How Smart Is It to Go to Bed with the Phone? The Impact of Short-Wavelength Light and Affective States on Sleep and Circadian Rhythms
One article on PainSci cites Schmid 2021: The Insomnia Guide
original abstract †Abstracts here may not perfectly match originals, for a variety of technical and practical reasons. Some abstacts are truncated for my purposes here, if they are particularly long-winded and unhelpful. I occasionally add clarifying notes. And I make some minor corrections.
Previously, we presented our preliminary results (N = 14) investigating the effects of short-wavelength light from a smartphone during the evening on sleep and circadian rhythms (Höhn et al., 2021). Here, we now demonstrate our full sample (N = 33 men), where polysomnography and body temperature were recorded during three experimental nights and subjects read for 90 min on a smartphone with or without a filter or from a book. Cortisol, melatonin and affectivity were assessed before and after sleep. These results confirm our earlier findings, indicating reduced slow-wave-sleep and -activity in the first night quarter after reading on the smartphone without a filter. The same was true for the cortisol-awakening-response. Although subjective sleepiness was not affected, the evening melatonin increase was attenuated in both smartphone conditions. Accordingly, the distal-proximal skin temperature gradient increased less after short-wavelength light exposure than after reading a book. Interestingly, we could unravel within this full dataset that higher positive affectivity in the evening predicted better subjective but not objective sleep quality. Our results show disruptive consequences of short-wavelength light for sleep and circadian rhythmicity with a partially attenuating effect of blue-light filters. Furthermore, affective states influence subjective sleep quality and should be considered, whenever investigating sleep and circadian rhythms.
related content
- “Does iPhone night shift mitigate negative effects of smartphone use on sleep outcomes in emerging adults?,” Kara M Duraccio, Kelsey K Zaugg, Robyn C Blackburn, and Chad D Jensen, Sleep Health, 2021.
- “Evening use of light-emitting eReaders negatively affects sleep, circadian timing, and next-morning alertness,” Anne-Marie Chang, Daniel Aeschbach, Jeanne F Duffy, and Charles A Czeisler, Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America, 2015.
This page is part of the PainScience BIBLIOGRAPHY, which contains plain language summaries of thousands of scientific papers & others sources. It’s like a highly specialized blog. A few highlights:
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