Is THIS why you’re having trouble falling asleep?

If you often find yourself having trouble falling asleep after your head hits the pillow, there’s one thing you could be doing that is preventing you from sailing away into dream land…looking at your smartphone!

“People are exposing their eyes to this stream of photons from these objects,” says Dr. Dan Siegel, explaining just how impactful screens can be on our sleep. “They basically tell your brain, ‘Stay awake!’”

Dr. Dan Siegel is a clinical professor of Psychiatry at the UCLA School of Medicine, and he’s made it his business to help people recognize the serious problem of screen time interfering with sleep time.

Whether it’s 10 p.m., 11 p.m., or midnight, staring at your phone screen right before bedtime communicates to your busy brain that it’s not time to go to sleep yet. The irony being, of course, that it is. You create a Catch-22 situation for yourself; you’re staring at your screen because you’re not sleepy, but you’re not sleepy because you’re staring at your screen.

Dr. Siegel explains how staring into your backlit smartphone or laptop tells your brain, “Don’t secrete melatonin yet.” Melatonin is the naturally produced hormone that regulates sleeping and waking cycles, and if we cheat ourselves out of it, our sleep will inevitably suffer.

Interesting…more details here.