Studies from 30 years ago screamed about health and TV, corelating bad eating and sleeping patterns with screen time. Suddenly one article says that it's not true for new techs.
I'm really not convinced. Just because you are less passive in front of a smartphone or a laptop doesn't negate the screen effect.
I'm increasingly convinced the worst health effects of tech are mostly about sleep, with any secondary effects being negligible by comparison.
I'd challenge anyone who thinks they "just can't" sleep on a normal schedule to drop all light-emitting devices and all artificial lighting aside from a couple candles, a bit after sunset in the Winter, or at sunset in the Summer. See if you still can't, or if you just don't want to. Not that I blame individuals for it, as it's really damn hard to stay away from all this hyper-engaging stuff at night. I haven't been able to. But trying that for a couple weeks gave me some serious insight into the why of my lifetime of screwed-up sleep. It's incredibly bright nighttime lighting (try the candle thing and see if you aren't surprised at how obnoxiously and unnecessarily bright even a single 60w bulb is after) and screen-based media (TV on up) to blame, entirely.
Turns out if you light your house up like it's daytime, then put 1,000,000x the top-quality entertainment an emperor of yesteryear could hope to command on a given night right at your fingertips, it's very hard to sleep. Go figure. But that's what's overwhelmingly the norm now for most people's evenings.
Honestly, I think I'd rather take <X> years off the end of my life than cut out my favorite activities from the only hours of the day that are really mine to allocate. It's time I'm losing either way, and sacrificing those hours on the altar of better sleep now, when I'm the youngest I'll ever be, doesn't appeal to me at all.
Basically, any suggestion to improve sleep by boring myself to death for 6 hours is a non-starter, and the holier-than-thou attitude of people on the internet who do so is starting to annoy me.
> Basically, any suggestion to improve sleep by boring myself to death for 6 hours is a non-starter, and the holier-than-thou attitude of people on the internet who do so is starting to annoy me.
Sure, but the flip side is you get a whole lot of "I just can't sleep a normal number of hours at a normal time, I guess I'm just built differently" and... well, no, probably not. I mean maybe. But probably not. You just like Netflix or late-night hacking or video games or whatever, too much to get a healthy amount of sleep. So does everyone else, to varying degrees.
And it's less a trade against end-of-life years as a trade against your ability to remember what you did or learned today tomorrow, and much shorter term mental and physical health issues (harder time with weight and blood pressure, generally lower energy and happiness, and so on). Though yeah, go for it. Most of the rest of us do, too, just not because sleep is some really hard thing that people are bad at and ordinary daytime schedules are unreasonable and demanding like many special Internet snowflakes claim (Nb not accusing you of making any such claim), but because our homes are, 24/7, more entertaining and brighter than a mid-tier amusement park.
I don't find it faulty, I'm saying that many studies said the contrary for TV for decades. I'm saying that many current time studies say that blue light and intense white ligh affect sleep. I'm saying that nowadays screens are debated as a huge problem for focus and attention.
And so I'll wait for 30 new studies saying screens are fine before starting to ignore them and my personnal experience.
If everytime you have a new study you trust it 100%, you will have to change diet every other week.
> Studies from 30 years ago screamed about health and TV, corelating bad eating and sleeping patterns with screen time.
Since you're a computer scientist I suppose I don't need to remind you that correlation != causation.
People who already have bad eating habits and sleeping patterns for other reasons, might also be the kind of people who enjoy spending more time in front of 80s/90s TV.
That would assume it's something about a specific screen technology that have this effect, while my understanding is that it's about the concept beaming virtual information to your brain that causes the issue.
I can't make heads or tails of your last statement. Is there some sort of magical connection to the rest of the world that we have that twisted by looking at these terrible liquid crystal displays? Sounds more sentimental than anything.
Studies from 30 years ago screamed about health and TV, corelating bad eating and sleeping patterns with screen time. Suddenly one article says that it's not true for new techs.
I'm really not convinced. Just because you are less passive in front of a smartphone or a laptop doesn't negate the screen effect.