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 for Chronic Pain Patients
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?,” Duraccio et al, Sleep Health, 2021.
- “Evening use of light-emitting eReaders negatively affects sleep, circadian timing, and next-morning alertness,” Chang et al, Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America, 2015.
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