How and when screens are used: comparing different screen activities and sleep in Norwegian university students

How and when screens are used: comparing different screen activities and sleep in Norwegian university students

Introduction: Screen use in bed has become a widespread habit, particularly among young people. This behavior has been associated with poor sleep, with some studies indicating that social media use may be especially detrimental. However, there is a scarcity of research directly comparing the relationship between various screen activities and sleep, and most existing studies focus on adolescents rather than young adults. This study aims to explore the relationship between screen use in bed and sleep among students, specifically comparing social media use to other screen-based activities.

Methods: This study utilized data from the cross-sectional Students' Health and Wellbeing Study of twenty twenty-two and included forty-five thousand two hundred two participants aged eighteen to twenty-eight years. Regression analyses were used to assess the relationship between screen time in bed and sleep, comparing social media use with other activities.

Results: A one-hour increase of screen time after going to bed was associated with fifty-nine percent higher odds of having symptoms of insomnia and a reduction in sleep duration of twenty-four minutes. The associations between screen time and sleep outcomes did not differ for social media use versus other activities. Independent of screen time, participants who exclusively used social media had lower odds of insomnia and longer sleep duration compared to those engaging in other activities or a mix of activities.

Discussion: The present study found that increased screen time in bed is linked to poorer sleep, across activity type. Future research should refine classifications, assess specific content, and employ experimental approaches to determine causal mechanisms.

One Introduction

Sleep is essential to physical and mental functioning and getting too little sleep or having poor sleep quality negatively impacts mental health, physical health, and even longevity. By impacting attention span, memory, and other aspects of cognitive functioning, poor sleep can also affect academic performance, with potentially wide-reaching consequences for individuals' lives. As a group, students in higher education have been shown to have insufficient sleep duration, falling short of the recommended seven to nine hours. Among American students, thirty-six percent reported sleeping less than seven hours per night, while data from Norwegian students show that thirty percent sleep for six to seven hours or less. Sleep problems beyond short sleep duration are also common, with twenty-two percent of males and thirty-four percent of females having sleep problems corresponding to the DSM-five criteria for insomnia, with increasing trends from twenty ten to twenty eighteen among Norwegian students. Digital media use, including watching TV, gaming, or using social media, has been associated with poor sleep, and some have suggested that increases in screen time over the past decades may have contributed to a larger proportion of people reporting short sleep times. Digital media use has become a part of everyday life, particularly among young people. A recent study mapping international trends in screen use found that young adults spend around twelve hours per day using screens.

To date, most studies on digital media use and sleep have focused on children and adolescents. For these groups, spending a long time on digital media is longitudinally associated with delayed bedtime, increased sleep onset latency, and thus shorter sleep duration - which also overlap with insomnia symptoms, difficulties falling asleep, and daytime sleepiness. In line with these findings, interactive and highly stimulating content is discouraged prior to bedtime for children and adolescents. Reviews including young adults in addition to adolescents have found similar associations between screen use and sleep, but more studies including young adults are needed.

Screen use before bed time or in bed is more strongly linked to poor sleep compared to overall screen time during adolescence, a pattern also observed among students. With the advent of the smartphone, using screens after going to bed has become commonplace, particularly among adolescents and young adults. Studies of student populations have shown that over ninety-five percent use screens in bed. A twenty eighteen study of over forty thousand Norwegian students showed a mean total screen time in bed, including a range of screen-based activities, of forty-six minutes. Furthermore, the continuous tracking of the smartphone use among eight hundred fifteen young adults found that twelve percent engaged in smartphone activity during their self-reported sleep period.

Screen use in bed has been suggested to impact sleep via four routes: one) screen use directly replaces sleep; two) light exposure suppresses melatonin secretion and delays the circadian rhythm; three) screen-based activities leads to increased arousal, prolonging the time it takes to fall asleep; and four) notifications from devices can interrupt sleep after sleep onset. It has been hypothesized that social media may be particularly relevant in terms of increasing arousal, and several researchers have suggested that social media, compared to more "passive" screen use such as watching TV, may be particularly detrimental to sleep. Furthermore, it may be harder to terminate one's social media use to go to sleep, due to social expectations, thus delaying bedtime and displacing sleep. Additionally, notifications from social media may interrupt sleep if the smartphone is left unmuted during the night.

Thus, the link between screen use and sleep is likely related to how and when screens are used, and studies addressing these aspects are increasingly called for. However, few studies have directly compared different screen activities, and the evidence for a particularly strong association between social media use and sleep is mixed.

Among adolescents, higher overall screen time was associated with longer sleep onset latency, shorter sleep duration, and more mid-sleep awakenings, and that the associations were stronger for social media use and internet use compared to gaming and TV. However, that particular study exclusively asked about gaming on a console or computer and the authors hypothesized that because the smartphone is more readily taken into bed, it may further disrupt sleep, and hence the stronger association for internet and social media use.

Contrary to the hypothesis that social media is more disruptive to sleep than other screen activities, a recent meta-analysis showed that although social media use at one time point predicted worse sleep at a later time point among adolescents, this link was weaker than the link between traditional media use and sleep. The authors suggested that social media use, compared to other screen activities, is less disruptive because social media entails socialization, which may be protective in terms of developing sleep problems.

Thus, it is unclear whether social media use is worse than other screen activities in terms of disrupting sleep. Most studies to date have focused on total screen time and have not delineated the unique associations of social media use versus other activities at bedtime with sleep. Furthermore, most previous studies on screen time and sleep have involved adolescents and less is known about sleep and screen use among young adults. The aim of this study was to investigate how the amount of time students spend using screens in bed relates to their sleep duration and experience of insomnia, specifically examining the impact of social media use compared to other screen activities, using a large, nationally representative sample.