Sleep Texting?

LadyPox · #1 ● 11-28-2011, 11:23 PM

HLN

Things were so much more simple when all we did while sleeping was talk, walk or annihilate leftovers.

But now we may have developed the potentially self-destructive ability to fire off random text messages too. Yes, sleep texting has arrived. And if you're already prone to talking/walking/eating in your sleep, you may want to warn everyone in your contact list.

Sleep medicine specialists say they're seeing an increasing number of patients who are sending out text messages while essentially asleep, and have no recollection of doing it.

“They kind of get stuck in a no-man's land where they're not really fully awake but yet feel the need or urge to be able to respond to that text message," Dr. Markus Schmidt told WBNS.

That "need or urge" while drifting to sleep apparently has a lot to do with our inability to settle down while awake. An Australian sleep expert blames sleep texting on all the stress we deal with each day.

"People are doing so much during a normal day that it can mean that they feel like they're "on call" even at night," Dr. David Cunnington says in the UK's Daily Mail.

"Because it's so easy to receive emails constantly, and get notifications from smartphones, it becomes more difficult for us to separate our waking and sleeping lives," he adds.

It's certainly something many of us can relate to ... however Dr. Schmidt says teenagers also battle stress and most sleep-texters he sees are teens. "Four out of five kids that have cell phones sleep with the cell phone in the bedroom, next to their bed."

One Ohio teen told WBNS she had no idea she was sending out 3 a.m. texts until a friend asked her about the strange messages he was receiving from her. The teen's mother says one of her daughter's texts just read "Close her door." No explanation provided.

Other sleep texts are not nearly so harmless. Schmidt says one of his patients sent out compromising pictures of herself.

He says to cut down on the odds of ending up in a similar position, keep your phone out of the room and go to sleep earlier.