Contradictory Evidence: Social Media and Sleep

The Sleep Foundation recently released a survey that found that adults who use Instagram, Snapchat or TikTok before bed sleep at least two minutes more than average each night. 

While two minutes doesn't sound like much, this does run contradictory to a recent study from the American Academy of Sleep Medicine (AASM), which found that 80% of U.S. adults lose sleep because of social media use. 

Key Findings:

• U.S. Adults spend 3.5 hours on social media before bed each day
• 74.7% of social media use occurs before bed
• 73.8% of respondents use YouTube for at least one minute before bed, followed by 72% using Facebook.
• More than half of respondents (55.2%) check Facebook as soon as they wake up, well more than No. 2 Instagram (31.4%)
• Facebook also causes us the most anxiety, with 21.5% of respondent ranking it as such. TikTok is a distant second at 12.8%

“Watching emotional or violent things before bed factors into later bedtimes and fewer hours of sleep on a typical weeknight. When you’re seeing that on your feed, it will probably raise your heart rate and maybe make it harder for you to fall asleep," says Linda Charmaraman, Ph.D., senior research scientist at the Wellesley Centers for Women and director of the Youth, Media & Wellbeing Research Lab and medical contributor for SleepFoundation.org. 

You can view the full survey here.