After decades of research, global experts have reached a consensus: Smartphone use before bed can be bad for a good night’s sleep, especially among children and teenagers. The National Sleep Foundation has new best practices to keep screen time from affecting sleep.
WSHU’s David Tauscher spoke with Lauren Hale, who chairs the international panel and is a public health professor at Stony Brook University.
WSHU: Can you walk me through the basic findings of the sleep panel?
LH: Sure, absolutely. I study sleep health as a public health issue. And one of the ways I do that is I am involved in the National Sleep Foundation, I was actually chairman of the board for a while. One of the activities the National Sleep Foundation does every year or so is to convene consensus panels on a range of different sleep-related topics in which they gather lead scientists from around the world to sort through the current science and ask questions about various recommendations. Are the recommendations current, are they supported by the evidence, and has anything changed? And you know, in the past, some of our big recommendations have been about sleep duration, age-specific sleep durations, and quality measures, but this year, the committee that identifies what the public wants to know, selected screen use and sleep as one of the pressing issues that the public is interested in receiving current recommendations on.
And since I've been involved with the National Sleep Foundation, as well as research on screens and sleep over the last 15 years, they invited me to chair that panel. And that was about a year and a half ago. The way the panel worked is that we invited 16 leading scientists at academic institutions who are engaged in this research to meet with us on a bi-monthly basis to identify what research question we still want to know and also to review the literature. And of course, that is kind of an ambitious task. So we worked most closely with five of the 16 members of the panel, and the Stony Brook University Health Sciences Librarian to go through all the scientific databases, and we found 2200 abstracts, then we sorted through and found over 500 articles that were relevant to the question of screens, and sleep health. And then we would go back to the full panel and present our results and summarize, you know, most of these articles are cross-sectional studies, most of these articles rely on self-reported measures of sleep, you know, we very systematically presented the type of study that the team found to the panelists so that we could identify kind of pressing questions that we could vote on.
The way this consensus panel works is that once you accept the literature and identify the consensus statement, then we vote. We did two rounds of voting, including a conversation in the middle. We voted on 10 statements and reached a consensus on five of them about screen use and sleep. So that's basically how the panel works. And it took almost all year to reach or vote on the consensus.
WSHU: How was the panel convened, and how did you reach your conclusions?
LH: We met extensively on Zoom, we had participants from all around the world. We met, and we voted twice, as I mentioned, with time in between to go back to the kind of summary of the literature to determine our conclusions. I want to point out that, you know, this panel was important because even though a lot of people think, 'Oh, we already know that screens affect sleep.' There are hundreds of studies, and we already mentioned over 500 articles show, the overwhelming majority, show a positive association between more screen use and later sleep onset or sleep duration and poor sleep quality. What is missing are questions about the mechanisms. Is that the light, or is it the content? Is that the timing? Is it for younger people or older people? And most importantly, is there something we can do about it?
WSHU: How could these findings be used to inform parents, doctors, and others interested in children's sleep habits?
LH: The most important thing we found from our findings was not just that we did reach a consensus that screen time directly impacts the sleep of children and teens, but that there's something you can do about it. Our review of the literature shows that it's not always easy, but interventions can work to help mitigate the effects of, especially, nighttime screen use on the sleep of kids and teens. The recommendations are that they haven't changed that much, but they're worth reiterating so our listeners can hear as well that parents should be talking with their kids about the use of technology and screens and how it can affect sleep. And parents should be setting limits, in conjunction with their kids about when they use screens, and how much they use screens.
I firmly believe that screens should not be in the bedroom environment, especially for kids; it's just too tempting to have that device right by your head at night, and you want to check it. It might vibrate, it might ring and might wake you up, you might learn something about what your friends are doing that you weren't invited to. And all of those interactions with your phone at night are disruptive, to falling asleep, staying asleep, and having the most restorative night's sleep. So the take-home message is that parents and children should work together and regulate how much screen use they have at night. We recommend all family members, including parents, charge their phones or other devices in a central location at night and implement early, regular and relaxing bedtime routines. In general, that means, without screens. Bluetooth might be okay for listening to a story or for music. But you probably don't need an interactive, engaging device in the bedroom or the bed with you.
WSHU: Outside of screen use, what can someone do to improve their sleep pattern?
LH: There are lots of ways that children and adults can help improve their sleep. The first is having a regular schedule, which means going to bed at approximately the same time every night and waking up at the same time every morning. That's hard when we have, you know, built into our society. Sometimes we do work, and some days we don't work; we need to catch up on our sleep. But the optimal sleep pattern for your body operates on a 24-hour cycle. And you should be falling asleep at the same time and waking up at the same time. Make sure that your bedroom is cool, dark, and quiet, as well as absent of screens because there's so much research showing that screens interfere with falling asleep and staying asleep. Whether it's from the content, the time displacement, or just a disruption from the devices themselves. We know that people sleep better when devices are not in the bedroom.
