Why is it so bad to use screens before bed?

Ever had a hard time falling asleep? Or waking up and not feeling refreshed at all? Although there are many different factors that can affect our sleep pattern: screen time actually has a great impact on it too.

Here are the three main ways using phones, tablets or even watching TV before bed can impact our night sleep.

Often when we start watching videos, or gaming or even chatting online it’s very hard to stop. And before you know it, it’s really late at night and you end up having few hours of sleep. This of course means that you will not be as awake and energetic in the morning.

Screens can actually decrease our melatonin levels before bed because of their blue light. But what is melatonin? Melatonin is a hormone that helps regulate our sleep cycle and the higher it is, the more likely we are to have a great night rest. But if we’ve spent too much time looking at a device we might get a very disrupted sleep.

Screens can alert us, both psychologically and physically. If we spend hours looking at the light of the screen in bed our brain basically thinks that it’s day, so it’s constantly awake. This means that it will be very difficult to wind down and fall asleep.

So what can you do to get a great night sleep? Well, Dr. George Kitsaras suggests the best way would be to avoid screens all together in the hour before you go to bed. If that is difficult to achieve at the first attempts, you could try to set some screen-free zones in the house and set the rule not to use phones or tablets in your bedroom.

Check out this article if you are curious to know why getting enough sleep is so important for us!

And here is where you can find out how many hours of sleep you should get.