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Late Nights Aren’t Giving Teens Asthma
Why you probably don’t need to stress too much about circadian rhythms and breathing problems
If there’s one thing that we love to stress about, it’s technology and kids. Nothing inspires more gratuitous fear than the idea that we might be harming our children by letting them near an iPhone. Screens have become the ultimate boogeyman, being blamed for everything from mental health problems to cancer. Partly that’s because we love to hate things we don’t understand, but it’s also because of our pervasive belief that anything new must, by definition, be a danger to our very souls.
So it’s no surprise that when a study suggested that late nights in front of screens might be giving teenagers asthma, the media jumped on the story in a second. Headlines everywhere have been proclaiming that teens who stay up late (probably in front of screens) are giving themselves asthma and respiratory problems with their nocturnal habits.
Fortunately, while it sounds scary, the evidence doesn’t really support that at all.
