If you need a good night's sleep, the best advice is to put off your smartphone.

A new study showed that the light of smartphones adversely affects the duration and quality of a night's sleep.

During the month, the project participants used smartphones on average 38 hours - about 4 minutes every hour. The more time they spent in an embrace with the phone, especially in the evenings, the shorter and worse became their night rest.

"Today people spend too much time with smartphones. This can affect health, including on such fundamental aspects as night sleep, "said Gregory Marcus, director of clinical research at the Department of Cardiology at the University of California at San Francisco (UCSF), USA.

The authors recall that lack of sleep is associated with global problems - obesity, depression and type II diabetes mellitus. True, Marcus warns that his research did not prove the harmful effects of smartphones, but only demonstrated an alarming connection.

Let's notice, that earlier some scientists already declared harm of sources of dark blue light, which include smartphones and tablets. These devices over-stimulate individual zones of the brain, disrupting the physiological patterns of sleep.

"If we combine all these data, it becomes obvious that before retiring to bed it is better to refuse to work with any digital devices," argues Marcus.

Christine Knutson, employee of the National Sleep Foundation of the United States, spoke in the same vein: "Sleep quality plays a crucial role in maintaining our health and well-being.

Given the current prevalence of mobile devices, it is important for us to know and remember the risks of these technologies for health, and not abuse them ".

On the other hand, it is impossible to exclude the error of the study. Perhaps it's not smartphones that cause insomnia, but insomnia forces people to stay out late at night behind screens? This tricky question has yet to be answered.

See the details of the work of Dr. Marcus in the journal PLOS ONE.

medbe. en.