We all know in our heart of hearts that embarking on a pre-bedtime social media scroll isn’t the best route to a good night’s sleep. We’ve all seen the advice about good sleep hygiene, imploring us to switch our devices off at least an hour before heading to bed or, better still, to leave phones, tablets and the like in another room altogether.

But unless you’ve got a will of iron, a quick glance at your apps can be hard to resist if you’re really struggling to nod off. Surely just one quick trawl through that friend of a friend’s holiday photos won’t hurt, you tell yourself? And what about answering a couple of WhatsApps or tweets?

The findings of a new sleep study exploring how posting on social media late at night can impact your sleep pattern might just make you think twice about doing so.

A team of researchers led by Dr William Meyerson of Duke University set out to investigate the perception that social media usage “delays the onset of sleep and predisposes to the health risks of insufficient sleep”.

They wanted to explore whether the relationship between poor sleep and social media use “has properties suggestive of a causal relationship” (ie whether social media use impacts sleep) or whether it might alternatively be explained by “users turning to social media to pass the time when they are otherwise having difficulty sleeping or by individual differences that draw some people to frequent social media use or by offline activities that overlap with both social media and delayed sleep”. 

In other words, they were looking to find out whether social media usage was an effect of sleeplessness (with people turning to their phones late at night when already struggling to drift off) or whether it could actually be causing that sleeplessness.

In order to do so, they tracked 120 million posts shared by 44,000 Reddit users over a period of more than 15 years, alongside the users’ estimated bedtimes. In their study, published in the journal Sleep Medicine, the researchers revealed they had discovered that users were “especially likely” to be active on Reddit after their bedtime on the nights that they had “posted to Reddit shortly before bedtime, especially if they posted multiple times or in high-engagement forums that night”. 

According to Meyerson, this could be the result of several factors: “From screen lights disrupting the circadian rhythm to the anticipation of a response.” They also discovered that the users who posted online within an hour of their bedtime were more likely to stay awake for one to three hours afterwards.

Overall, the researchers found that their study “lends additional support to the notion that there likely is some causal effect of evening social media use on delayed sleep onset”.

It’s just yet another reminder that our late-night social media habits are potentially having a knock-on effect on our wellbeing, and it’s certainly something to bear in mind the next time we find our finger hovering over the Instagram app on our home screen after 11pm.

Images: Getty