“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.”
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.
This sounds like hocus pocus to me, along the lines of the claim that phone alert tones activate the "love centre" of the brain. Just so happens that the "love centre" is also the "vomiting centre" along with a load of other stuff. I'd treat this hand-wavy claim with the same kind of skepticism - your counter-example is an excellent one. I agree that looking at a phone first thing in the morning is a bad idea, but for very different reasons.
I got into "deep work" a while ago, keeping my internet off until noon every day. It blew my mind how calm and focused I was when I didn't fill my head with nonsense first thing in the morning.
Agreed that justification sounds like rubbish. Especially when one of their stated alternatives is to read a book. Unless you’re reading a digital book through a projector, that too is an object close to the face.
Maybe if you attached googley eyes to your phone so your brain recognises it as a being? Worst thing my phone is gonna do in the morning is fall on my face and make me do a weird pouty lip airbag sort of move
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
Other things that are regularly close to my face: my glasses, several pillows in my bed, my fork as I eat, my children as I hug them.
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.
Best thing I’ve done is configure my iphone to not ring but just softly vibrate for calls/texts with “custom taps” and removed any “pending notifications” app badges to avoid this sense ouf urgency. Only thing left is silent breaking news from the Guardian and app notifications on the Lock Screen I can quickly glance at and discard in a tap.
That quote made me lose interest in anything that article had to say. It's such a ridiculous claim to say that everything that is close to my face is automatically registered as a threat, and I bet that 99.99% of things that regularly gets close to peoples faces (even disregarding smartphones from that statistic) are actually not threats at all. I don't think it makes evolutionary sense at all since it would cause us to perceive our babies and food as threats too.
Either that quote is taken wildly out of context or the interviewed therapist is full of shit.
This strikes me as likely over extrapolating from weak or shaky data. I highly doubt that objects close to you are generally registered as threats. that's absurd, and completely dependent on context, etc. No parent views their baby from a foot away as a threat. The phone is a different context as well, and might be a thread, but certainly not in the general sense.
Yeah, sometimes I put a morning banana by my bed, and I'm pretty sure my body doesn't treat it is a threat.
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."
Other than sounding "bad for you" for some reason to some people, what's wrong with waking up with a threat? Like why would that inherently be bad for you? Nobody explained that in the article and it's taken at face value.
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.
The problem is that basically nothing that happens on the phone is something you can deal with more effectively with a dose of stress hormones. Unless there is a text message that says you suddenly have to literally run somewhere and/or literally fight somebody, you will "deal with" it by like...posting more stuff yourself, and possibly not even that.
> You wouldn’t want to wake up and look a bear in the face every morning.
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.
> 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.
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?
As someone who has woken up to looking a bear in the face while camping, I can say with 100% confidence that on a physiological level these are not the same thing.
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.
The author's fairly active elsewhere online, looks like she's a "Health Coach" at UC San Diego with a MS in Kinesiology.
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.
Yeah and it’s not hard to come up with a hypothesis with reverse causation: people struggling with mental health tend to (on average) live more solitary lives with more screen time.
I'm not very confident about the quality of this study... It already begins like this:
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.
Jesus, isn't it at least a bit obvious? OK so let's call it 'interactive screen time'. No, reading ebook doesn't count, as long as you don't keep switching to something else frequently. It will mess up your eyes worse than physical book, but that's about it.
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.
A bit tangential but how does a digital book mess up your eyes? Or a physical one.
I don’t think reading has any effect on your eyesight.
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.
I'd guess that you can equate "screen time" to "smartphone use" in most of the population but here. Similar to what people are using the screen for.
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.
A huge number of people are professional screen-users. Almost every office job, and quite a few otherwise. I probably spend more time on my work laptop than my phone, and I'm pretty bad for using my phone a lot.
Regarding the recommendation to not spend the first hour of the day in front of the screen. I found the other way around more helpful: Not spending the last 1-2 hours in front of screens. This helps me to get better sleep. In the morning, I find it not so difficult and screen time (+coffee) helps me to wake up slowly.
No screen before bedtime/no screens in bed is like the easiest health improvement hack that anyone can implement.
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.
When the pandemic forced me to work from home, incorporating a 20 minute morning walk in the neighborhood before work was one of the first things I added to my routine. It's great to make the 'transition' and also starts up the body faster.
I try and avoid screens before sleep but also use a Kindle for reading before sleeping - wondering if the e-ink displays count as screen time in studies like this?
From anecdotal experience, it makes essentially no difference.
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.
I think both make sense. Although I go through phases of following it. I find that in the first few hours of the morning, I prefer to limit inputs to things I don't have control over but instead achieve some small to do list items (starting with making bed). Things I know I can get done and build some momentum. A few hours of productivity gives me enough momentum to take in external inputs.
I am the first one to wake up (with an alarm) in my house on weekdays. I also find the light from the phone actually helps me wake up slowly. If I don't wake up early (get ready myself) and get the kids ready for school, it'll have a cascading effect on the whole day, so screen time works for me for that purpose. And it's usually only 10-15 minutes max. In that time, I don't see or do work stuff. Since, we have family around the world, I usually just go through the family chat messages, some light social etc in that time. I get why it's a bad habit but I also have a reason why it works. On weekends, of course the alarms are off and I wake up when I wake up.
Article and its linked studies fail to establish a causal relationship. Put another way the findings can also be summarized as, "broken people tend to have these habits."
> 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?
> Then, a reverse of the above at 6am the following day.
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.
I wonder if any of these studies distinguish between people who use screentime more productively. I use my phone on a morning for Duolingo and logging my workouts. That's quite different to doomscrolling, but I still wonder if it's good or bad.
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?
I imagine, like most things, it's on a spectrum. No screen (for the first hour of the day) is probably better than Duolingo, which is better than doomscrolling. I also imagine it varies between people. I can get overstimulated by screen use, so I feel much better if I don't use it for the first and last hours of the day, but I'm not always good at keeping to that rule!
I think that there are a lot of issues with the way Duolingo motives people through unhealthy incentives, but research does show that it works. Though it will need to be used in conjunction with other methods of learning to be truly helpful. But then, why would you learn a language if you’re not going to actively use it?
That's too dismissive in my view. Duolingo isn't as good as in-person lessons, but it's still way better than nothing. I'd also argue that grammar exercises are cripplingly boring for most people, so if the choice is not learning or grammar exercises they'd choose not learning, which is worse. I'd also argue that you're only talking strictly about learning language in the most efficient way, but missing out on the fact that if you can make it fun, the enjoyment in itself is a valid reason for doing something.
I think all the activities mentioned stimulate the little dopamine rushes; Duolingo and workout loggers both gamify progress, where getting the points or progression in those apps is more important than what they're intended to quantify. Doomscrolling will get you the dopamine rush of the various emotional ups and downs it provides.
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.
Readit News
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...
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
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.
I hate phone alerts with all my soul. I wish they never existed as a concept.
Or why people who fall asleep cuddling their partners wake up in terror.
/s because Poe's law.
My BS-meter also went off on this.
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.
> 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.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Just-so_story
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."
Someone sleeps alone.
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.
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.
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?
That guy has lived god knows how many years being blissfully unaware of the existence of furries.
Deleted Comment
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.?
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.
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.
/r/nosurf is a good start (but isn't particularly a high quality sub)
Deleted Comment
> 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?
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?
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?
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...
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.
https://www.researchgate.net/publication/379288394_The_Effec...
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.