After years of studying sleep, this brain specialist has decided: there is a red line that must no longer be crossed before sleeping.
Difficult nights? Tired when you wake up? The consequences of insufficient or interrupted sleep accumulate over time: learning difficulties, prolonged reaction time, weakened memory and disrupted immune balance. Dr. Rab Nawaz Khan, a neurologist with over a decade of clinical experience, confirms that chronic sleep loss can have “effects much more serious than we think” on long-term brain health.
“There is one habit that I absolutely avoid” he warns straight away. For what ? Everything happens during deep sleep. Each night, the brain activates a cleaning system called the glymphatic system, which removes metabolic waste accumulated during the day – including certain proteins associated with Alzheimer’s disease. However, this habit before sleeping delays entry into this essential restorative phase and fragments the slow and paradoxical sleep cycles.
The specialist is blunt: “This habit to avoid for the brain is staying late at night on your phone or laptop, especially in bed.” This phenomenon even has a name: “doomscrolling”, or the act of compulsively scrolling through online content, often negative information, without being able to stop. Checking your smartphone in bed has become an evening reflex for millions of people. A quick scroll through social media, some news, some messages – nothing too bad it seems. However, according to Dr. Rab Nawaz Khan, this habit is one of the worst that you can inflict on your brain at the end of the day.
The problem with night scrolling is twofold. On the one hand, the blue light emitted by screens inhibits the production of melatonin, the sleep hormone, signaling to the brain that it is still daytime. On the other hand, the content consumed – news, social networks, messages – keeps the brain in a state of alert and stimulates the production of cortisol, the stress hormone, at the precise moment when it should disconnect.
So, what does this specialist recommend? In an interview with Inc. Magazine, he first advises putting your phone outside the bedroom, or at least charging it on the other side of the room. Then, take a break from screen time 45 to 60 minutes before going to bed and replace it with a soothing ritual: a hot shower, a few stretches or a few pages of a book. The neurologist also advises favoring a fixed wake-up time rather than a perfect bedtime, because it is this which best anchors the biological clock.
Dr. Khan finally emphasizes a point that is often overlooked: snoring and daytime sleepiness should not be trivialized. Untreated sleep apnea represents, he says, “one of the most easily correctable threats to brain health.” If these symptoms are present, it is advisable to talk to your doctor.
