7/30/2019 Electronics Disturb Sleep Pattern

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 book — people begin to deprive their brain of the downtime that's necessary in the

sleep process.

"We've gone from bigger devices - the computers that were fixed on our desk to the

handheld portable devices ... so it's become a much more difficult issue to actually

create a boundary between sleep and switching off these devices," she said, "becauseof course they come into the bedroom and a lot of people use their mobile phones as

their alarm clock."

These effects create a group of people who likely do not label themselves as morning

 people. Charles Czeisler, Ph.D. and professor of sleep medicine at Harvard Medical

School wrote recently that the extended use of electronic devices at night can result in

a domino effect. The "second wind" feeling that people generally experience mid-day

soon appears at nightfall.

"Before the widespread use of electric light, people probably experienced that second

wind in the mid-afternoon, keeping them going until night fell," said Czeisler in arecent issue of  Nature. "But light exposure after sunset signals 'daytime' to the [brain],

shifting the clock later, postponing the second wind and delaying the onset of 

melatonin secretion. As a result, many people are still checking e-mail, doing

homework or watching TV at midnight, with hardly a clue that it is the middle of the

solar night."

KIDS, LISTEN UP

Especially disastrous is the potential impact in children, who need a proper night's

sleep even more so than adults given their still-developing brains and increased need

for concentration at school.

"Often young people are using these devices in the bed and this creates a learned

association between the bed as being a place of study or work or socializing, rather 

than keeping the bed just for sleep," said Gamble. "They're at much greater risk of 

later developing anxiety disorders, depressive illnesses, substance abuse issues and

also, on the more physical side, they're at increased risk of poor glycemic control,

diabetes and so on."

Moving forward, Czeisler echoed Rajaratnam's sentiments regarding the phasing out

of blue light-heavy devices before bed.

"The adverse effects of night-time light on sleep and circadian rhythms can be

reduced by replacing blue-enriched light with red- or orange-enriched white light after 

sunset," said Czeisler. He concluded by encouraging the scientific community to

reexamine what it knows about the effects of electricity on our brains.

"It is time to reassess the early assurances of Thomas Edison," he said, "that using

electric light 'is in no way harmful to health, nor does it affect the soundness of 

sleep.'"