Teenagers lacking sleep, because they don’t do ‘this’ before going to bed?

A new study found that the most important reason teenagers don’t get enough sleep is because they don’t turn off their cell phones when they sleep. This was reported on the 26th (local time) by the health and medical webzine ‘Health Day’ based on a paper by researchers from the U.S. and Canada published in the Journal of Adolescent Health.

Researchers analyzed data from 9,400 11- and 12-year-olds who took part in a long-term U.S. study of brain development and child health and found that sleeping with a cell phone turned on increased the risk of sleep disturbance by 25 percent. Sixteen percent of children in that age group reported having their sleep interrupted by a phone call, text message, or email in the past week.

Even sleeping with your phone on silent or vibrate mode can make you sleep less, the researchers noted. “Our study found that keeping notifications on, even on silent mode, reduced sleep time compared to turning your phone off completely or leaving it outside the bedroom,” said lead author Jason Nagata, a pediatrics professor at the University of California, San Francisco, School of Medicine.

These teens are more likely to stay up late with their phones if they wake up in the middle of the night. Almost one in five kids (19%) reported using their phones or other devices when they wake up at night.

Professor Nagata pointed out that “teenagers are very sensitive to cell phone notifications, so they often wake up immediately when they hear a notification sound.” He said, “Even if the cell phone is on silent or vibrate, they often check it during the night, so when they start reading or responding to messages, they become more alert and aroused, making it difficult to fall asleep.”

The researchers also found that having a TV or internet-connected device in the bedroom was associated with shorter sleep times. They also found that preventing teens from accessing the internet while they were sleeping helped improve sleep. The researchers noted that social media use, internet chatting, video games, web browsing, and video streaming were all associated with sleep deprivation.

The paper can be found at the following link (