The iPhone is ruining teenagers’ sleep patterns. But it can also fix them

By JOÃO MEDEIROS | Thursday 29 June 2017 | Wired.co.uk

The good news is that the device can also be used as a sleep aid, says sleep researcher Russell Foster

The iPhone has changed us in a fundamental way. Smartphones have been described as the culprit responsible for wrecking attention spans, disturbing sleep patterns and affecting eyesights. As part of our week-long coverage of the 10th anniversary of the iPhone, we consult with three experts to help us disentangle fact from fiction when it comes to how the iPhone has affected our brain, our sleep and our eyesight.
WIRED talks to University of Oxford sleep researcher Russell Foster, who has co-authored the book Sleep, a very short introduction.

WIRED: There have been many headlines about how smartphones are affecting our sleep. What’s your opinion?
Russell Foster: The problem with smartphones is that they represent an additional delay to sleep onset. Now the group most vulnerable to this are teenagers, of course. They are biologically predisposed to go to bed late and to get up late. But that’s been hugely exaggerated over the past ten years because of the use of the internet, texting and emailing. It is sort of a compulsion, almost an addiction. And that seems to be delaying further sleep onset. It’s a sort of biological predisposition that has been enormously exaggerated. On a school night many kids are getting less than six hours every night and it’s been estimated that for full cognitive performance in teenagers at that age you need about nine hours of sleep. What happens with delayed sleep onset is that their performance in schools in the morning is particularly bad. They’re chronically tired.

Is this being caused by too much exposure to screen light in the evenings?
I think the issue about the amount of light from the phones is still one where we need the data. The best data we have is not for iPhones but for e-books. There’s a very interesting study from Harvard on this and what they did was get people to look at e-books on full-screen intensity for four hours on five consecutive nights before they went to bed. That delayed sleep onset was only ten minutes.

I think it’s a good rule of thumb to minimise that exposure before you go to bed. But the light could be doing two things. It could be potentially shifting the biological clock and causing an increased level of alertness. But evidence that that’s happening via exposure to light still awaits empirical proof.

I suspect the main effect is not the light exposure but essentially the arousing nature of the content from smartphones.

If you look at adults, it’s a very similar picture. I mean this technology is just awesome and exciting. And the fact that we can communicate with anybody anywhere in the world is extraordinary. We’re like kids with a new toy. We need to sort of have a few ground rules and we haven’t as a society worked those out yet. I think we’re learning as a society how to use this extraordinary power and technology.

Can the iPhone be used to counter-measure this very problem?
One thing that is emerging which I think is absolutely fascinating is the potential use of the GPS system on these phones. We have some studies under way showing that somebody’s position and whether they’ve left their house can give you signs of depression and mental illness. They can sense whether you’re sliding into a depressive episode or a mental health crisis and therefore contact you and then hopefully try an intervention before things get any worse.

“It might be good to limit or not use these devices 30 minutes before the desired bedtime”

Russell Foster

In terms of sleep, there’s already a device on the market called Sleepio. The critical thing for me is that they’ve been involved in randomised controlled trials and been shown to be effective. I think this is immensely powerful. You can use the iPhone as a sleep aid with the appropriate apps and information. I think we’re just a society learning how to use these things and learning control. And increasingly I think that they will be enormously powerful in supporting many areas of health, not least sleep, via the appropriate app.

What advice do you have in general for people who wish to improve their sleep health?
People are beginning to wise up. Frankly you need to turn the things off 30 minutes before you want to go to bed get to a relaxed state. Stop doing e-mails, stop texting and do something that relaxes you. Now that is such a simple message but it’s not got out there. What would be very valuable is that iPhones in the future should have sort of advice and guidelines about proper use, flagging up the importance of sleep and that these can be used as an agent to delay sleep onset. It might be good to limit or not use these devices 30 minutes before the desired bedtime. That would be a very important educational message that that there’s advice could could be used for.