You spend nine hours a day on your office computer. You check Instagram in the elevator. You scroll through Twitter while you wait for your boyfriend to show up for dinner. You answer texts during commercial breaks of The Good Place. You check Insta Stories one more time (OK, three more times) before bed.
No, this isn’t an episode of Black Mirror—it’s your life. And the younger you are, the more likely you are to have your entire day ruled by technology. College students send an average of 60 to 100 text messages a day. And the more texts you send, the more likely you are to fall victim to a new, embarrassing condition: sleep texting.
A study published in the Journal of American College Health followed 372 college students from two universities—a whopping 25 percent reported sleep texting, aka sending a text message after falling asleep. But the most surprising part? 70 percent of these sleep texters had no memory of doing it! It wasn’t until they checked their text message history the next morning that they realized they’d been typing some really weird stuff at odd hours.
There’s even a Twitter hashtag (#sleeptexting) devoted to the phenomenon. Hilarious sleep-text messages include: “Lips I dripped it,” “I legittt wish veggird were enough to fuelme,” and “It means Girls tonight. It I 10.” The study notes that mostly, the sleep texts are garbled messages as opposed to actual words, which is thankfully a lot less embarrassing than accidentally sleep-texting your ex a Shakespeare love sonnet.
