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Earlier quoted context omitted.
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?
LED backlight might. If no backlight probably fine.
and many spend 8 hours at work in front a screen :(
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.
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 co…
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 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…
> I use my phone on a morning for Duolingo 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...
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."
TL;DR: Go outside, touch grass
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.
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.
What do you do instead of TV/Computer before bed?
/r/nosurf is a good start (but isn't particularly a high quality sub)
“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 m…
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 fo…