Is the (Digital) Elephant in the (Bed) Room impacting your sleep?
If you are seeing this blog or video whilst lying in bed then turn it off right now…it can wait until morning!! The Digital Elephant is clearly in your bedroom! Sleeping with the Enemy! So, you sleep with your phone/ tablet/ laptop (NB for the rest of this article I will just use the word phone, but please insert whichever screen device applies to you!)? What is wrong with that I hear you ask? The main problem is that it can have a major effect on your sleep – both physiologically and emotionally. Not getting enough good quality sleep is detrimental to your health in both the long and short term. In the short term obviously you feel tired, you are less motivated to do all the things you should do to look after yourself, you will be less productive and potentially then become stressed about what you are not achieving (check out my blog on the relationship between stress and productivity), you will potentially be short tempered and impatient with other people you are dealing with and you will probably resort to ‘quick’ fixes like caffeine and sugar to give you a boost, neither of which provide you with any nutritional value and can be potentially harmful in themselves. In the long term, not getting enough sleep interferes with all physiological processes of the body, most importantly the immune