25% Of Young People Losing Sleep Over Social Media

We have secretly suspected our young people of being obsessed with social media. Now a new study appears to show social media use is invading our children’s bedrooms and increasingly robbing them of their sleep.

The research confirmed that twenty-five percent of young people regularly wake up during the night to check their social media feeds and send messages. Growing educator and parental concerns about social media’s negative impact on our young people’s lives are evidenced by these latest findings.

According to the Journal of Youth Studies, this unfortunate nighttime behavioural pattern is surfacing at school. Active nighttime social media users are three times more likely to report feeling constantly tired at school compared to peers who do not log on at night. This may have major implication for their performance in class, cognitive uptake and information processing ability.

The study recruited over 900 pupils aged 12 to 15 years. They were asked to self-report on how often they woke during the night to check social media and to log the times they woke and went back to sleep. Participants were also asked to rank on how happy they felt with several facets of their life ranging from friendships to perceptions of their experience at school, through to their own appearance.

Twenty-five percent of young people surveys reported ‘almost always’ waking up to check their social media feeds. The study found girls were far more likely to check in with their social media feeds than boys. Study participants who indicated they regularly woke up during the evening to check in with social media or who didn’t wake up at a regular time each morning were three time more likely to report feeling constantly tired at school by comparison with peers who didn’t check in on social media. A further connection was found between young people who reported being always tired were on average less happy than their peers.

Professor Sally Power, Co-Director (Cardiff) Wales Institute For Social and Economic Research, Data and Methods and the author of the study commented, “Our research shows that a small but significant number of children and young people say they often go to school feeling tired – and these are the same young people who also have the lowest levels of well-being. One in five young people questioned woke up every night and over one third wake up once a week to check for messages. Use of social media appears to be invading the ‘sanctuary’ of the bedroom.

Summary

There are growing concerns about the intrusive nature of social media on young people’s lives, particularly at night in their beds. The study generally supports these concerns, although the diverse causes of tiredness at school requires further large-scale studies to establish clear causal links between social media habits and tiredness at school.