds, ‘‘the temptation to look is enormous’’, lead researcher Dr Sarah Appleton at Flinders University’s Adelaide Institute of Sleep Health warned.
‘‘This is a really difficult problem to deal with because it’s so pervasive and ingrained in our population,’’ she said.
Twenty per cent of adults were woken by their devices, or woke to use them, at least twice a week, found the survey of 2044 people aged 18 to 90 about their use of phones, computers and tablets after they went to sleep over the previous seven days.
About 23 per cent of respondents who used their phones after they had fallen asleep at least two nights a week reported having a recent car accident or near-miss compared with 2 per cent of those who slept soundly.
‘‘It’s a frightening finding,’’ said Appleton after adjusting for confounding factors including reported sleep disorders, age and sex.
These people were also significantly more likely to report making mistakes or falling asleep on the job, being absent and missing social activities because of tiredness, as well as having lower energy levels, mental wellbeing and motivation.
In April, the Australian federal government’s Inquiry into Sleep Health Awareness found inadequate and disrupted sleep cost the economy A$66.3 billion ($71.5b) in 2016-2017, equating to nearly $1000 of lost shut-eye per sleepless person.
It wasn’t just young people reaching for their phones in the dark. People aged 55 and over also reported being woken by, or waking to send messages.
Almost three-quarters of respondents said they kept their phones in their bedrooms as they sleep, one in three kept a tablet and one in four a computer.
President of the Australasian Sleep Association and biomedical research scientist Peter Eastwood said the study backed warnings from sleep experts that having electronic devices in bedrooms risked disturbing sleep.
‘‘We know that if you are being woken up in the night it’s going to have a profound effect on how you function the next day,’’ Eastwood said.
‘‘We need to go back in time to analog alarm clocks. It’s a very simple solution.’’
Appleton said addressing such an ingrained behaviour would be challenging, but suggested a public health awareness campaign could encourage people to switch their phones to silent, a ‘‘Do Not Disturb’’ setting, or moving them away so that it would be too much of an effort to reach them.
The findings will be presented at the Australasian Sleep Association’s annual conference in Sydney this week.
The study is under review for publication in an international journal.