Long Hours of Gaming Before Bed Affects Teens' Sleep and Learning Ability

Playing video games long hours before retiring to bed can lead to significant sleep disruptions among teenagers, a new small study says.

A team of researchers from Flinders University examined the consequences of prolonged video gaming on the quality of teenager's sleep and their studies.

For the study, Dr. Michael Gradisar and colleagues provided 17 adolescents with a violent video game. All the participants, equipped with sleep and heart-rate monitors were instructed to play the game either 50 minutes or 150 minutes in a Sleep Lab.

Monitors and feedback from the participants were used to reach a conclusion. Researchers found the teens playing games for 150 minutes experiencing a 27-minutes loss in total sleep time and 39-minutes delay in falling asleep.

"While they went to bed at their regular bedtime, the adolescents' still experienced significant sleep disruptions caused by frequent awakenings throughout the night," Gradisar said.

Apart from that, researchers also found the long duration of playing video games affecting some stages of sleep that help in learning process of children.

REM sleep or dreaming sleep that play a major role in remembering the content one learns during the day was found reduced by 12 percent among teens who played video games for more than two hours.

"This may not seem like a significant reduction but REM plays an important part in helping us remember content we learnt that day so for adolescents in their final years of school who are revising for exams, winding down at night with a video game might not be the best idea," Dr Gradisar explained.

Researchers couldn't find any significant impact of playing video games for 50 minutes on the quality of sleep.

"Based on the self-reports, those who played for 50 minutes said it took them 22 minutes to fall asleep, which is within the normal amount of time teens take of 30 minutes or less," he said. "But their sleep onset delay almost doubled to 39 minutes when they played for two and a half hours so clearly there's a limit to how much you should play before bed."