‘Sleep Texting’ Is Now a Thing Among Teenagers

Being a teenager is a perilous time in one's life as a not-quite fully developed brain will cause the teen to make all kinds of questionable decisions.

Now thanks to a new phenomenon called sleep-texting, the teenager can even make these bad decisions while they are catching z's.

According to a study by Elizabeth Dowdell, a professor at Villanova University, more and more of the high school set are responding to or even initiating text messages when they are half-asleep.

"The phone will beep, they’ll answer the text,' Dowdell explained. 'They’ll either respond in words or gibberish."

It's when they actually make sense that they get themselves in trouble, especially when communicating with somebody they are or would like to be intimately involved with.

Like with sleep-walkers, sleep-texters rarely remember what they have done the next morning.

Aside from overstepping boundaries, if somebody is sleep-texting it also means the person isn't getting a good night of rest, and sleep deprivation in teens can lead to obesity, depression and poor grades.

The solution to all this is simple enough: Don't sleep next to a cell phone with the ringer and alerts turned on.

Good luck getting a teenager to follow that advice.