Do You Text in Your Sleep?

Even sleep walking is keeping up with technological advances.


You’ve heard of butt dialing and drunk messaging (and maybe done both yourself?), but a new smartphone mishap is on the rise: sleep texting. It’s just like sleep-walking except a lot more public. And embarrassing.

CNN reports on the phenomenon, which seems to mainly affect teens and young adults who’ve grown up using cell phones. While it’s not exactly proven scientifically, it’s easy to see anecdotally—just search Twitter for the hashtag #sleeptexting and you’ll come up with thousands of hilarious results.

Elizabeth Dowell of Villanova’s College of Nursing explains that this type of sleep behavior isn’t particularly new, but rather it’s an old one that’s adapting to technological advances.

“I think for many adolescents and young adults, technology has provided us another avenue of sleep walking, or talking in our sleep. People have answered the phone, the good old-fashioned landline, in their sleep. What we are seeing now is younger people experiencing this,” she told CNN.

The sleep texting’s problematic health link, of course, is the fact that it can be interrupt sleep patterns. And sleep, as we know, is impacts everything from eating behavior to exercise.

CNN recommends that those who are having issues with sleep-texting do the obvious and shut down their phone or set a pass-code lock before hitting the sack.

Check out a sample of hilarious sleep-text messages here.

Photo: Shutterstock