How social media is depriving your sleep

There is no argument that social media has largely transformed the world we live. Through social media people interact, conduct business, get entertainment, share information and others end up finding their life long partners through social media. When put to scale the merits of social outweigh the demerits, but that does not imply we turn a blind eye on them. One of the greatest disadvantage of using social media is  sleep deprivation.

Pause for minute and think about it; late night conversations with your significant other, watching reels on Instagram, watching people go live on TikTok, finishing up on that series on Netflix and keeping with your favorite celebrity on their YouTube channel, sounds fun right? Well according to a study conducted by the American academy of sleep medicine 93 per cent of Gen Z admit to staying up past their bedtime.

For Gen Z, social media has proven to be so luring that you will also find people glued to their phones. They are always checking for latest posts for they have developed a fear of missing out, they feel that if they are not constantly briefed on what’s trending they are naive. This forces them to be on social media even past their bedtime. At the wee hours of the night when most people are asleep they are not because they are online as they say. What these young men and women don’t know is the harm they are bringing to themselves.

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Electronic devices like cellphones and laptops emit Blue light or in other terms short wavelength enriched with light that has been shown to reduce or delay the natural production of melatonin. This is a hormone released in the evening to help you feel tired and ready for sleep. Continued use of social media results in low production of melatonin.

For any human being, at least 8 hours of sleep is required for you to function properly, failure to which lack of sleep drains your mental abilities and puts your physical health at risk not to mention the risk of heart disease, kidney disease, high blood pressure, stroke, obesity and depression.

Sometimes its hard to actually realize how much addicted to social media one is and lack sleep is rarely ever enough. The realization also comes in when you discover you constantly wake up to check your phone and the first thing you do when you wake up is to actually reach for your phone. Our parents laugh at us saying we wake up looking for our phones without actually finding out if we can walk instead of identifying that we have a problem that needs an urgent solution.

We clearly can not do away with social media but we need to identify ways on how to responsibly use social media. One way is by silencing alerst and notifications on your phone to make sure you do not wake up at night to through it another way would be  developing discipline by making tuning out a habit, that is, create a time limit for using social media for instance say past 10pm no social media.

The feeling of not wanting to miss out will not go away, you only need to filter between what is it you are keeping up with and how much value it brings. Someone said ” A good laugh and a long sleep are the best cures in the doctors book.”