Do you know that taking your smartphone to bed may be the unhealthiest thing in your lifestyle? Experts say that it is killing both you and your career. Do you know that you may be sleeping for seven hours every day, but your brain only sleeps for less than an hour? By virtue of your mobile connectivity, you are attracting an enormous health burden. The quality of your sleep is highly dependent on the state of your mind, more than any other factor. As such, the question is not the number of hours you sleep, or how comfortable your bed is, but how much you deprive your mind of much-needed rest. Numerous companies are already developing automatic sensors to monitor sleep quality and resultant level of fatigue.
Consequences of Sleep Deprivation
Polo-Kantola and Paula Alhola conducted an empirical study on sleep deprivation, focusing on how sleep deprivation affects cognitive performance. The study, published by the Neuropsychiatry Disease and Treatment journal in 2007, highlighted how sleep deprivation delimits your decision-making potential, level of creativity, mental health, physical fitness, and daily functioning. The study conducted by Polo-Kantola and Alhola (2007) was only one among many studies that have generated similar findings in the last 10 years.
In another study on sleep deprivation effects, Killgore (2010) established that "sleep deprivation has become commonplace in modern society" and the "far-reaching effect" has been reduced cognitive performance (p. 105). The outcomes of insufficient sleep according to the scholar include variability in performance, reduced productivity, slow response speed, few attention spans, poor perception rates, and a malfunctioning memory. Similar findings were reported by Pilcher et al. (2007), Whitney and Hinson (2010), and Gildeh et al. (2016) among many others researchers. Evidently, sleep deprivation portends extremely disastrous effects on your mental, physical, and financial health. , as well as on your future, courtesy of low productivity and loss of creativity.
Dangers of Mobile Connectivity
The problem however, is that much of sleep deprivation causes in the contemporary society, as noted by Killgore (2010) and Gildeh et al. (2016), is manmade. Before you sleep, your brain always needs what Killgore (2010) defines as "compensatory support" (p. 106). You have spent a busy day and when you are almost about to sleep, you realize that you need to speak to somebody, review your social media accounts, send a message, or make a call. What you are looking for is compensatory support for the day, before you sleep.
If you were using a home phone, you would not call so late. Now, fortunately, you can simply send a text, update your profile, initiate a chat, and even call from the convenience of your bed. With a smartphone, tablet, or laptop, you easily switch your mind from preparing to sleep to active cognition. You walk to bed, and start the sleeping process. Then all over a sudden, your mind is no longer preparing to sleep, but deliberating concerns in your professional life, social network, political debates, and online entertainment options. Not only will your sleep be riddled with restlessness, but according to Gildeh et al. (2016), the risks also include kidney disease, cognition malfunction, and cancer.
Remember that your body was in the process of sleeping, but not your mind. Now your mind is thinking, awaiting that reply, envisioning the feedback, and anticipating compensatory support. Even when you finally pull the covers and lure the body to sleep, the mind will still be cognitively active. In most cases, you will sleep while still consciously aware of your last actions for the day, and the mind will be lucky to take a 5-minute break from cognitive activity. What mobile connectivity has done is invade your sleeping space, taken your mind captive, and initiated progressive sleep deprivation.
How to Resolve and Prevent Sleep Deprivation
Given the dangerous effects of sleep deprivation, and how mobile connectivity is worsening inadequate rest for your cognitive functions, you need to be concerned. Your brain needs perhaps more rest than any other body part, at a time when you are preparing for another busy day. From the mobile phone to the smartphone, and from the tablet to the laptop, mobile connectivity now share your bed space, and the results will be as painful as they are disastrous. Most of your body is now allowed to rest, but rarely your brain. That is the problem.
The question is, will getting the phone or tablet from your bed be enough to prevent sleep deprivation? Unfortunately, the answer is no. In most cases, reacting and behaving in alignment with mobile connectivity is a lifestyle and not an action. It needs to go as far as liberating your mind from attaching compensatory support to instantaneous and momentary social and professional contacts. Indeed, the health consequences of sleep deprivation portend mandates your absolute lifestyle awareness. Among the things you should urgently consider towards resolving and preventing sleep deprivation, five of the most important include:
- Isolate your bed from any mobile connection device at least 15 minutes before sleeping
- Secure a comfortable yet firm bed space that allows you to nurse the conscious brain to rest even before the rest of the body does
- Create a to-do-list every evening before you sleep, highlighting what your schedule for tomorrow, and then postpone every other concern, official or otherwise, until you start on the to-do-list
- Make sure that your first action when you wake up is not to check on your mobile communication device, or else, your mind will start anticipating the same even before you wake up. Rather, make your waking process active rather than passive
- Initiate an offline activity that you always do before you sleep, and make it a consistently programmed behavior, until your mind associates it with sleeping time.