Young people who look at screens more often on a given day, sleep less on average the following night. This is apparent from a large-scale Norwegian survey among young people around the age of 18. It is unknown whether screen time leads to shorter sleep, or vice versa.
According to the researchers, it could also be that young people who sleep less because of boredom spend more time per day looking at device screens. The study was too limited to answer that question. In addition to the fact that young people who watched a lot on screens slept less, they also took longer to fall asleep.
The researchers state that young people would do well to stop looking at screens on any electronic device an hour before going to bed. There were, however, differences between different devices. Young people who were gaming on their consoles slept better than young people who were working on their phone.
A total of 9846 young people took part, all of whom were born in 1993, 1994, or 1995. The researchers from the Norwegian University in Bergen collected the data in the spring of 2012. The study has a major limitation. The young people themselves had to report the use of devices and the duration of sleep. They also had to fill in how much sleep they needed to get rested. Research based on respondents’ own reports is known to be less reliable than measurements.