SCIENCE / SUMMARY / SCREENS AND SLEEP

Do internet and phone addiction go together with poor sleep in teenagers?

SINGLE STUDY · CROSS SECTIONAL ■■□□ low evidence: three schools in one city, one point in time, self report

Who: All students at one public (593 students) and two private (659 students) high schools in Izmir were invited; 910 of 1,252 (72.7%) completed the survey. Ages ranged from 13 to 18, mean 15.7; 449 girls and 461 boys. Data were collected in March and April 2018.
What they did: In class, under researcher supervision, students completed the short Internet Addiction Test, the Smartphone Addiction Scale and the Pittsburgh Sleep Quality Index. Logistic regression looked at factors linked to poor sleep while accounting together for age, sex, parents' education, perceived health and perceived family income.
What they found: Internet use was normal in 72.4% of students, problematic in 19.2% and pathological in 8.4%. Poor sleep rates in these three groups were 52.5%, 72.6% and 80.3% (Table 2). After accounting for the other factors, the odds of poor sleep compared with normal users were 1.83 times higher in the problematic group (95% confidence interval 1.22 to 2.74) and 1.99 times higher in the pathological group (1.23 to 3.87); each 1 point rise in the phone addiction score raised the odds 1.01 times (scores range from 33 to 198) (Table 5). Odds were 1.50 times higher in girls and 1.39 times higher at age 16 or over. Correlations between addiction scores and sleep subscores were weak (the highest, 0.38, with daytime dysfunction); there was no link with habitual sleep efficiency.
Limits: As the authors note: all data are self reported; a cross sectional design shows association, not cause and effect. From our own reading: the sample comes from three schools in one city; the sleep scale's internal consistency in this sample was low (Cronbach's alpha 0.64); poor sleep was defined as a score of 5 or more, while the scale's original study uses above 5, so the rate may be somewhat inflated; results cannot be extended to adults. No funding was received and no conflicts of interest were declared.

What does this mean for you?

This study describes heavy internet and phone use and poor sleep often appearing together in teenagers; it does not say which affects which. If a teenager's sleep has been disturbed for a long time, talking with a doctor may be worthwhile. This is not advice.

Link to Nefesly: One of the reasons behind Nefesly's rule of dimming the screen at night and keeping interaction short. Because the sample was adolescents, this rule is not presented as an effect claim for adults; it is not a health claim. How we built it (Turkish)
Reference: Acikgoz A, Acikgoz B, Acikgoz O. The effect of internet addiction and smartphone addiction on sleep quality among Turkish adolescents. PeerJ. 2022;10:e12876. doi:10.7717/peerj.12876 · Open access (CC BY 4.0).
Why chosen: One of 15 sources chosen from 403 candidates on the Türkiye and guidelines axis; included as the largest Turkish sample to study phone and internet addiction against sleep quality with scales and adjusted odds ratios.
Summarised by: Nefesly, from the full text, 11 October 2026. Awaiting clinician check.
Copyright: Summarised from the full text, not translated from the abstract.