Three Takeaways you first need to understand:

Adults average nearly 11 hours per day staring at their screens and nearly 5 hours per day watching television that is increasingly angrier, divisive, and rage-filled.
Smart phones, tablet, and e-reader screen ‘blue light’ significantly reduce REM sleep, the cognitively restorative stage of deep sleep.
The compulsive need to check your smart phone is an anxiety-arousal feedback loop due to cortisol and dopamine actions that is stimulated by social media algorithms which both increases your daytime anxiety and worsens your nighttime sleep.

Three Quotes you’ve never heard (but need to know):

From The Guardian:

Chamath Palihapitiya, former VP of user growth at Facebook, has said that: “I can control my decision, which is that I don’t use that sh%t. I can control my kids’ decisions, which is that they’re not allowed to use that sh%t... The short-term, dopamine-driven feedback loops that we have created are destroying how society works.” – Source: The Guardian

From Axios:

Sean Parker, who was the founding president of Facebook, has publicly called himself "something of a conscientious objector" on social media and said, “God only knows what it's doing to our children's brains.” – Source: Axios

From The New York Times:

Steve Jobs, who was CEO of Apple for many years, told reporters that his kids don’t use iPads and that “We limit how much technology our kids use at home.” – Source: The New York Times

Insomnia: A Disease we Created

This article began with our 2020 quarter one internal patient data at the sleep clinic. As an accredited and licensed sleep clinic, we track all kinds of patient behavior during procedures, exams and consultations. Though sleep apnea, snoring, and fatigue are the most common sleep disorders we evaluate and treat, we never know if a new patient may present with rarer, neurological disorders like narcolepsy, cataplexy, parasomnia, or hypnagogia. We have to begin with a blank slate and collect all data points, regardless of whether they are relevant to us or not.

One data point that was disproportionately appearing again and again at our sleep clinic in 2019 was patient smart phone usage during consultation and procedure. We found that 99% of patients seen in 2019 used their smart phone at least once during a consultation or procedure. We also found that 3 out of 5 patients checked their smart phone or wearable tech (like a smart watch) during their face-to-face consultation with the sleep counselor or the doctor unrelated to the appointment itself (such as when receiving a text message or email). That means 60% of patients had to check their smart phone while they are in the middle of talking live to the sleep counselor or doctor – 60% had to look down, stop talking, and check something else rather than wait 15-20 minutes to check their incoming message. 60% of adults in Austin could not stop themselves from compulsively checking their smart phone for a 15-20 minute period.

Perhaps more than even obesity and alcohol consumption, smart phone usage is the new Boogeyman in the sleep medicine field. Here at the sleep clinic where sleep hygiene counseling of new patients is increasingly necessary, we often focus on smart phone usage and screen time when counseling insomnia patients and for good reason: Americans love staring at their smart phones. Adults spend a staggering 11+ hours daily staring at screens, with nearly 5 of those hours spent watching television. Teenagers average 7 hours per day staring at their smart phones – often spending more time on their phones than total hours in the classroom! Children’s screen time usage is nearly 5 hours daily and continuing to rise. Americans are so addicted to their smart phones that 88% of Americans use a smart phone while watching television at the same time.

These statistics are disheartening when one considers that systematic and meta-analysis reviews of twenty peer-reviewed studies demonstrated “strong, consistent evidence of an association between bedtime access to or use of devices and reduced sleep quantity and quality, as well as increased daytime sleepiness.”

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Sleep counselors and sleep specialists throughout America (including here at SleepSomatics) have been warning about the effects of increased smart phone, electronic tablet and e-reader usage due to the ‘blue light effect’ on the brain’s neurotransmitter production. Research has demonstrated how use of these devices prior to sleep significantly reduced cognitively restorative REM deep sleep and how “exposure to the blue-enriched light from these devices shifts our circadian rhythms to a later hour, suppresses the release of the sleep-promoting hormone melatonin, and makes it more difficult for us to fall asleep.”

The ‘blue light effect’ is not the only problem. In fact, despite paid apps ‘adjusting’ your smart phone brightness level or purchased ‘blue light dampening screens’ being used, insomnia rates have increased in the last several years. At SleepSomatics, we counsel patients that blue light is a problem, yes, but it is not the only reason for your insomnia.

Smart Phones: A Hand-Held Slot Machine

Compulsive, repetitive ‘checking my phone’ behaviors increase insomnia likely more than the ‘blue light effect.’ Picking up your phone to check if you have any messages or notifications – unprompted by any audio cue – is increasing disproportionately to static screen time viewing. Research has shown half of teenagers and one-quarter of adults feel addicted to their smart phones, with “78% of teenagers check their devices at least hourly, and 50% report feeling ‘addicted’ to their phones; meanwhile, 69% of parents check their devices at least hourly, and 27% of parents feel “addicted.”

Why are smart phone apps and social media platforms so addictive? From Dr. Larry Rosen:

Research has shown that “what’s driving it is anxiety, and it’s a particular kind of anxiety some people call nomophobia but we call technological dependency.” Nomophobia is also known as fear of missing out. That’s right: FOMO. Rosen explains it like this: “As soon as you check in, chemicals start to build in your brain,” including the stress hormone, cortisol. “When those get to a sufficient level to create external distress, that’s the key that forces you to go, ‘Oh, I better check in.’’ These are arousal chemicals, he points out, not the feel-good chemical dopamine. So, while we might get a hit of pleasure from seeing a fun message from a friend on our phone screen, the increase in check-ins doesn’t seem to be driven by addiction-style pleasure seeking. Instead, it’s driven by anxiety. Which makes you wonder about the skyrocketing rates of anxiety: What if we all had a tiny device that we carried with us everywhere and considered essential to daily life, that was also an anxiety-producing machine? – Source: Chicago Tribune

Never heard of ‘The Dopamine Loop?’ You should. The Dopamine Loop is a large driver of most of your behavior (without you realizing it). Even if you don’t care about The Dopamine Loop, the developers of the smart phone apps and social media companies you use care so much about The Dopamine Loop that they engineer their products to exploit your brain’s Dopamine Loop to their profit and your detriment.

Dr. Barbara Jennings is a member of the technical staff at Sandia National Laboratories, a part-time instructor at Central New Mexico Community College, and a lifelong learner who pursues her interests in the spirit of a knowledge seeker. She has worked as a youth counselor, computer programmer, college instructor, and research engineer.

If this compulsive behavior doesn’t sound familiar to you, consider slot machine gambling. Slot machines are the most profitable game for casinos and consume the most floor space in any casino enter. Yet slot machine pay-outs are legislatively controlled by the state with a computer chip inside the machine and therefore provide no pay-out for skill. Why then are slot machines so popular and so addictive to so many compulsive gamblers? The cortisol – dopamine behavior that is activated by your smart phone and social media notifications behave identically to the slot machine, compelling you to “check your phone” (or “pull the lever”) again and again and again to produce dopamine to alleviate the anxiety from the cortisol.

Often, the apps themselves aren’t helping: from games to social networks, they’re precision engineered to create and feed our interaction neediness. According to British apps developer Nick Kuh: “A lot of these companies are employing behavioural psychologists to really nail that: finding ways to draw you back in. I’ve worked on apps like that myself, and it’s not something I’m proud of.” – Source: The Guardian

Don’t believe that smart phone app developers and social media companies use psychological and neurological programming like casinos to keep your attention? Consider the 60 Minutes segment on Brain Hacking documenting how behavioral scientists are hired by these companies to consult on app design and function.

Still don’t believe smart phones are addicted? Schools are now having to pay students to stay off their phones, including offering Starbucks gift cards and the option to remove bad test grades in exchange for staying off their phones. In defiance of these ‘awards,’ students are reporting separating anxiety symptoms due to having their smart phones taken from them during class time. This is where we are now at in America.

Modern Media: Reclaim your Self-Control

Consider the modern availability of media and entertainment for your consumption: watching television, basic cable, premium cable, online streaming (Netflix, Disney Prime, HBO GO, Hulu), curated video streaming (YouTube, Facebook Live), or reviewing social media (Instagram, Facebook, Twitter, Reddit), or video games and online gaming platforms (X-Box Live, PlayStation, Google Stadia, Steam). The increased time spent staring at our smart phones therefore increases the consumption of media content.

The highly competitive media landscape is driven now by “clicks” (hence the term, “click-bait”). There are no longer only three network television stations and one local newspaper as your sole source of news and entertainment. There are countless and ever-expanding options for your attention and disposable income. As a result, media companies must elevate the most sensational, polarizing, or outrageous content to get consumer attention and social media shares to drive search engine and social media optimization in what one journalist accurately labeled ‘The Rise of Algorithmic Engagement.’ Modern news aggregators, social media sites, and blogs now pay journalists commission based on number of clicks for their articles. In this modern media landscape where there is so much competition for your attention, the most sensational (and often extreme) content will likely generate the most attention for your eyeballs and the highest profit for the media company that engaged your attention.

In a recent interview, news anchorman Tom Brokaw commented on the divided state of modern media in America:

I think the most extraordinarily powerful tool and the most destructive development in modern life is the current media. Everybody has a voice — and I think it’s great for people to have a voice — but there’s no way to verify what’s true and what’s not. It has no context; it’s just a 24/7 rage about what’s pissing people off across the board from the left to the right. – Source: Artful Living

The transition from reading a physical newspaper or watching one of only three bland network television offerings to the modern media landscape is rather staggering in the damage to your sleep, mood, and cognitive function. The effects of increased smart phone usage expose your brain to blue light that inhibit restorative REM deep sleep. The compulsive cortisol – dopamine action of social media notifications creates anxiety, addiction, and insomnia. And the increase of content consumption exposes you to more divisive, angrier, and emotional content, worsening insomnia, anxiety, and depression.

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The totality of these negative side-effects of smart phone usage is a reduction in American quality of life – the qualitative metric Internet connectivity was purported to improve:

A 2019 study at Rutgers University found that using your smart phone during other tasks leads to mental depletion and poorer performance compared to people who don’t stop a task to check their smart phone or social media apps.
Smart phones contribute to ‘nature deficit disorder’ or decreasing our time spent outdoors, contributing to anxiety, attention problems, depression, insomnia, and obesity.
Staring at your smart phone rather than engaging with a live person (known to psychologists as ‘phubbing’ or the snubbing of a live person in favor of your smart phone) is a big problem with married couples and singles. Phubbing with your smart phone decreases relationship satisfaction and increases alienation and depression.
In a peer-reviewed, 2019 study, researchers demonstrated in a controlled experiment that removal of social media usage for one month resulted in “an increase in well-being and a decrease in political polarization.”
A person’s proximity to a smart phone reduces their intellectual acuity. When phones are placed in another room, learning improves. In schools that have banned smart phones from campus, student test scores increased significantly.

Solution to Insomnia: Break the Addiction

The simplest (and hardest) solution to insomnia is to admit that you have a problem. Most smart phones now provide screen time tracking to check your hourly and daily usage (including social media and app notifications). An objective review of your smart phone and screen time usage is necessary to admit to yourself that you have a problem. The solution, therefore, is simple: stop using your smart phone. If the mere thought of doing so seems impossible (or outrageous), then consider contacting a cognitive behavioral therapist or licensed counselor for consultation. Help is available.