The Light From An iPad May Be Interrupting Your Sleep

Could the glow of your iPad be messing up your sleep pattern? Recent findings published in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS) show that these devices could be interfering with our ability to get an adequate night's rest.

"It may be having a greater impact than we previously thought," said Anne-Marie Chang, a professor at Penn State University and a co-author of the study, in a news release.

For the study, researchers conducted a two-week inpatient experiment that involved about a dozen adults. Some of the participants were asked to read on an iPad for four hours each night before bedtime for five consecutive nights. Other participants were asked to read printed books in dim light. After a week, the groups switched.

Findings revealed that participants who used iPad displays reduced their levels of melatonin-a hormone that helps induce sleepiness typically during the evening. These participants also took longer to fall asleep and spent less time in restorative REM or rapid-eye movement sleep. Furthermore, researchers found that the iPad readers were much sleepier than counterparts.

"There's a lot of skepticism out there; a lot of people think this is psychological," said Charles Czeisler, director of the Division of Sleep Medicine at Harvard Medical School. "But what we showed is that reading from light-emitting, e-reader devices has profound biological effects."

Researchers concluded that as electronic devices become more common, their insomnia-invoking issues could create long-term health problems for users. 

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