How Nighttime Screen Use Disrupts Sleep

[Dr. Lauren Hale]: What kids are watching on their screens, especially if they’re doing it in the hour or so before bed, can be psychologically stimulating and interfere with what’s necessary for the mind to calm down and relax and feel safe and go to sleep. Just as an example, we don’t have a lot of time, but imagine an 11-year-old girl logging on to social media and seeing that her friends went bowling without her and didn’t invite her and they were having a great time. It’s perfectly normal and natural to feel distressed about that. That’s a healthy response, but it’s interfering with sleep. And so if she didn’t have that phone, she wasn’t aware of it or learned about it at a different time of day, it might not affect her in the same way.