Do you hit up social media when you can’t sleep? Are you a midnight tweeter who uses hashtags like #cantsleep and #teamnosleep?
If so, new Harvard University research is about you. Apparently, enough Twitter users have trouble sleeping that we now know more about sleep disorders thanks to their data.
According to the recent study from Harvard, Boston Children’s Hospital and pharmaceutical company Merck, night owl Twitter users have shed new light on sleep disorders and their effects.
Specifically, researchers linked sleep disorders with a greater risk of psychosocial issues, accomplishing their main goal: to determine whether Twitter data could be used for this kind of scientific health study.
Analyzing more than 1,800 Twitter accounts, researchers searched for sleep-related hashtags and words and tried to build a profile of how someone suffering from insomnia or other sleep trouble acts on the popular social networking site.
They found that people with sleep problems had fewer followers and followed fewer people, with less interactions overall. Those folks also tended to tweet less and were more likely to tweet negatively.
Well, duh. Of course if you can’t sleep and you’re up all hours of the night you’ll be more negative and have fewer interactions! There are fewer Twitter users online in the wee hours, for starters. And the relationship between social media and sleep has always been a little rocky. It’s interesting and cool that scientists can now measure things like this using social media data, but other than that, this is not really new information.
So what’s the takeaway? First of all, people are watching you. And they might be tracking your social media habits based on the sleep hashtags you use. Yeesh.
On a less creepy note, we simply have more evidence that good sleep yields benefits like better mood, positivity, and connectedness.
The number of times someone tweets is hardly a scientific measure for how happy or socially connected or interactive they are. Maybe they simply aren’t attached at the hip to their Twitter feed (which could be a GOOD thing).
Nevertheless, it’s easy to tell that sleep is important and it makes a big difference in quality of life. Seriously, even if you’re one of those who love-love-LOVE Twitter, you probably don’t want to be up tweeting at 3 am.
Insomnia is an awful problem that’s not simple to solve. But making sure you’re taking care of yourself by eating well, exercising and managing your stress levels can help.
Plus, it never hurts to take some quiet time to think and journal—instead of tweeting—if you can’t sleep. Sometimes, we can’t fall asleep or wake up in the middle of the night because we have too much on our minds and haven’t given ourselves enough time to process.
Trying those things and sleeping in a quiet, dark, cool room on a comfortable, quality mattress, could keep you far, far away from subject status in the next Twitter sleep study.
#sweetdreams and #sleeptight!