Exercise can backfire in terms of sleep. A bit earlier in the day and it's great. But not right before bed, at least not in my experience.
How do you think people achieve the goal of 50 books in a year, for example?
I hated going to bed as a child (all that wasted time!) but my parents cleverly said I could read in bed if I wanted to stay up.
I usually fell asleep within an hour or two anyway, and I ended up reading a huge number of books, which served me well.
My wife and I sometimes read together before bed now. It definitely aids sleep.
As a matter of fact I'll put my phone away and get my book out.
Good night! :)
/r/nosurf is a good start (but isn't particularly a high quality sub)
Anyway, LED backlight shouldn't be a problem if it's not white light. Best to have some additional light in the room though, to reduce contrast / eye strain between the screen and the background.
(And then it wouldn't be that surprising I don't think if we figured out splints long before anything you might call medicine.)
You can switch out broken bones for „being dragged from the campfire into the dark and devoured“ - another natural occurrence that I gladly live without
(I think the science behind blue light being bad for us is still up for debate, but it's hard for me to ignore the amount of anecdata I've heard, including my own experience using flux and the like)
Would be interested in studies refuting this.
I read for an hour or two before bed every night. Paper, kindle, or my current iPad mini make no real difference to my sleep.
Dim lights, relaxing, and trying to clear my brain of distractions other than what I’m reading make more of a difference. It’s almost but not quite like meditation.
With that said, anecdotally I can vouch for the "no screen in the first hour" suggestion the article is making. I've been working for home for the past few years, and I feel more sluggish since I just move to my laptop first thing in the morning, instead of having that preparation-breakfast-commute routine. Granted I live in a walkable city so commute doesn't mean what it means in SV, but it's the same idea.
A book would not tick any of those marks
An ereader would account for looking into a light source only if you use background illumination. And even then, it can be set to emit significantly less light than a smartphone screen, especially in the blue frequencies
I see a simple solution: a 6-hour workday to bump that excessive screen time up to 4 hours.
Seriously, though, I wonder if people who do not work with a PC are less affected.
>however research shows that adult brains are also negatively impacted by excessive screen time, defined as more than two hours a day outside of work hours.
My first thought was it's funny that 8 hours at work is fine but 2 hours at home isn't.
1. Turn Mobile Data Off
2. Turn Bluetooth Off
3. Turn WiFi Off
4. Turn AppleTV off (this one is fun because it can cut off a show mid-sentence)
5. Set brightness to 10%.
Then, a reverse of the above at 6am the following day.
Normal phone signal is still enabled for any emergency calls, but most apps become useless without the internet.
I understand that's not the case, but I want to imagine your AppleTV coming back to life at 6am every morning, resuming the show mid-sentence at 100% volume. Instant alarm clock.
Curious question, up until age 18 did you have a similar upbringing?
This is interesting to me. It does make some evolutionary sense but at the same time, i wake up every morning and look at my girlfriends face, hopefully that does not subconsciously trigger the same response.
That said, the "sky before screens" idea has been rummaging in my mind since i first heard about it https://www.cyclingweekly.com/news/sky-before-screens-has-ma...
Social media, doom scrolling, candy crush, etc. are all high-dopamine activities. After you engage in these activates for a while, then stop, you're left at a relative dopamine deficiency, which your brain abhors. It attempts to rectify the deficiency by encouraging you to engage in high-dopamine activities, which you experience as being 'distracted' from the relatively low-dopamine-rewarded work you're trying to focus on. If you avoid engaging in high-dopamine activities in the morning, your brain WILL be more amenable to focus on low-dopamine-rewarded work.
Read Dopamine Nation for a handy primer on this.
The rule was to spend at least the first hour offline, but I'd find myself getting so much done, I'd want to keep going, and usually extend it to 3 or 4.
In fact I was so productive during this time, I found myself looking actually looking forward to work the next morning.
My BS-meter also went off on this.
Having said that I was washing my face this morning and in a moment of fight or flight I did rip the washcloth to shreds with my teeth
This was completely ignorant of Apple’s history of first using the numbered dot over the Apple Mail stamp icon that looked like a postmark.
I’m really skeptical of all these experts.
(1) https://www.nytimes.com/2018/02/27/magazine/red-dots-badge-p...
I hate phone alerts with all my soul. I wish they never existed as a concept.
Of course, my children can also jam their face into mine when they're being all manic and running around and that's not fun
But clearly, there is a big difference between "things I choose to put in front of my face" and "things that appear in front of my face outside of my own agency".
Similar to how you can't tickle yourself.
That wasn't even hard to figure out. First 15 minutes of the day, haven't gotten out of bed yet, with my phone in my face.
I also find it interesting how these sorts of articles never talk about reading books. I find that reading novels too much can also give me feelings of being stuck, not wanting to do anything else, just trundling along doing the same activity over and over again. It's how I got through all 9 books in The Expanse series in only a couple of months.
The problem isn't screens or light or not seeing the sky. It's over indulgence in consumption. It's just plain ol' addiction.
Or why people who fall asleep cuddling their partners wake up in terror.
/s because Poe's law.
> i wake up every morning and look at my girlfriends face, hopefully that does not subconsciously trigger the same response
Giggled out loud, funniest thing I heard all day.
Do you mean in her or in you?
Does it? It sounds total bs to me.
"When you have an object close to your face, it's registered as food, because you need to get close to your meal to eat it."
"When you have an object close to your face, it's registered as love, because parents needs to get close to their child to look after them."
When you have a statement that you can bend in an arbitrary way and still make some sense out of it, it's nonesense.
Seeking a charitable explanation, "near things are a threat" is a garbled form of "near things cause physiological arousal"?
That more-inclusive version would then cover cases like "delicious fruit" and "scary spider" and "the thing I put down next to me as a reminder to do something with it as soon as I got up."
I do think objects can be affective, but one would never willingly put scary stuff near your bed, unless you’re into that sort of thing.
Now your phone can be threatening if you always expect the worst, e.g. your employer constantly prodding you with messages , but then you have bigger problems.
this person is living in the year 3200 with moves as smart as this one
[0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_o7qjN3KF8U
[1] https://www.mayoclinic.org/diseases-conditions/delayed-sleep...
Yeah, exactly. If my adult brain can distinguish between my wife's face and a bear, or my pillow and bear, why can't it distinguish between my phone and a bear? Plus, the phone is an object I hold in my hand. Is TFA saying that other objects I hold in my hand and bring close to my face so I can get a good look at them register as threats?
It reads like nonsense to me.
I wonder if this theory, as bullshit as it probably is, is on to something?
Someone sleeps alone.
That guy has lived god knows how many years being blissfully unaware of the existence of furries.
Sure I would! If I’m alive every day when I look at that bear, that’s a pretty good sign they don’t mean to harm me. In fact, sleeping next to a bear sounds like great protection from other predators, and quite warm and cosy too, like a giant cat.
I'm pretty convinced my cat would eat me when I'm late with her lunch if she could.
Either that quote is taken wildly out of context or the interviewed therapist is full of shit.
Not what they display, how they operate or any other detail. No. Screens. A thing that displays information.
What's more important is being conscious of what we are doing with screens at what times. I stop using my computer after 7pm typically, no social media before bed or upon waking
What's wrong with "activating your fight or flight"? I could easily see some pop-sci book being written about how activating your fight or flight boosts testosterone or makes you more aware during your next tasks or whatever. Stress that makes you anxious is correlated with some diseases, but stress that you can deal with can many times be beneficial.
There's also the category of people who stew infront of a TV all day - it's unsurprising that these people will have lower cognitive functions, but is that because they don't have the drive or ambition to do anything else? Is that comparable to someone who comes back from work tired and watches 3 hours of Netflix while doomscrolling?
Duolingo is extremely passive. you're not learning a language, you're learning how to answer correctly on an app.
It's a lot more time efficient to do exercises from a grammar. But... It doesn't feel as good. Which is exactly the point.
Edit: yes, I am dismissive because I've tried it and seen that its obviously a scam, in the sense that it's sold as a fun way of learning but it's actually just a fun way of not learning.
I disagree. Duolingo makes you feel that you are being productive and you are learning (when you actually don't).
That is worse than nothing, because when you do nothing you know you are being indulgent, will feel bad about it, and react.
Duolingo is like a candy wrapped in package that says "this is a healthy vegetable".
https://www.researchgate.net/publication/379288394_The_Effec...
This reminded me of that story by Feynman where he meets a painter that claims we can make orange paint with just red and white.
That research you link has been conducted by Xiangying Jiang and Bozena Pajak (first and last authors). If you want to contact them about how totally objective and unbiased they are, here are their emails:
I mean I'm guilty as well, I often browse reddit mindlessly, often r/all which opens up the floodgates (although it's not really 'all' anymore, it used to include porn as well and subreddits can opt-out I believe).
I agree but I just find it too useful to be able to see what my workout is going to be and what I did last time, as well as my progress on different exercises. The alternative would be printing out my workout app before each workout, filling it in with pen and paper and then inputting it back into the app later. I'd love an alternative.
It sounds like you're using the phone for a workout plan though... Nothing is perfect
I suppose it's just the worst I'll put up with / I don't generally use those kinds of apps, but if that can seem like nothing to people...
This is gonna come off as obnoxious but I can't help it, whenever my partner and I go out for a nice dinner we're unable to comprehend how literally every other couple spends basically the entire meal on their phones. Sometimes one of them even has a little phone holder and just watches videos while they eat.
This plus absolutely mad levels of Instagram engagement makes me feel like we're at a critical era of phone addiction. You thought Americans were taking to IG and threads hoh boy go look up some Threads posts about the typhoon.
Anyway when I use reddit, IG, and even this site too much I am unhappy, and yet I continue the behavior. Clearly addictive relationship. Am I just sick and have an unhealthy relationship with my phone and other people just use and enjoy their phones? Or am I just more aware of the harm it causes me?
I used to play a game when out to dinner: If there’s another table with two people and you notice one of them getting up (likely to go to the bathroom), see how long it takes the other person to take out their phone. It stopped being fun pretty fast because everyone did it instantly.
> Or am I just more aware of the harm it causes me?
It’s that one.
So it was definitely a thing pre-modern-tech too. Plenty of people used to read the newspaper on the can (and in the Soviet Union you would then use it to wipe afterwards - extra efficiency!)
Evidence suggests that chronic sensory stimulation via excessive exposure to screen time may affect brain development in negative ways. Excessive smartphone use may increase the risk [...]
Do they consider "screen time" only to be "smartphone use"? Is it better to use a tablet? Or PC / laptop? What if I use a 6.7" screen with my computer? Does it count as "bad" screen time?
Also, do they take into account what you do on said screen? Reading a book, learning something or binging tiktok videos, watching the facade people put up on facebook / insta don't sound the same to me.
To include so many variations of screen would complicate a lot the study, and without a prior about why it should matter, you are probably safer starting with something more homogeneous.
Presumably you don’t think that all the white collar workers who aren’t in tech spend all of their work-hours scrolling tiktok/etc.?
I'm fairly confident this is not a safe assumption.
> To include so many variations of screen would complicate a lot the study
How so, though?
> without a prior about why it should matter, you are probably safer starting with something more homogeneous.
That's not very scientific, is it? There's no prior as to why it shouldn't matter, which is what the authors seem to think.
I can see the proper cancer that screens cause to small children development. Heck, some parents are proud how 'digital' their kids are, like scrolling through social media videos is some hard earned skill only few posses. What I see is failed parenting, and I call it like that. Then you look at the mood swings of those kids, how they behave socially, what they eat etc. and its often a sad story. Then you look at parents glued to phones themselves, often overweight, living unhappy unfulfilled lives, and it starts making sense (broad generalization here of course, but I see it very often among peers & a bit younger).
Kids ain't adults for sure but screen time, if not done for actual work or learning, eats time we could be actually doing something with our life. Relaxing, sporting, socializing, learning new skills, making ourselves properly happy. That ain't happening in front of screen, any screen. The energy recharge and 'soul' regeneration that me and everybody else I know experience in nature and wilderness can't be achieved in any other way. Screen time also sets unrealistic expectations on how 'baseline' of normal daily life should be with its always-stimulated-neocortex as such, no wonder kids have attention issues with 'boring' stuff that regular life simply is.
I may be a luddite re this despite being software dev, but in this case happy to be one since I've figured my path to happy fulfilled life, and it sure as hell doesn't need more screen time, nor any made up justifications for some form of addiction to such.
People are quick nowadays (or always have been) to bring out the good old „todays kids are rotten to the core“ trope - just because it’s now you who is old and doesn’t get how the world moved on, doesn’t mean it’s any different to the centuries of complaining about the youth before us.
I wasted thousands of hours as a kid on unproductive stuff - I don’t see it as being much different to what kids do today.
Reading can absolutely have an impact on the eyes. Close distance reading as well as lack of natural light seem to be conditions that can favor e.g. myopia.
In general it’s good to take care of your eyes, like you do for the rest of the body and doing anything 8h+ without pause is bad.
But concluding that there is some kind of danger associated with reading is nonsense. Almost anything else you do is more dangerous.
Not convinced that the study you posted is evidence of reading being dangerous: >This is a cross-sectional study and therefore causal relationship could not be determined. The data analyzed in the study were drawn from a questionnaire study conducted about 40 years ago
Having read Michel Desmurget's "La Fabrique du crétin digital", this sentence was moderately triggering. Has anyone here read it? I don't know if it's been translated to English yet, and I know it received some very bitter reviews [which mostly seemed beside the picture he was trying to construct from the studies he used, it seemed to me]. However, it did seem to attempt to take the problem seriously.
Here is an interesting review: https://www.frontiere.eu/children-and-excessive-smartphone-u...
Excessive artificial light (which means ao screentime) is the source of all health problems.
An example of how negative impact on the brain is backed:
https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s11469-019-00182-2
From the abstract: > we systematically identified articles meeting the following inclusion criteria: published in English between January 1999–July 2019; human or animal subjects; primary and secondary sources including original research, systematic reviews, meta-analyses, scoping reviews, and narrative reviews. Primary search terms focused on “smartphone,” “mental health,” “substance use,” “neurodevelopment,” and “neurodegeneration”; secondary search terms focused on “social media,” “anxiety,” “cannabis,” and “dementia”.
They basically went fishing for studies that focus on the negative impacts, came back with enough content and packaged it as a meta-study. This sure could show some negative traits potentially associated with screen time. But that's very far from justifying TFA's title, worded as a causation, and not some random association when singling out pathological subjects.
This isn't science journalism, it's closer to influencer health blogging. My impression is that the author doesn't have a background in technical writing and probably wrote this for an audience different from the typical HN crowd.
i wake up, turn off my phones alarm.
then i get up, go wake up my kid, take a shower while he eats breakfast and we're off after that.
This is very normal for a lot of people I know irl (at least those within my generation).
but that 8-10 of work screen? can't be bad! smh
If they mean "phones" say "phones". If they mean "social media" say "social media". Oh but then all the bullshit about stuff being close to one's face wouldn't make "sense" (I wear glasses, I must be constantly terrorising myself.)
It may be a very slight overreaction but my first thought is that everybody in the entire faculty that produced these findings should be re-employed doing something actually useful like grocery deliveries.
Some people are mentally challenged, I give you that. But why is this projected onto everyone else? How about these people get help, instead of trying to convince the wolrd that X is bad?
The same holds for just about anything, like reading books.
I would expect that all these factors play a role in the effects on the brain.
Ok I wonder to what extent the flight / fight response can be unconscious and not noticed
And I get that FoF can be triggered. But from seeing the phone it can't be nearly as much as with seeing a bear coming at you can it?
I'm also curious what kinds of objects do that, and why does the phone do it and not something else?
Like would reading the news trigger that? Playing a game of chess?
I think I will ask Perplexity AI on those later
For instance:
> Another study found that adults who watched television for five hours or more per day had an increased risk of developing brain-related disease like dementia, stroke, or Parkinson’s
So what? It doesn't mean tv is going to make you have dementia, stroke or parkinson. This prove nothing, it could be causality but also correlation.
Aka, you have issue so you watch tv instead of going out.
The whole article reads like pseudo-science.
"This rule suggests that individuals look at something 20 feet away for 20 seconds every 20 minutes of the day."
Now clearly this is a rule that is impossible to realistically meet or maintain but yet the seed of anxiety is planted in the reader that they are not following yet another "rule" for better health (in this case eye health).
That is a really stupid advise, it only for a few months a year. The rest of the time it's dark when I get up and will remain dark for more than an hour.
I'm not actually advocating that (I kind of like it but it's also a bit incompatible with interacting with a society not living such a way, to varying degrees depending on your job, family, etc.) I just wonder if that would be the author's response - well what are you doing up over an hour before sunrise.
It might be good thing to do, but as general advise, it's has a pretty obviously flaw. That is NEVER address by the type of people who brings us this advise and to me that hurt credibility.
"Get sun light into your eyes first thing in the morning", perfect, I'll just sleep until 10.
I do programming amongst other creative computer based things- the thing I've noticed between me and the normal phone/tablet human- is the ability to focus. I can focus for hours, weeks, months, years on tasks etc.
Everyone around me feels like focus wimps- they focus for 15 minutes or an hour and are proud of themselves and want some kind of pat on the back. They even use apps on the devices to "help them focus" its hilarious. I don't use any medications at all or nootropics/drugs for focus either btw.
These devices destroyed peoples ability to focus amongst a myriad of other things. The solution to me seems very simple. Stop using them BUT thats like telling a heroin addict to just put down the needle. They can't do it- and neither can you (shrugs)
Also using phones has always seemed nerdy/dorky- no matter who the person is- when I see someone using a mobile phone they seem like a dweeb- like whatever aura they had fades away and they just become cringey. It doesn't matter if their screen is cracked or what case they have- there is no way to be cool while using a mobile phone- just a sea of dorks with broken brains begging for more.
Before portable devices I always had a computer from age 10 when I got my first 8 bit computer. I was glued to screens ever since.
I never had problems with focusing on tasks. In fact when I have a particularly interesting thing I'm doing, unless I actively remind myself to have breaks I'll forget to eat and drink for many hours. So there's my anecdote :-)
Nothing nerdy about sitting behind a terminal emulator...
It's becoming more apparent to me that important traits are:
1) raising the threshold of discomfort that makes one want to task switch 2) the ability to avoid task switching immediately once the task becomes uncomfortable or difficult (or at least avoid task switching in a mindless way)
I find that impactful work often takes sustained periods of focus with some level of discomfort. (For example, watch chess grandmasters at work. Their behaviors of often are a mixture of grimaces, frowns and exasperated sighs.)
Having said that, I find taking a walk is often fruitful, and has a different valence/intentionality to a mindless task switch.
What do you mean by focusing on tasks for years ?
For instance does a parent get to say they focused on raising their kid for 10+ years ? Or can a accountant say they focused on keeping books straight for decades ?
Aside from that I feel what's lost in this argument is whether a specific task merited focus in the first place.
Let's say someone is watching a movie but decides after 10 min to look at TikTok instead, to then go cook some popcorn and ends up doing the laundry. Should we blame them for doing chores instead of staying focused on the meh movie in the first place ? And does getting easily distracted even matter if they're otherwise decent adults who do what's required from them to do ?
How is it possible you could make by as a working professional without ever using a mobile phone?
It's just so arbitrary
Many of work task done on screens are much longer like writing or editing document. Maybe something like iterative debugging or coding could also be partly harmful. Or chat messages...
You may as well measure an impact of looking at printed paper. What about the impact of the actual activity you're having? It is completely different to mindlessly watch TV, or a YouTube stream vs playing games (online or offline). Then within games there are more and less intellectual or dexterity based ones and so on. There is social interaction or just exploring the game world. And so on.
Well, I can feel it. It's subtle but especially in comparison to screen-less activities I can _feel_ that I am doing something that impairs my mental health. (Doom) scrolling, binging on youtube etc.
> Rather than looking at our phones upon waking, Loeffler recommends starting each morning looking at the horizon or an object outside and far away.
Looking at the sky - okay. But looking at the horizon? That's a bit unrealistic. I'd argue that you could also have a plant. And the first thing you do after waking up is watering it and checking its health. Just as an idea for folks like me who can't see the horizon from their apartment.
> Since the eyes are directly connected to the brain
The eyes are actually a part of the brain.
> This rule suggests that individuals look at something 20 feet away for 20 seconds every 20 minutes of the day.
This is one of those totally ridiculous health rules. Not even worth talking about it. My suggestion would be to embrace a more dynamic work style. I'm working in front of a computer - technically for 8 hours a day. But I'm walking around _all_ _the_ _time_. Not because I think I should - but because it just feels right.
> This study found that excessive screen time can hinder sleep, especially when looking at screens late at night.
This I can confirm 100%. I don't even think that the screen's light is the biggest issue. For me it's more the content I tend to read and consume lying in bed, half-tired.
> One of the biggest issues with picking up the phone right away in the morning is that when you have an object close to your face, it’s registered as a threat,” says Loeffler. “You wouldn’t want to wake up and look a bear in the face every morning. On a physiological level, it’s the same thing.
I call BS on that. There are many reasons why not to take up the phone first thing in the morning. In fact that is why I use a separate alarm-clock (no need to handle my phone right before bed time and no need to take it up right after waking up) and I put my phone into flight-mode. So, there won't even be any notifications irking me. But this theory feels like what "scientists" come up with just to come up with something.
Very shallow article but good reminder to again put a little attention to discipline around phone usage.
> excessive screen time, defined as more than two hours a day outside of work hours
Oh, is that how we define it?
What are work hours, how do my eyes and brain know then they've ended, and why does the author default to assuming that employers should have first rights on this apparently finite resource?
Why would "work hours" have anything to do with this?
They can't make it through a second paragraph before demonstrating that the thinking that contributed to this is garbage. Why would I read more?
Spoiler: I didn't.
For me, keeping a book next to my phone has been a game changer.
We recently built a whole feature in our screen time app around this concept. When we onboard users we ask them to select a number of "scroll replacements" — these are simple things you can substitute for scrolling, like going outside or reading.
The app will block you from scrolling and direct you towards a chosen replacement.
One I make the split second decision to pick up the book it's easy to stay there. That single moment of decision can make a big impact.
(I'm the founder of an app called Roots)
“Since the eyes are directly connected to the brain, Loeffler encourages us to think about our eye health to ensure overall brain health.”
My arm is also connected to the brain. We can argue the definition of direct. Warrant connects the evidence to the claim. This article lacks warrant in many places.