A study of more than 45,000 Norwegian university students has shown that using screens in bed is strongly associated with insomnia symptoms and lower sleep duration. Researchers suspect that this is because screen time displaces sleep by taking up time when people would otherwise be resting. However, using social media was not found to be more harmful than other forms of screen use.
A large part of this are going to be insomniacs who are using media because they can’t sleep. Evidently that’s a feedback loop, but it’s not as unidirectional as the headline and abstract suggests.
They could have had them not use a screen for some parts of the study and use it for others, but after reading the article and skimming the paper I can’t see any indication they did this. It seems they just sent out a survey to 45k people and concluded people who use their phones in bed go to sleep later so that must be the cause.
Yep, I try to sleep, and after maybe 20 minutes or longer I go look at my phone for a bit to get tired, or watch some video. That actually makes me fall asleep most of the time, so maybe screen use reduces insomnia and people are just self-medicating 🤔
key thing here is you tried to sleep first
I’ve started to sometimes go straight to watching a video and actually fall asleep faster this way most of the time