Cure The Smart Phone Hangover

(Image courtesy of Kārlis Dambrāns)

How often do you find yourself tossing and turning at night before you finally drift off? If you're like us, often during those long late-night hours of sleeplessness you pick up your phone to surf the internet.

Though it may be an easy way to calm your mind, we bet you wouldn't believe that spending time on your smartphone late at night may actually be the reason that you're having trouble falling asleep. Writer, Elizabeth Giorgi, from Apartment Therapy breaks down exactly how smartphones interrupt your sleep. Keep reading to find out why you can fall asleep faster and sleep deeper without your smartphone. 

Smarphone hangovers are the new thing in science. Last week I wrote a post about why I wasn't using my smart phone as an alarm anymore and it caused quite an uproar. Researchers at Michigan State University have found that late night use of smartphones (which may include using them before bed) have been scientifically proven to prevent easy sleep.

Here's what researchers at Michigan State University told the Telegraph about their research:
"Smartphones are almost perfectly designed to disrupt sleep," said Russell Johnson, MSU assistant professor of management. "Because they keep us mentally engaged late into the evening, they make it hard to detach from work so we can relax and fall asleep. ... The night-time use of smartphones appears to have both psychological and physiological effects on people's ability to sleep and on sleep's essential recovery functions."

The cause? The blue light the phone screen emits. I've found many of their observations to be true, despite trying a few other measures first, including using the sleep function on my phone for a while.

Further results will be posted in the Journal Organizational Behavior and Human Decision Processes soon, but I wonder if anyone out there would agree that they experience a "smartphone hangover" from time to time too?