A  great number of people like to go to bed with their phones—often falling asleep with the gadget on the pillow. However, you probably don’t even realise how your this phone habit is affecting your sleep and your brain’s health. What may seem like a harmless habit to you—jumping into bed and opening up your phone—can actually have a big impact on your overall health.

Chelsea Iriza says she sometimes sleeps with her smartphone near her, and that many times, she forgets to put it away.

"During the night when I am in my bed and chatting on my phone, sometimes I drift off and forget my phone in my hand, so when I wake up in the morning I find it on my pillow, and every time I forget to put it away, I wake up feeling tired, or with a headache,” she says.

Fernand Ishimwe says he finds it hard to sleep with his phone put away. "I can’t sleep without music playing in the background and my phone is always on the head-side of the bed playing music. I honestly can’t sleep, even though I have been warned multiple times, it is a habit hard to quit.”

Dr Francois Xavier Nshimiyimana, a consultant neurologist at the University Teaching Hospital of Kigali (CHUK), explains that the highly mobile cohort, which are the ones we use today, are the most harmful and likely to cause dangers to the brain.

"There is a part of the brain called the hypothalamus that controls light from phones that are created in a way that can stimulate the brain. I call this part a regulated clock of the brain, there is also another part called the suprachiasmatic nucleus which is in charge of regulating the hypothalamus part, so when the suprachiasmatic nucleus is disturbed, there are harmful hormones that rise and are dangerous to some of the cells that prevent us from fast ageing, causing effects like headaches,” he explains.

According to Nshimiyimana, cheap phones or non-highly mobile generation have a system that prevents people from being radiated, yet the high generation phones are very dangerous because they don’t have this system and can cause, especially in children, brain cancer or brain tumours as studies have shown.

Remy Wilson Bana, a radiologist at RURA, explains more on the radiations emitted from cell phones that damage the cells in our body.

"In life, we have what we call electromagnetic spectrum, or spectrum of electromagnetic radiation, that spectrum ranges from computer, power lines or radio waves which also reaches the radiations we use while treating cancer in patients. This spectrum ranges from high power to low, the ones we use for treatment, which are gamma radiation, have the force of damaging cells in the body, and in this spectrum we have two parts which are non-ionising radiation and ionising radiation.

"The non-ionising don’t have the power to penetrate the body and damage cells, ionising radiations are the ones with that power, and many electronic devices have non-ionising radiations that don’t change anything physically on the body. Within the human body, the cells have a specific orientation, non-ionising radiation can sometimes cause some disturbances in these cells, which means radiations from phones are about 900 megahertz which can cause some disturbances in the cells of the body,” he explains.

What are the risks?

According to Bana, radiations when used especially at night can disturb the production of melanocytes, which is a cell in the skin and eyes that produces and contains the pigment called melanin. 

Sleeping with a phone near you can disrupt your sleeping pattern and cause other issues, Dr Nshimiyimana says. "It can cause chronic insomnia, or Alzheimer’s, because there is a part of the brain that can be damaged by radiations. A person can have problems with their hearing cells, there is a measuring unit we use for hearing called decibel and when this measurement decreases, a person might find themselves telling people to say something again,” he says.

"There is a study that has been carried out for 20 years, it shows that adults are not likely to get brain cancer, rather, children,” he adds.

Dr Alain Sayinzoga, a medical director and neuro-disability specialist, says, "When you’ve been going to bed with your smartphone for a long time, it won’t be good for your eye crystalline and can cause accommodation disorders.”

According to The National Center for Biotechnology Information, exposure of the heart to high doses of ionising radiation has long been known to cause cardiac injury. Although some pathology can be observed early after irradiation, the heart is considered a late responding organ with the appearance of most manifestations of radiation injury a decade or more after exposure. More recently, clinical, epidemiological, and experimental studies have provided evidence that the cardiovascular system may also be injured by ionising radiation in low doses.

Take precaution

• Keep your phone at least three feet away from your bed to limit radio frequency exposure. 

• Turn your phone off before you go to bed (if you don’t rely on your phone’s alarm clock).

• Turn your phone on airplane mode.

"Your bedroom is only meant to be a quiet place for you to relax and not have other interferes, like watching movies, it is better if you keep the TV or gadgets out of your room,” Nshimiyimana advises.