Live data from Hacker News

School smartphone ban results in better sleep and improved mood: study

york.ac.uk

211–220 of 706 posts

Re: School smartphone ban results in better sleep and improved mood: study

#211

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yeah so the smartphones and socials can be difficult addictions to shake, but this is the flip side of it: when you do put them aside for an extended period of time you often see your productivity absolutely go through the roof. I started sticking my phone in my bag or in another room during my afternoon work session and my productivity with that time doubled, in terms of actual output - tasks completed, lines of cod…

Damn, I should get my smartphone out of the bag and start using it, and develop a TikTok habit. Then I can put it away again, and my productivity will double! Which is to say that I find this claim highly unlikely. You're very lucky to have such immense latent productivity that was just waiting for the smartphone dam to burst.

You can choose not to believe me if you want. Yes, turning the phone off doubled my productivity.

I can't imagine why you wouldn't believe this, if you've ever had coworkers, and observed them spending half their time on their phone at work.

It's a distraction which hampers sustained attention and deeper thinking - as well as eats up actual minutes of time, some raw percentage of your work hours inevitably goes into garbage content on the phone instead.

I find the people who are skeptical about the idea that the phone frustrates doing deeper thinking, are often the ones who have never done it. This is why they don't see the value in it.

Re: School smartphone ban results in better sleep and improved mood: study

#212

> Interestingly, the research didn’t show significant improvements in cognitive ability; the phone ban group showed a modest 3% boost in working memory, and there were no improvements in sustained attention. Researchers suggest that these results might mean that changes in cognitive ability could take longer than the study period of 21 days to materialise. Notice how they had decided beforehand what they were going t…

I’m not a scientist in this field, but I would have been very surprised to have seen a difference in cognitive ability this quickly. I’ve always felt that we wouldn’t recover from the negative impacts of phone addiction very quickly, if ever, after several years of addiction to doom scrolling, social media feeds, and the short bursts of 10-second videos. I wish more real research in this field was being done, so that…

> I’m not a scientist in this field, but I would have been very surprised to have seen a difference in cognitive ability this quickly.

Not sure.

I worked with a science team that had found very strong cognitive improvements in the short term (~2 weeks) after improving sleep quality. Though, study participants were mostly middle aged and elderly.

Re: School smartphone ban results in better sleep and improved mood: study

#213

> Interestingly, the research didn’t show significant improvements in cognitive ability; the phone ban group showed a modest 3% boost in working memory, and there were no improvements in sustained attention. Researchers suggest that these results might mean that changes in cognitive ability could take longer than the study period of 21 days to materialise. Notice how they had decided beforehand what they were going t…

[deleted]

Re: School smartphone ban results in better sleep and improved mood: study

#214
post #26
post #9

Forcing every adult to exercise 30 minutes a day would probably also have positive health outcomes. But would that be a good enough reason to introduce such a policy?

Funnily there are some Japanese and Chinese companies forcing employees to do aerobic in the morning

I think the Japanese ones are more about team building and stretching before physical labour jobs, and less about cardiovascular health.

Re: School smartphone ban results in better sleep and improved mood: study

#215

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You start with a hypothesis and then you test it.

And then you find it was wrong, and you keep it, and make protestations.

I’ve seen the same thing in many A/B tests

Re: School smartphone ban results in better sleep and improved mood: study

#216

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Or if they just had parents controlling them?

I read somewhere that being the only kid without smartphone access is worse (for mental health) than giving your kid a smartphone. I.e. there needs to be consensus among parents.

> I read somewhere that being the only kid without smartphone access is worse (for mental health) than giving your kid a smartphone.

What is definition of worse in context of mental health? Can free and open-source devices help or proprietary software is inevitable?

Re: School smartphone ban results in better sleep and improved mood: study

#217
post #76

> challenged a group of Year 8 pupils to give up their smartphones completely for 21 days. It was not a ban during school. It was complete phone abstinence. The result was that the kids got an entire additional hour of sleep! Perhaps this could be replicated just by putting phones away at night.

> Perhaps this could be replicated just by putting phones away at night. Sort of like how people addicted to gambling would probably save a lot of money if they had just a little more will power.

Those are 8 year olds. So there is at least the option that parents take the phone away at night.

Re: School smartphone ban results in better sleep and improved mood: study

#218
post #46
post #9

Forcing every adult to exercise 30 minutes a day would probably also have positive health outcomes. But would that be a good enough reason to introduce such a policy?

"Adult" being the crucial word here. I also can't tell adults to eat veggies but I can my kids :)

Say what you like about Noam Chomsky, but I recall him once saying that it is OK to cover children as their parent, presumably to build good habits. Thinking back about my childhood, I am sure that my parents did similar, to much benefit to me as an adult!

Re: School smartphone ban results in better sleep and improved mood: study

#219

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You start with a hypothesis and then you test it.

And then you find it was wrong, and you keep it, and make protestations.

they found it was invalid in the short term, for this particular study. the long term is still an open question. which is why they’re pointing that out.

saying “we thought this would happen, it didn’t, but maybe there’s just something to do with our study that meant we disnt see the result that confirms our hypothesis” is a perfectly valid conclusion.

Re: School smartphone ban results in better sleep and improved mood: study

#220
post #76

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Perhaps this could be replicated just by putting phones away at night. Sort of like how people addicted to gambling would probably save a lot of money if they had just a little more will power.

Those are 8 year olds. So there is at least the option that parents take the phone away at night.

Year 8 is 12-13 years old
Post reply on HN