When you finish your busy work and lie in bed exhausted, you open the short video app ready to relax and brush until you are overjoyed, suddenly you find that the time is already in the early morning of the next day. After missing a night’s sleep, you just have to go to work in a daze, which reduces your work efficiency and damages your body at the same time.
How does this happen? Recently, a study in the United States found that the retina is stimulated by too much light, especially the blue light stimulation brought by cell phone screens, which can seriously affect the photoreceptor role of the retina. As long as the optic nerve cells are stimulated by blue light for 8 minutes, the body will continue to be excited for more than an hour, causing a significant reduction in melatonin released by the amygdala in the brain, so that the biological clock is disrupted, so that people can not sleep at night.
The reasoning is understood, but once you want people to put down their phones at night and go to bed on time, it’s not so easy. The cell phone is a tool to capture the human mind and change the way of life in the information age, but also to cultivate people’s lifestyle. In addition to work can not leave the phone, even before going to bed must also brush a phone to rest.
The time spent swiping the phone passes quickly, while the stimulation of light reduces melatonin and makes it too exciting to sleep. The 2021 White Paper on Exercise and Sleep shows that there are currently over 300 million people in China with sleep disorders. According to the World Health Organization survey, 27% of people worldwide have sleep quality problems.
From the survey, work pressure has become the primary factor affecting the sleep quality of adults, while for teenagers, it is more due to the difficulty of leaving electronic products before going to bed, forming a situation of “not enough sleep, can not get up” and “sleep but still tired”. The results of a recent sleep data survey of 2012 people also showed that 78% of people admitted to having “retaliatory sleep procrastination” and that it took an hour on average to fall asleep after playing with their phones for a while before bed.
What can be done to change the situation of swiping the phone at night and affecting sleep? First, we need to learn more about the dangers of swiping your phone at night that affects your sleep. A new disease, smartphone eye blindness (TSB), has emerged in the UK and the US because swiping the phone in the night environment can damage vision and, over time, can lead to blindness in both eyes. The symptoms of prolonged cell phone use at night can also be referred to as “digital eye strain”.
A more serious result is that the risk of cancer increases exponentially when you swipe your cell phone before bed or throughout the night. Sleep is designed to allow the body to repair genetic mutations and damage, thus allowing people to be energetic, maintain health and live longer. Recently published findings suggest that staying up all night swiping your phone directly alters the expression of certain genes associated with cancer while disrupting circadian rhythms, thereby triggering cancer.
However, even though they are aware of the serious consequences of doing so, some people are still unable to stay away from their phones at bedtime. Self-discipline needs to be cultivated, but it cannot depend on external force. It is an expression of strong “I want to” self-will, and is a way of life that is enjoyable and gradually habitual. In the long run, what is good for the mind and body must be comfortable, but there is some resistance at first.
However, there are some techniques that can help develop good habits. For example, set a daily bedtime and turn off your phone regularly, and distract yourself from your phone by washing up or taking a shower. Of course, there are other alternatives, such as reading a book for a while before going to bed, doing a little housework, so that the body is moderately tired, but also as soon as possible to fall asleep.
If you trust science and realize that swiping your phone at night is going against the laws of nature and the circadian rhythms that have evolved on Earth over hundreds of millions of years, it is possible to turn off your phone at night on time. We have to put our health and life first, only healthier bodies can make life more exciting and fruitful.
