Study: Increase in sleep texting among students

You've heard sleep walking and sleep eating, but now there's sleep texting.

New research from Villanova University's College of Nursing shows that a growing number of adolescents and college students are reaching for the phones to text in the middle of the night.

More than a quarter of the students in the survey reported that they had texted in their sleep and a majority of them did not remember doing so.

The students who sleep text report that most of their messages are gibberish or nonsensical responses to questions.

Elizabeth B. Dowdell, PhD, RN, FAAN, professor of Nursing, is the lead author of the study, "Interrupted sleep: College students sleeping with technology," published in the Journal of American College Health.

"The majority of the sleep texting students had no memory of the texting behavior as well as who or what they texted," Dowdell says. "The lack of memory is not surprising as sleep research has found that people awakened after sleeping more than a few minutes are usually unable to recall the last few minutes before they fall asleep."