Sleep Patterns and Excessive Social Networking Users

Introduction:

Social media is a type of website and technology that gives a platform for accessing information, promoting communication and sharing ideas. In other words, it is a collection of software that allows people and communities to gather, communicate share and sometimes play or collaborate. Over half of people worldwide use social media platforms. A large number of proportion consist of young users of social media. There are different types of social media, and each of them is used by a vast number of young people. In addition, fiction, post bars, microblogs, websites, Social Networking Service(SNS), forums and blogs are also very popular among people. Moreover, it has a wide range of online company-sponsored discussion boards and chat rooms, consumer to consumer e-mail, consumer product or service rating websites and sites containing audio, images or movies (Mangold, 2009) The penetration of social media into modern society has become a worldwide influential phenomenon. Social media use widely accessible. However, these opportunities can be followed by important pitfalls and risks. (Don S. Dizon, 2012).

Sleep is a natural state of body and mind, it is characterized by altered consciousness, relatively inhibited sensory activity, inhibition of nearly all voluntary muscles, and reduced interactions with surroundings. It is different from wakefulness due to a decreased ability to react to stimuli, but more reactive than coma or disorders of consciousness, sleep displaying very different and active brain. A sleep pattern is also referred as sleep-wake pattern. It is a biological rhythm that guides the body as to when it should sleep and when it should wake. It is one of the body's circadian rhythms. It typically follows a 24-hour cycle, controlling the body's schedule for sleeping and waking. Disruption in sleep and inadequate sleep results in adverse health outcomes. People affected by sleep disturbance are susceptible of being woken by noise. This lead to poor performance in the day time and slower reaction times. According to many studies, sleep performs a very important role in physical and emotional growth. A sound sleep is very essential for us, it is required for cerebral functions, social performance, learning and attention, well-being and all-round quality of life. (Kirov, 2011). Deficiency of sleep has many ill effects on temperament, cognitive functioning, metabolism, cardiovascular risk, weight and immune system operations. (Mullington, 2009). The average young or mid-life adult should take a daily sleep of 7-9 hours but recent studies show that 40% of U.S. adult population are getting less than 7 hours of sleep a day (Jones, 2013).

According to Pilcher (1996), largely subjective indices of sleep characterize sleep quality. These subjective indices of sleep include how deep the sleep is, how well rested one feels upon awakening, and general satisfaction with sleep. These all are in addition to the traditional indices like number of awakening during night, sleep duration and sleep latency. Sleep disturbances is a leading cause of many problems. Anxiety disorders and disturbances like insomnia and nightmares have been included in definitions of anxiety disorders such as anxiety and post-traumatic stress disorder (Staner, 2003). A recent study by Alfano, Ginsburg and Kingery found that out of 128 children and adults, almost 88% of them were examined to have problems related to sleep, they were not limited to nightmares and insomnia only but it lends further proof to the correlation between anxiety and sleep quality.

To support the interplay between increased usage of social media with depression and anxiety, there is an ever-growing literature base.

After initially intending to use it for a short duration, the users of social media show a tendency to increase their use of the medium. This sedentary form of entertainment may change the sleep rhythm and may lead to poor quality sleep. (Levenson, 2016). There have been a lot of factors that have all been touted as potential causes of depression which arise from the prolonged use of social media. A study suggests that being exposed to flawless depictions of people on social networking sites arise the feelings of resentment and skewed belief system making us think they lead much more successful and happy life. Moreover, engaging ourselves continuously in social media activities which are just meaningless and do not hold any sort of value creates a sense that we are unproductive and useless and adversely effects the mood. According to Bianchi and Phillips, extraverts spend more time on social media. The studies which are based on examining the link between sleep patterns and social media are mainly based on children and adolescents.

In this, we present the results of a controlled study aimed at identifying the impact of social media which is a very trending and prevalent phenomenon nowadays, on young adults and how it adversely affects their sleep patterns. Its goal is to study the relationship between social media use and sleep patterns. Furthermore, it is used to identify that whether sleep duration and its problems are predictor of social media or the out-comes of social media.

Social media use will be negatively related to reported sleep length. Individuals with higher social media use will report to sleep less while individuals with less use of social media will report to sleep more. Addictive texting will have a negative effect on sleep patterns. Individuals who are higher in extraversion will spend more of their time on social media.

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