The Screen Sleeper Generation

It’s one of the earliest lessons we’re taught as children: get a good night’s sleep! We learn that sleep recharges our bodies, enhances our memories, and resets us for the day ahead. Plus, who doesn’t love a cozy bed?

But frankly, sleep is under attack.

Let’s be honest, how many of us sleep with our phones? Thought so. I’m guilty, as well. This isn’t just a phase, it’s an increasingly core (and unsettling) characteristic of our generation’s daily life.

Over the past decade or so, our little black mirrors have nuzzled their way further and further into our bedtime routines. Many of us have even bought those 6' long charging cables just so that we can continue to thumb-scroll— uninterrupted by 1% fears—through the very latest Instagram posts or watch that final episode of ‘Friends’ after we’re already in bed.

Heck, charging the phone across the room, or god forbid in another room, is almost laughably unlikely these days.

We’ve even been convinced by some apps that we should, in fact, place the phone on our actual mattresses to track our sleep quality via our movements throughout the night, as if we’ve accepted that 1) we’re all now PhDs in nocturnal activity or 2) that we’d even know what to do with this information once gathered.

Despite countless studies showing detrimental effects that our screens’ blue light have on our circadian rhythms, many of us continue to brush these warnings aside because of the unavoidable fact that we’re addicted to our screens.

A couple of years ago, at the Summit LA conference, Reed Hastings, Founder & CEO of Netflix, had this to say about his newest, biggest competitor:

“You get a show or a movie you’re really dying to watch, and you end up staying up late at night, so we actually compete with sleep,” he said of his №1 competitor. Not that he puts too much stock in his rival: “And we’re winning!” I’d bet that many of my family and friends would laugh if I told them that the biggest tech companies in the world—the Facebooks, Netflixes, and Apples of the world—are actually starting to consider sleep their number one competitor.

Surely, they all want us to engage with their devices and apps, but they must still have some respect for our biologically required beauty rest… right? 🤷🏽‍♂️

The biggest competitor for tech companies is no longer other tech companies, it’s sleep. In a world where loneliness and busyness are increasingly prevalent traits of our generation, sleep is our last bastion of hope—our sacred space to turn everything off and reset.

Therefore, it is in our societal best interest to build stronger barriers to our bedrooms that even blue light cannot penetrate.

I urge you to consider your bedtime routine. I urge you to reflect on technology’s proximity to that routine and make the first step towards gaining back the ground you may’ve lost to tech over the past few years.

Technology is not the enemy, we all know that it moves us forward in more ways than one, but let’s not let our screens dictate our sleep.

Let’s not be the Screen Sleeper generation.