Dakota Schroeder

Professor Leonard

English 1201

9 March 2020

The use of social media has a huge impact on the amount of sleep teens get.

Having your phone at night scrolling through instagram or twitter keeps every teen up.

As Woods said, the use of cell phones in bed are causing issues in teens and young

adults sleep, which can lead to other more serious issues such as bad performance in

school, fatigue, and even anxiety and depression. Agata said, with most teens having to

wake up at 6 a.m., staying up late on social media isn't a very good idea. Why do they

still do it then if they know it's wrong?

While Jessica Levenson, in her article “The Association between Social Media

Use and Sleep Disturbance among Young Adults” argues that getting notifications on

your phone keeps you up rather than just being on your phone rather than what Heather

Woods in her article “Social Media Use in Adolescence Is Associated with Poor Sleep

Quality, Anxiety, Depression and Low Self-Esteem” about how just being on your phone

keeps you up. Levenson bases her claim on statistics from a study conducted through

Science Direct. Woods makes her claims based on studies conducted by Psychology

Today. Both sources use credible evidence and are reliable.

Screen time is up more than ever for teens and young adults. The Iphone has a

feature where it tells you how long you’ve been on your phone each day and gives you

a weekly average. It also shows what you spend your time on whether it be YouTube,
social media, or other platforms. In our Sociology class we went around in our reading

groups and each looked at our screen time and what we spend the most time on. Most

of our group was around the 5-6 hour mark per day and spent most of our time on social

media such as Twitter and Instagram. However, one member of our group averaged

over 12 hours a day on her phone. I was very surprised by this because I thought 5-6

hours was a lot for one day. When we looked to see what she spends most of her time

on it was YouTube. She said that she uses YouTube in bed before going to sleep and

often falls asleep with it on still. When I asked her how her sleep quality often is she

said not the best and that she often feels tired and fatigued in class.

Back then people didn't have electronic devices to cope with their time. I feel as if

back then people would actually have conversations with people rather than just texting

them. I also believe that the depression rate is now a lot higher now because people

don't know how to talk to people about problems and rather hide behind their phones.

I learned in these articles that sleep is a very important thing especially in a teens

life. Teens have so much on their plate with school, sports, friends, and jobs. Always

make sure you get a good amount of sleep at night so you aren't dropsy throughout the

day.