Jennifer Senior warns that our gadget dependency both deprives us of sleep and encourages absent-minded eating:
It’s already fairly well established that people consume more food when watching television. Recently, researchers at the University of Bristol found the same among those who eat in front of their computers, though their sample was small and the design of their study was a bit eccentric (they fed 44 subjects the same meals at lunchtime; those who ate while playing computer solitaire were apt to eat twice as many cookies 30 minutes later as those who ate far from a glowing screen). The theory, whether it’s television or a desktop: You remember eating when you’ve made a separate activity out of it; you don’t if you’re doing something else, and therefore misgauge your appetite.
Yet it’s increasingly difficult for Americans to unplug.
Last winter, The Journal of Clinical Sleep Medicine reported that nine out of ten of us use a technological device in the hour before bed. (In 60 percent of those cases, it’s the TV, but that’s in aggregate; for Americans under 30, it’s cell phones, which the researchers deemed much more disruptive.) According to a Pew study from 2010, 65 percent of Americans sleep with their cell phones on or next to their beds (for people 18–29, that number jumps 90 percent.) And in 2012, a poll by Harris Interactive found that 54 percent of Americans look at their phones while lying in bed.
None of which is to say that curtailing email and Facebook and Twitter use will make us lose ten pounds. But it cannot hurt, at the very least, and reminds us that all of our cells, be they inside our bodies or in the palms of our hands, could use a good rest.
The Dish 