18 Dec Holiday? Binging on TV shows? Its bad for you…
It is hard to escape the newest show, like Game of Thrones, its everywhere and for some of us it is just one of many shows we watch. Some of us take things to the next level, and watch these shows, back to back; sometimes for hours at a time. This is called binge viewing, but you can also just binge view normal TV also. We can get quite excited about these shows, when this happens before bed it increases our pre-sleep arousal (it makes us more awake).
Recently Exelmans and Van den Bulck published a paper in the Journal of Clinical Sleep Medicine on this very topic. They surveyed over 400 adults about their TV watching, binge viewing, insomnia, sleep quality and pre-sleep arousal. What they found was that those who binge watch more frequently were likely to have poor sleep quality, increased fatigue and symptoms of insomnia. Regular TV viewers were not. Cognitive pre-sleep arousal fully mediated these findings.
They suggested that some interventions such as alerts about excessive viewing duration and reducing arousal before sleep may be useful ways to tackle sleep problems in binge viewers.
Original article: http://www.aasmnet.org/jcsm/ViewAbstract.aspx?pid=31062