Is it harmful to sleep next to a smartphone?

In 2019, the non-profit organization Common Sense Media held survey among adults and adolescents. The survey showed that 29% of teenagers sleep with their phone or other mobile device in bed. And more than two-thirds of young participants (68%) always keep their gadgets within reach while sleeping. Among adults, this figure is even higher: 74% of respondents place their phones at arm's length. True, only 12% take them to bed.

Other study held in 2017 in the USA. It involved 855 hospital staff and university students, with the average age of respondents being approximately 44 years. The survey found that 70% of them use social networks while lying in bed, with 15% scrolling through them for more than an hour.

Many people like to start their day by checking their smartphone, and go to bed with exactly the same ritual.

But also a considerable number of people are convinced that sleeping with a phone nearby is harmful to health. You can find articles on the Internet that warn against this habit. To what extent are such fears justified? Let's figure it out.

Why a smartphone is not as dangerous as you think

Most often, the media cite “radiation” emitted by a smartphone as the main source of danger. Allegedly, the electromagnetic waves that the device uses to transmit signals can “disturb the body’s biorhythms” and even cause the formation of malignant tumors.

Another popular scare is that smartphones can supposedly lead to overheating of human brain tissue, so keeping it nearby while sleeping is dangerous. However, both of these assumptions do not stand up to criticism. And that's why.

Smartphone radiation is not carcinogenic

There are currently no studies showing that cell phone radiation can cause cancer. Yes, this very word traditionally evokes associations in people with radioactivity. But it's popular delusion. Not all radiation is harmful. For that matter, sunlight is also referred to by this word, but people need it for life.

Hazardous to cells ionizing, or radioactive, radiation - for example, gamma rays or x-rays. But your smartphone is physically unable to produce it.

US National Cancer Institute spent a comparative analysis of the incidence of brain cancer and other types of cancer over the past two decades in the USA, Australia and Northern Europe. Scientists have discovered that although the popularity of smartphones increased from 1993 to 2013, the incidence of cancer among the population did not change.

Wi‑Fi and 5G radio signals generated by your smartphone are nearly a billion times larger weaker, than the ionizing fluxes of photons emitted by radioactive substances. They are not powerful enough to even penetrate your skin, so your smartphone will not be able to damage your cell DNA and cause cancer.

Smartphones do not cause overheating of human tissues

You can also find statements on the Internet that the radiation of a mobile phone can harm a person by overheating his body during prolonged contact. Therefore, if you keep the phone in active mode near your head for a long time - for example, under the pillow while sleeping - you can damage your brain cells, raising their temperature.

This is also a myth. How report According to experts from the US National Cancer Institute, the human body does indeed absorb energy from devices that emit radio frequencies - smartphones, tablets, and so on. The natural biological effect of this is to heat up the area of ​​the body where the cell phone is located. That is, if you put a smartphone on your head and talk on it, you will actually raise the temperature of this part of the body.

But the power of this device is completely insufficient to heat the tissues of your body to any noticeable levels. To damage the cells of the same brain, need to raise their temperature above 43 °C - a phone antenna is not capable of this.

After all, if you could heat up organic matter with your smartphone, people wouldn't need to take up kitchen space with a microwave.

In one study, researchers from the Isfahan University of Medical Sciences in Iran decided test the effects of mobile phone waves on cow brain tissue. They found that its antenna power was not enough to raise the temperature by even 1°C.

Why you shouldn't sleep with your smartphone anyway

As you understand, a mobile phone is not at all a source of harmful radiation, as some media try to present it as. It cannot cause cancer, nor can it boil the brain. That is, it can hardly be said that a person who falls asleep with a gadget in his hand is in mortal danger. But you still shouldn’t do this for several reasons.

Blue screen light disrupts sleep rhythms

The screens of smartphones, as well as computers, televisions and other devices emit so-called blue light. It has the shortest length in the visible spectrum, but it also has the highest energy.

Light waves in the blue color spectrum are one of the components of solar radiation. But they suppress production of melatonin - the sleep hormone. Here's how it works.

Under natural conditions, during the day the sun shines on you and you are awake. At night it sets, and in the darkness you tend to sleep. But if you stubbornly continue to look at the screen in the evening, the body begins to believe that it is still day outside, and melatonin is not produced. As a result, you have difficulty falling asleep, experience insomnia and lack of quality sleep.

To avoid the negative effects of blue light, avoid using your smartphone before going to bed. Try to sit for at least a couple of hours without gadgets before going to bed.

Well, or at least activate the blue light filter on your smartphone - this function may be called “Night Mode”, “Reading Mode” or Night Shift. It is present in the vast majority of mobile devices. If you don't have it, you can install it third party application.

The smartphone distracts and prevents you from falling asleep

When the device lies at arm's length, I really want to scroll through social media feeds, instead of lying boringly with my eyes closed in the dark and count sheep. As a result, you get carried away and spend half the night looking at the screen. And then, having not slept enough, you nod off all day.

American Academy of Sleep Medicine Researchers discoveredthat the vast majority of adults they surveyed suffer from sleep disturbances associated with late-night social media use.

77% of men and 83% of women lack sleep because of their smartphones.

The easiest way to avoid temptation is to avoid bringing smartphones and tablets into the bedroom. You can also install “digital wellness” apps on your devices that allow users to manage their social media addiction. Many manufacturers already have this function built into their system.

Choose which programs and services most often interfere with your sleep, and indicate the time frame for using them. And the smartphone will automatically block them, say, from 22:00 to 7:00 the next day.

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A smartphone can wake you up in the middle of the night

Even if you have iron willpower and you fall asleep completely calmly, without being distracted by the seductively lying smartphone nearby, it can still harm your sleep if you receive a notification in the middle of the night or message. Often, having woken up too early, it can be extremely difficult to fall back into sleep, so it is better to avoid waking up at night.

Fortunately, modern smartphones can automatically turn off sounds, vibration and screen lights according to a schedule. Look in your device's settings for "night mode" or "do not disturb" mode and set it to activate when you go to bed.

It doesn't affect alarms, so you can still get up on schedule. However, there is an even more effective step - stop bringing your smartphone into your bedroom altogether, and use a mechanical or electronic watch instead.

The smartphone may catch fire due to overheating or short circuit

We have already established that a working smartphone will not be able to heat up the human body enough to cause tissue damage. But a gadget that is faulty or used inappropriately can easily cause a fire.

For example, Apple recommends Operate your devices at room temperature - from 16 to 22 °C and do not use them at temperatures above 35 °C. The company warns that storing and charging its smartphones in hotter environments "could have irreversible and destructive consequences."

The lithium-ion battery of a smartphone can ignite and even explode if severely overheated, short-circuited during charging, or due to mechanical damage.

British Electrical Safety Council organization Electrical Safety First warnsthat you should not charge any electronic devices, including smartphones or tablets, on your bed or under your pillow while you sleep to avoid possible overheating and fire. So don't do that.

Also, do not leave devices charging unattended. If you need to connect your gadget to the network overnight, place it on a hard surface - for example, on a table. And do not charge it in a hot room or in direct sunlight.

The smartphone can play a cruel joke on people with sleepwalking

Finally, the habit of keeping your smartphone close to your bed may have other bad consequences that are less obvious. There are various unusual sleep-related behavioral phenomena called parasomnias. They are not necessarily associated with a sleep disorder and occur even in completely healthy people.

For example, sleep paralysis or sleepwalking (somnambulism) are considered parasomnias. Some people not only wander, but also manage to cook food, go outside, and have sex. When they wake up, they don't remember anything about it.

Our William Shakespeare wrote about sleepwalking; this is an old topic. But sending messages in instant messengers in a somnambulistic state is already something new.

Yes, some people have developed their skills to such an automaticity that they manage to correspond with their contacts in their sleep. This is happening during the rapid eye movement stage - when we dream.

People who have discovered this strange form of sleepwalking admit that they sometimes find themselves in awkward situations because of it. For example, one girl told in an interview with CNN, how in a dream she wrote to her boyfriend the following phrase: “Just because your brain is a cast-iron frying pan does not mean that your body is a cast-iron frying pan.”

Now imagine that you share similar revelations with your boss, business partner - in general, with a person with whom you have a strictly formal relationship.

It’s easier to avoid such embarrassment if you don’t keep your smartphone in the bedroom. Or at least within arm's reach. And don't text while lying in bed, because it can become a habit and become a purely automatic action.