BY BECKY SHEASBY
As students there can be a lot of contributing factors to being sleep deprived. Stress, job, school work and life all bundle up into a nice package that ends up weighing on their brains every night. However, there is one thing that many people do that causes a bad night’s sleep that is actually easily avoidable – using your cellphone.
Using your phone before bed can prevent you from getting a good night’s sleep. A study done by researchers at Michigan State University, University of Florida and the University of Washington found that engaging in “work-related” activities on phones before bedtime (the study defines bedtime as after 9 p.m.) has a negative effect on a person’s general well-being the following day.
For the study, which will be published in the journal, Organizational Behavior and Human Decision Processes, a total of 243 people participated and were divided into two groups. The first group was 83 upper-level managers and the second consisted of 161 employees from a variety of different industries.
Both of the surveys showed that using a smartphone for business before bed ended up sapping the workers’ energy the next day. The pay grade and profession didn’t matter; everyone’s sleep was affected by late night cellphone use.
“Smartphones are almost perfectly designed to disrupt sleep,” said Russell Johnson, MSU assistant professor of management in an article written in Manila Standard Today. “Because they keep us mentally engaged late into the evening, they make it hard to detach from work so we can relax and fall asleep.”
A countless number of studies have proven the importance and benefits of sleep. Sleep improves your memory, makes you live longer and even curbs inflammation that is linked to heart disease, diabetes, arthritis and premature aging. Studies have also shown sleep improves creativity, athletic ability, school grades and attention spans and it helps lower stress. The benefits of sleep go hand in hand with a student’s educational career, but, unfortunately, so do our phones.
What is Journalism?