Impact of technology use on sleep
What do we want to know?
A substantial body of research has long demonstrated that sleep is essential for physical health. People who get less sleep are at a higher risk for cardiovascular diseases, obesity and diabetes. In addition to physical risks, more recent research is beginning to shed light on the relationship between sleep, mental health and emotional well-being. The importance of sleep for mental health is particularly pertinent for children and adolescents, because, among other reasons, early-life behaviors can be influential in establishing later-life habits. Children who don’t get enough sleep demonstrate increased emotional problems, and adolescents who don’t get enough sleep are more likely to perform worse in school, are less productive, and report higher levels of depression. Furthermore, the data over the past decade has identified a clear trend of children not getting enough sleep. A study from 2012 revealed that far fewer adolescents are getting the recommended 7 hours of sleep per night than they had been 20 years prior, and a study from 2017 revealed a steady continuous decrease in the amount of children getting enough sleep between 2009 and 2015. While the direction of these trends is abundantly clear, little work has explored the potential causal factors that may explain them.
There are many factors that impact the amount of sleep one gets, from stress to socio-economic status. It can sometimes be difficult to specify the cause for these effects: Does being stressed prevent one from sleeping soundly, or does a lack of adequate sleep make one less able to deal with daily life stressors? Or do both explanations reinforce the other, creating a vicious cycle of poor sleep and poor mental health. More recently, digital technology has emerged as one of the leading hypothesized causes of poor sleep, in terms of duration and quality. Indeed, studies of college students have shown that increased technology use is associated with lower sleep quality. Other studies of children and teens have shown that while many different types of technology impact sleep, using a smartphone or computer is worse for sleep than watching TV, perhaps because watching TV is a more passive activity.
There are several explanations for why technology use before bed might impact sleep. Given the design goals of social media, using these platforms may increase feelings of anxiety and depression, which can in turn lead to less healthy sleep patterns. Activities one engages in before bed on social media platforms may lead to emotional arousal, which then makes it more difficult to fall asleep. In addition, the light given off by phone and computer screens has been proposed to interfere with the human body’s biological clock, tricking it into thinking it’s daytime. The exposure to bright light late at night can make it more difficult to get a good night’s sleep.
Despite these efforts to identify some of the factors affecting sleep, it’s unclear how technology use at night interacts with other variables, such as stress and emotional well-being, because the vast majority of studies of technology use and sleep are observational in nature. These studies can reveal correlations between variables but are less able to extract causality. In order to fully understand the ways in which digital technology impacts sleep, we must randomly assign participants to different groups in which experimenters manipulate technology use before bed. In addition, while many studies have investigated the effects of technology use in children and adolescents, a comprehensive understanding of how the impacts differ across children, adolescents, and adults is missing from the literature. Finally, there are multiple explanations for why using digital technology impacts sleep: some focus on bright light and the technology itself, while others focus on the specific activities that one does before bed. It’s unclear how these explanations interact with each other.
How will we study it?
In the current study, we plan to enroll participants in three age groups: children (ages 7-10), adolescents (ages 11-17) and adults (ages 18+). Participants will be randomly assigned to one of four conditions: a natural behavior condition, in which participants receive no explicit instructions about technology use before bed, a no-tech condition, in which participants will be instructed not to use digital technology within 90 minutes of going to bed; a passive-tech condition, in which participants participants will be instructed to read an article on their phone or laptop before bed; and an interactive-tech condition, in which participants will be instructed to use social media (or some other activity that requires user input and elicits emotional arousal) before bed. The duration of the study is expected to be two weeks. Sleep quality will be recorded with a wearable device that provides an estimate of sleep onset time, sleep architecture and wake time, as well as via self-report the next morning. A more general assessment of sleep will be collected using the Pittsburgh sleep inventory or equivalent measure, which will be answered by parents for the younger cohorts. Participants will also fill out a series of surveys early each evening. These surveys will be designed to assess emotional well-being, emotion regulation abilities during that day, and amount of technology use during that day.
What would our findings mean?
The relationship between sleep and cognitive development is well-understood: getting a good night’s sleep is important for everyone, but is particularly important for children and adolescents, whose minds and bodies are still actively growing. In addition, the relationship between technology use and mental health is also known to differ between age groups, necessitating comparisons among these groups. Our study will extend the robust body of work on how development and mental health are impacted by technology use by investigating the differential impact on sleep. Finally, our study is designed to elucidate some of the causal factors of the ongoing adolescent mental health crisis. Careful assignment of participants to conditions that vary in technology use before bed provides an avenue to more directly linking technology use to sleep quality, which can have important implications for mental health and well-being.
