Strange sleep schedules

TikTok use can be addictive and cause users to not get enough rest

AVA MENONI contributing columnist

Social media, specifically TikTok, has a negative impact on college students’ sleep. College students are known to have bad sleeping habits due to their overwhelming academics, excessive social lives and tight schedules. According to the Centers for

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Disease Control, at least 60% of college students have poor-quality sleep, failing to complete the nine hours recommended by Johns Hopkins Medicine. Recently, there’s been a new factor adding to the decline of sleep in college-aged people: social media’s top dog, TikTok.

TikTok is a popular social media app that’s changed the way people view entertainment.

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The main function of this app is TikTok’s “For You Page” which compiles content tailored to the viewer. The app collects data such as which videos people have liked and shared and creates a customized page of media to consume. The “For You Page” content consists of short videos people can scroll on for hours and hours. It sends the brain of the viewer into a mindless loop and they can’t look away.

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TikTok has benefits. One of the platform’s taglines is “find your community,” which is fitting because many people have found a community on the app. Each community has its own hashtag added to the caption of the videos that has “Tok” at the end to signify that it’s a TikTok video. From MomTok to SkaterTok and WitchTok to FinanceTok, there’s something for everyone. It’s created jobs and hired thousands of U.S. employers since 2020 according to Forbes. Its addictive nature is affecting viewers more than they think, specifically in the sleep department.

TikTok’s addictiveness comes from its design. The two most concerning aspects of the formatting are the limited number of buttons and the length of the videos. The limited number of buttons is convenient, yet it gives the app control over how much time you spend on it. Short videos can be especially addictive for children and teenagers because of their short attention spans.

Many TikTok users experience a distorted sense of time. They scroll on TikTok for hours and don’t realize how much time has passed. It’s almost like they’re in a hypnotic state. Another reason why students are losing sleep over TikTok is the blue light emitted from the screens. According to Harvard Medical School, exposure to light suppresses the secretion of melatonin, a hormone that influences circadian rhythms. Exposure to blue light during the day can be beneficial because it mimics sunlight. However, exposure during the nighttime can keep viewers awake.

Since its creation in September 2016, TikTok has quickly gained popularity, especially among young people. A survey by Pew Research Center found that 67% of teens have used TikTok, and it’s more popular than both Instagram and Snapchat.

The Breeze polled Instagram users about TikTok usage. The results indicated that 80% of the 20 respondents use TikTok before bed. In response to the question, “Does TikTok negatively impact your sleep schedule,” 82% of students responded affirmatively expressing how the app affects their sleep. One Instagram user, @halfbakedcrazy, responded “Yes absolutely so much negative impact.”

It’s important to recognize the dangers of TikTok. Its impact on students’ sleep can be catastrophic. Short-term problems associated with regular sleep loss include lack of alertness, excessive daytime sleepiness and impaired memory. Impaired memory is especially threatening because college students cannot retain the information given to them in class, which can affect classroom performance. Students can prevent TikTok from ruining their sleep schedule by setting time limits on their phones or deciding not to go on TikTok an hour before bed.

CONTACT Ava Menoni at menoniap@ dukes.jmu.edu. For more editorials regarding the JMU and Harrisonburg communities, follow the opinion desk on Instagram and Twitter @Breeze_Opinion.

Beginning a new semester can be exciting and a bit stressful for all of us, whether we’re coming back from a challenging fall term or beginning our journey.

For many of us in the JMU community, academic stress has been the least of our worries. The past two years have been filled with grief, loss, perpetual fear and anger for disabled people as a disproportionate number of us have lost our lives, livelihoods, ability to access care and safely inhabit public spaces in the limited ways we were afforded before the pandemic began. Disability is the only minority group that any one of us on any given day can join and intersect with all identity groups and in all communities in every corner of the globe.

This fact in itself should bring us together in solidarity and transformative direct action. Truth is, unless you are disabled and have to live in a world not meant for you, you may not realize how drastically different our experiences can be. There are many ways ableism can be defined, Lydia X.Z. Brown (they/them/theirs/themself or no pronouns) provides a salient articulation in “Ableism/Language” on their blog, Autistic Hoya: “Ableism is not a list of bad words. Language is *one* tool of an oppressive system. Being aware of language -- for those of us who have the privilege of being able to change our language -- can help us understand how pervasive ableism is. Ableism is systematic, institutional devaluing of bodies and minds deemed deviant, abnormal, defective, subhuman, less than. Ableism is *violence.*”

You might be asking yourself if ableism is really as bad as all that. You wouldn’t be alone in this skepticism and in itself does not make you a bad person; it just means you do not confront and navigate ableist systems in the same way and on a daily basis as disabled people do. Disabled people who benefit from other forms of privilege do not experience ableism in the same way as those in our community who experience the effects of compounded oppression. In truth, ableism is so entrenched in our daily lives you do not even have to be disabled to experience ableism and you don’t have to be able bodied/minded to hold ableist beliefs. It might even seem natural and inevitable that a disproportionate number of disabled people experience poverty, lower health outcomes, early/ high mortality, low employment, high rates of incarceration and institutionalization … but it wasn’t always like this and it is neither natural or inevitable for any group.

By tracing this lineage of discrimination back to its origins, we start to see how history informs the present. In understanding these origin stories and how they have been replicated, reproduced and upheld throughout the years we are one step closer to correcting these injustices and repairing the harm done. One of the best ways of course correction is including disabled voices from all marginalized backgrounds in research.

When COVID-19 swept the globe in 2020, the disability community was hit harder than most, yet not equally throughout. The segregation of disabled people with higher support needs into state care facilities and other communal living situations that disabled people inhabit, made social distancing and other practices of mitigating the spread inaccessible.

For example, a 2020 research paper “People With Disabilities in COVID-19: Fixing Our Priorities in the American Journal of Bioethics,” found that in New York State alone, those with intellectual/ developmental disabilities (IDD) had a death rate of 9.5% as opposed to the overall death rate of 4% in the general population. To date, they write, nearly half of reported deaths of people with disabilities list the disability itself as the cause of death and “beyond the illogic of identifying a disability, as opposed to an illness or disease, as a causal health event leading to death, this practice makes it difficult for public health researchers to understand mortality risks” for the disability community.

This should be shocking, however it’s so open to hearing the ways in which our society (is) set it up have disadvantaged not only ourselves … but … disadvantaged (people based on) group member status … because they are Indigenous, or they are Black, or Hispanic, or an Immigrant, or they are Queer. In a “historical way we have advantaged some people and disadvantaged others.”

Just as important is addressing the immediate need and material conditions of those who experience exclusion, oppression and inequality. In an interview with JMU assistant health science professor Tony Jehi, he underscored the need to work with and understand the community you are serving to effectively facilitate preventative measures and highlighted the importance of interdisciplinary collaborations and connections in research. In his work with the “Full Plate Diet,” Jehi and fellow research facilitators “focused on accessibility both geographical and economical” serves as a cultural institution and valued source of information that is generally accepted to be reliable, verified, and objective in informing our opinions and beliefs. For the disability community, this is not the rule but the exception. shockingly common, normalized, moralized and rationalized that many do not appreciate the gravity of these realities and their violence until someone points it out.

There is a wealth of evidence that speaks to the way individuals and communities that must navigate oppressive systems are better positioned to understand these systems than those who benefit from them, so why aren’t disabled people and other marginalized groups consulted in and leading research that is about them and for them? A big reason is the legacy of co-constitutive and co-creative scientific and medical ableism, racism, cis-hetero-sexism, etc. that legitimates prejudice in scientific and medical study and skews our understanding of natural human diversity. As bell hooks has emphasized in her book “Teaching to Transgress: Education as the Practice of Freedom,”“western men who established their own ways of knowing … (are) … failing to realize that they’re also just cultural products, while rationalizing them as more valid, more correct, and methodologically stronger than others.” What would happen if we took Audre Lorde’s wisdom to heart, when she said in her essay by the same name, “the master’s tools will never dismantle the master’s house” and applied it to the way we collectively conduct and fund research?

During the pandemic, the rationing of care and resource guidelines that healthcare workers were given justified the denial of life-saving treatments of disabled people and combined with racism in deadly ways. As Sabatello highlighted “the prevalence of disability and associated poorer health outcomes are higher among Blacks/African Americans, Latinx, and American Indians/Alaska Natives communities with disproportionately high rates of COVID-19 infection and mortality.” In an interview with Dr. Merrell, a JMU health sciences professor and researcher, she pointed to a paper her and colleagues published in 2021, “Social Determinants of Health and Health Disparities: Covid-19 Exposure & Mortality Among African American People in the United States,” which looked at how COVID disproportionately impacted marginalized groups.

In individualistic societies like the U.S., we often assign blame to the person who is sick but are “not that looked to address health disparities with preventative, educational projects that focus on the unique needs of the community.