Dragging your phone into the bedroom may be costing you a good night's sleep, experts warn.
Sleep psychologist Dr Michael Hlavac, director of the sleep unit at Christchurch Hospital, said mobiles and other technological devices like iPads were best left outside the bedroom when people were gearing up for a night's rest.
His comments follow a new study from Washington and Lee University in the US, which linked excessive texting to sleep deprivation.
The study, carried out by psychology professor Karla Murdock, examined the sleep and texting patterns of 83 first-year university students.
It found a higher number of daily texts was directly associated with an increase in sleep problems.
Two behavioural habits were suggested as culprits for this:
1) The fact that students often felt pressured to reply to texts immediately, regardless of the time of day or night.
2) The tendency of many students to sleep with phones nearby and therefore be woken by alerts from incoming texts.
Dr Hlavac said texting before bed was among a number of activities which could interfere with a person's "sleep hygiene".
"It's things like watching TVs in the bed, playing on the computer or the laptop or iPad in bed, having a phone in bed or having a phone next to you so you get text messages.
"They're all things which will tend to delay sleep onset and interfere with your ability of getting into a deep sleep early on in the night," he said.
While he didn't specifically quiz his patients about their texting habits, Dr Hlavac said it was highly likely that avid daytime texters would carry through to the night time.
"It's just become a force of habit. People text during the day, and the evening is no different.
"People didn't used to ... sit and talk on the phone late at night as much, but you've got a little thing in your hand [now] which is portable and easy to use and it's much more convenient to text than do other things," he said.
In addition to linking sleep deprivation with texting frequency, Professor Murdock's study also found texting between friends could be "problematic" during times of stress.
"Although speculative, it could be argued that text messaging is a uniquely unsuitable mode of communication for coping with interpersonal stress in close relationships," she wrote.
Her findings were published in the academic journal Psychology of Popular Media Culture.
- By Teuila Fuatai of APNZ
