Too much Facebooking could be a cause of insufficient sleep. The University of Pittsburgh School of Medicine researchers conducted a study, suggesting that heavy social media use may cause havoc with your sleep patterns.

Earlier studies have discovered that use of tech gadgets like computers and smartphones could mess with the sleep of adolescents and children.

The Pitt researchers focused mainly at young adults and discovered that the people who said that they spend a lot of time on Facebook, Google Plus, Instagram, Snapchat, YouTube, Twitter, Reddit, Tumblr, Pinterest, Vine or LinkedIn have more chances of reporting sleep disturbances.

In a news release, lead author Jessica C. Levenson, a postdoctoral researcher in Pitt's Department of Psychiatry, said, “This is one of first pieces of evidence that social media use really can impact your sleep. And it uniquely examines association between social media use and sleep among young adults who are, arguably, first generation to grow up with social media”.

Levenson and her colleagues sampled 1,788 adults in the US, in the age group 19 to 32, using questionnaires. They discovered that on average, the participants spent just more than hour per day on social media and checked social media accounts 30 times in seven days. Over 50% of the sampled individuals reported that they were suffering from medium or high levels of sleep disturbance.

The individuals who had have the highest chances of reporting sleep disturbances visited their social media accounts most frequently across the week, or spent most of the time online during the day.

It isn’t clear so far that whether social media use is accountable for keeping people up at night, or they were using social media because they weren’t able to sleep, or both? According to the researchers, further study is required to address that question.