Junior Drew Lindholm sleeps with his cellphone next to him every night and constantly finds himself waking up to check his text messages.  

“When I hear my phone vibrate, I wake up right away. I have to,” he said. “There’s a sense of excitement,” Lindholm said. “It’s almost like a present. You don’t know who it is yet, but it makes you anticipate who or what it could be.”

University of Rhode Island researchers found that students are losing an average of 45 minutes of sleep each week because of their cellphones. The findings show that one of the most common reasons students feel compelled to answer their phones at night is the fear of missing out on something.

Sophomore Andrea Brown feels attached to her phone. She always checks her phone before going to bed only to find herself waking up in the middle of the night to answer text messages or emails.

“I feel like if it’s not close to me, I could miss out on something important that’s happening. So if it’s not by me, I always quickly try to find out where it is,” she said. “Whether it’s my calendar or email, every way I keep track of my life is on my phone.”

Carol Bruess, communications and journalism professor and family studies director, said studies are starting to tap into how technology is creating new patterns of behavior. She believes that technology creates opportunities to stay connected in ways that could never have been done before.

However, Bruess feels the connection to cell phones could be unhealthy for students socially, physically and psychologically.

“We as human beings can only take in so many messages, and so to have (them) available to us at every moment of the day… we’re starting to find that not all of us do that well,” Bruess said. “Sometimes I think we privilege the excitement and the possibility of connecting with someone else over the things that really make us healthy, such as sleeping, eating and exercising.”

Psychology professor Roxanne Prichard said that college students need eight and a half hours of sleep each night, but on average, are only getting about seven hours.

“I have a small baby and whenever she is sleeping, I never feel that I am fully asleep because I am always kind of listening to see if she is having a problem or crying. I think that students do the same,” Prichard said. “They never fully fall asleep because they want to hear the texts come in, so they never feel that sense of deep sleep.”

Junior Allie Koram believes that it is normal for students to sleep next to their phones.

“This is sad, but my whole life is on my phone,” Koram said. “Sometimes it keeps me up at night because I’ll be checking things on my phone like Facebook when I probably shouldn’t.”

Anna Tu can be reached at tu978399@stthomas.edu.