Preliminary results from a new study indicate that greater amounts of daily screen time are associated with more insomnia symptoms and shorter sleep duration among adolescents.
Results show that for social messaging, web surfing and TV/movie watching, insomnia symptoms and sleep duration fully explained the association between screen-based activities and depressive symptoms.
“Higher rates of depressive symptoms among teens may be partially explained through the ubiquitous use of screen-based activities, which can interfere with high-quality restorative sleep.” said postdoctoral researcher Xian Stella Li, PhD, who conducted the analyses with collaborators at Stony Brook University (Lauren Hale, PhD), Penn State University (Orfeu Buxton, PhD, Soomi Lee, PhD, and Anne-Marie Chang, PhD), and University of Wisconsin-Madison (Lawrence Berger, PhD).