Is Your iPad Keeping You Awake? Uh…Yeah…
Friday, May 14th, 2010 at 11:27 am
I wonder if this glowing screen could be keeping me awake? Duuuh!
I mean that’s kind of the point. Who wants to fall asleep when they would rather be using an ultra-cool iPad. Read this article on CNN and tell me that you already knew this. I don’t have an iPad (yet) but I use with my laptop almost every night right before I go to sleep. I don’t need a degree in neuroscience to tell me that it’s probably keeping me awake later than if I were to avoid it. It just makes sense that staring into a glowing anything would be stimulating enough to keep a person awake for awhile. I tend to view Twitter posts, blog entries and tutorials from my favorite designers (and the occasional Cheezburger Network post) until I fall asleep. That could be anywhere between 10pm and midnight depending on the day but I just about always get my 8 hours.
I am not saying that J.D. Moyer wasted his time. Not even close. He conducted a valuable experiment and got great results. He also got mentioned in an article that was featured on the front page of CNN. You can’t buy that kind of exposure. Well, not on the cheap that is. And I know what he was talking about when he said “I had the experience, a number of times, just feeling kind of unreasonably happy for no reason. And it was the sleep”. I agree with that wholeheartedly. I have had that feeling myself and I believe, as J.D. does. That feeling is a direct result of getting enough sleep. How much is enough? It varies person to person but if you are one of those people who say “oh, I can get by on 4-6 hours a night” you are correct. You can “get by”. But wouldn’t you rather be “unreasonably happy”? I know I would.
Don’t be too worried though. As usual with every “new finding” there is a group of people on the opposite side who say either the problem does not exist or that it’s not nearly as bad as it’s being made out to be. The latter is the case here with another researcher commenting that “People shouldn’t be concerned about reading on backlit electronic devices at night unless they’re experiencing insomnia, in which case they should dim the screen”. So there you go. You are not going to die if you use your iPad, laptop etc. every night before you go to bed.
However, I know that if I had to go to bed without my laptop for a month I would die. I don’t mean that I would feel terribly inconvenienced or that I would feel lost or vulnerable and uncomfortable. I mean DIE like dead and gone die. So I will continue to use my laptop (and soon my iPad) before I go to sleep. That is until I develop insomnia. 
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