It’s the middle of the night and you have a big office meeting the next day keeping you up, but you can’t seem to stop scrolling through your Instagram feed to find another montage of silly cat videos to put you to sleep. Sound familiar? You’re probably a victim of one the highest growing epidemics of insomnia and you don’t even know it.
Following the announcement of recent proposal made by the UK government, a potential ban on mobile phones within schools may be coming into action across the country. There is evidence that suggests that this may be the start to a solution of a wider problem.
According to a recent study published by Land of Beds in February 2026, just 27.9% of adults get the recommended seven hours of sleep per night. The amount of recommended sleep for adolescents increases to 8 to 10 hours of sleep a night.
Most people within the UK just simply are not getting enough rest, 27.9% of young people achieve the recommended seven or more hours of sleep with 24.9% of those managing just five to six hours.
Simply put, this is not enough for your brain to process information properly and mental health counsellor, Connor Giles, believes phone usage is a key component in the battle against rising levels of insomnia, just one of the issues that may arise among young people and adults as a result of poor sleep.
Despite this, 91% of adults of admitted to using a screen before bed. According to a study conducted in Norway by Frontier Journal it was found that social media and notifications from our devices can interrupt sleep.
He said: ‘’I found changing our routine even just a little bit, helps with that … not necessarily dropping the phone, but having a cut-off point’’
‘’10 o’clock, nine o’clock, I’m going to turn my phone to do not disturb and do something else before going to bed. So that could be reading, that could be just having a night-time routine… that act of just preparing ourselves to go to sleep even just for an hour, helps a lot.’’
Connor continued: ‘’ You see misconceptions on sleep and how to handle it, and I definitely see that, because adults as well struggle with sleep. It’s not just children and that carries down’’.
According to a study published by the NHS in 2023, 37.8% of children aged 8 to 16 had a problem with their sleeping three or more times over a seven-night period.
In a statement provided by The Sleep Charity, deputy CEO Lisa Artis said: ‘’ With increasing discussion around phone bans in schools, there is increasing debate about whether these measures will meaningfully improve young people’s sleep’’
‘’The biggest impact on sleep tends to come from behaviour outside school hours, particularly in the evening and at night… school bans alone are unlikely to fully resolve the issue.’’
Connor believes that this is due to poor habit forming and can be a result of an attempt to avoid something else. People don’t recognise they shouldn’t be scrolling on their phones so much, but they still do so. Resulting in potentially widespread addictive behaviours.
Victoria Creamer, Founder of the Lincoln based DAMA Talent Agency, spoke on her own personal struggles with sleep and her recent discovery of her ADHD diagnosis. Removing herself from social media due to its impact on her daily life.
She said; ‘’I thought the way that I slept was normal, and it wasn’t until I spoke to somebody, that said it’s actually not normal for your sleep to be broken three, four times a night.
‘’For a long time now, I’ve had a rule that I don’t take my phone into the bedroom… I put my phone on charge downstairs before I go to bed, previously when I would wake up at two, three in the morning it would be if I couldn’t get to sleep straight away it would be a scroll.’’
She continued: ‘’Social media is effectively an addiction, it should be treated like any other addiction. We’re addicted to the dopamine hit and that’s a problem… As adults we are a bit more regulated of our emotions, and we can stop ourselves, the less you are on social media the less you want to use it’’.
Connor suggested a solution to help parents break the cycle for themselves and their children.
‘’I know from people that told me that because they use Duolingo, so they can’t use Instagram until they’ve done the Duolingo. And you can do that with apps. You can lock them for certain times’’
So, it’s more about an ownership of, okay, this is the time that they need to dedicate to learning to sleep, to whatever extracurriculars they may need to do. It takes away distraction by blocking it away.’’
In a world with a seemingly endless stream of information a screen us never far away. While switching off your devices is easier said than done, small changes like setting personal boundaries and building a daily routine can make all the difference. Sometimes the solution to obtaining that distraction free night sleep isn’t what you add but what you are willing to turn off.
