Study Says Binge-watching Television Can Severely Affect Your Sleep

Binge-eating can lead to obesity, weight gain and a host of other health issues. Well, it is not just binge-eating, but binge-watching television- watching multiple consecutive episodes of the same television show in one sitting on a screen, be it a television, laptop, computer or tablet, can also be dangerous.

According to a recent study, binge-watching television can cause poorer sleep quality, more fatigue, and increased insomnia in young adults.

The findings suggest that the mechanism explaining this relationship is increased cognitive alertness resulting from binge-watching.

During the study researchers found that more than 80 percent of young adults identified themselves as a binge-watcher, with 20.2 percent of them binge-watching at least a few times a week in the previous month.

Also those who identified as a binge-watcher reported more fatigue, more symptoms of insomnia, poorer sleep quality and greater alertness prior to going to sleep. Further analysis found that binge-watchers had a 98 percent higher likelihood of having poor sleep quality compared with those who did not consider themselves to be a binge- watcher.

"We found that the more often young people binge-watch, the higher their cognitive pre-sleep arousal," said Liese Exelmans, doctoral candidate at the University of Leuven in Belgium.

The study involved 423 young adults who were 18 to 25 years old, with an average age of 22 years. Sixty-two per cent of participants were women, and 74 per cent were students.

An online survey assessing regular television viewing, binge-watching, sleep quality, fatigue, insomnia, and pre-sleep alertness was conducted during the study. An average binge-watching session lasted 3 hours and 8 minutes, with 52 percent of binge-watchers viewing three to four episodes in one sitting.

The study was recently published in the Journal of Clinical Sleep Medicine.