Teen night-texting

by Terry Robson February 2, 2016

Teenagers are perhaps more susceptible to the new technology than anybody. We know for instance that children aged 8-18 use electronic devices around 7.5 hours per day. Of course, being able to text message your friends at any time of the day or night is appealing to anybody but especially when you are forming social networks and discovering your place in the world. Unfortunately, new research shows that teens who do their texting after lights out at night may be harming their academic performance.

We know for instance that children aged 8-18 use electronic devices around 7.5 hours per day.

For the new study researchers gave surveys to more than 1,500 teenage students and then looked at their marks achieved at school, the sex of the student, the duration of messaging, and whether the messaging took place before or after lights out at night.

The results showed that teens who turned their phones off within 30 minutes of turning the lights off at night did significantly better than those who messaged for more than 30 minutes after lights out. Students who texted longer in the dark also slept fewer hours and were sleepier during the day than those who stopped messaging when they went to bed. Sending messaged before lights out did not affect school performance.

Females did report more messaging overall and more daytime sleepiness but they still did better than males academically.

The female effect is probably because the study showed that females tend to message before they turn the light off. The mechanism here is that short wavelength light has an impact on daytime sleepiness by delaying the release of melatonin. The effects of blue light emitted from smartphones and tablets are intensified when viewed in a dark room. Turning the lights off should be the signal to the body to make a gradual transition from wakefulness to sleep. However, the blue light from phones delays this and affects sleep and then academic performance the next day.

The moral of that is that “lights out should be lights and phones out”.