Is Your Late-Night Screen Time Keeping You From Sleeping?

Lots of people don't get enough sleep these days, and there's growing evidence that smartphones and other digital devices may be contributing to the problem.

Part of the trouble is what people are reading or viewing. Consuming content that gets us excited (whether it's a thriller novel or a troubling news story, in print or on a screen) can delay sleep by causing us to lay awake thinking about whatever it is we've read or seen.

Are your digital devices keeping you awake? (Photo: Evil saltine, Wikipedia.)

But now scientists have found another reason why it may not be a good idea to be on our laptops, smartphones, or tablets right before bedtime: the light the gadget gives off may be keeping us from dozing off, and from feeling well rested the next day. A recent Harvard study has found that people who read before bed using a tablet or other e-reader gadget "felt less sleepy and took longer to fall asleep than when they read a regular printed book, researchers found," according to WebMD.

What's more, these people had more trouble waking up and gaining full alertness than they did after reading an old-fashioned printed book, even though they slept the same amount.

Fatal Familial Insomnia

Yes, this is another syndrome that was featured on "20/20," but it's a fascinating illness (and thankfully rare), so I thought readers might want to know more about it. You can find an article from ABC that pretty much sums up the "20/20" feature here.

For a more scientific explanation, you can read an article from the University of Michigan. As it explains, the disease is caused by degeneration of a certain region of the mind, the thalamus. As the article notes, "Sleep, blood pressure, heart rate, body core temperature and hormone flow are all affected by the interruption of the body's circadian rhythms which is a direct result of the degeneration of the thalamus in this disease."

Symptoms of Fatal Familial Insomnia can include an inability to feel pain and poor reflexes, and the lack of sleep can cause the sufferer to experience hallucinations and eventually fall into a coma.