Insomnia and the smartphone
Business Daily
BBC
4.4 • 816 Ratings
🗓️ 17 January 2020
⏱️ 18 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
Modern tech is accused of interfering with our sleep, keeping us up late anxiously staring at our phone screens. But could a phone app provide the cure?
Roughly one in three people in most developed countries typically tell surveys that the suffer from insomnia. The BBC's Laurence Knight is one of them. He seeks the advice of sleep physician Dr Guy Leschziner of Guy's Hospital in London, who explains how sleep and anxiety can become a vicious circle.
The good news is that there is a new non-drug treatment that is proving remarkably successful - cognitive behavioural therapy for insomnia. The bad news is that there are nowhere near enough trained clinicians able to provide treatment. That provides a gap in the market - and one that Yuri Maricich of US medical tech firm Pear Therapeutics hopes to fill with a mobile phone app of all things.
(Picture: Cell phone addict man awake at night in bed using smartphone; Credit: OcusFocus/Getty Images)
Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | Hello and welcome to Business Daily. I'm Lawrence Knight. |
| 0:05.0 | Now, are you feeling well-rested? I ask because apparently there's an epidemic of us staying up late in bed on our phones, and that's bad news for sleep. |
| 0:17.1 | In recent years, there's been a great deal of concern about things like blue light, but it's also about |
| 0:22.6 | undertaking activities that are mentally alerting because they're strengthening the association |
| 0:27.4 | between bed and being awake. |
| 0:29.7 | But if like me, you're a bit anxious about your poor sleep habits, well, guess what? |
| 0:34.6 | There's an app for that. |
| 0:35.9 | The patient will get diagnosed and then download the software from the app store. |
| 0:42.2 | And there's an algorithm that recommends what their sleep window should be. |
| 0:47.5 | How to get a good night's sleep here on Business Daily. Um, |
| 0:54.7 | Mm-hmm. So it's 2 o'clock in the morning |
| 1:18.0 | and I've just woken up |
| 1:20.6 | this is becoming something of a common occurrence for me |
| 1:25.6 | I seem to be waking up between two and four each morning on a fairly |
| 1:29.0 | regular basis. And I doubt I'm going to be getting back to sleep any time soon now. |
| 1:36.9 | Well, back in the studio, there is some small comfort for me that I am not alone. In the UK, |
| 1:43.2 | like in most developed countries, typically about a third |
| 1:45.8 | of people tell surveys that they suffer from insomnia. And with modern technology providing us |
| 1:51.2 | with a 24-7 source of distraction, it's not a problem that's going away any time soon. But could |
| 1:58.1 | technology also provide some solutions? Perhaps unsurprisingly, there is a burgeoning industry of purported high-tech sleep cures. |
| 2:07.4 | My colleague Elizabeth Hotson went to look at some of them at the Somnick Sleep Show in London a few months back. |
| 2:13.5 | Jack Hawkins, I'm from Adjustomatic Beds. We actually get the bed to match the shape of the body, |
... |
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