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

york.ac.uk

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

#301

Post by ArnoVW »

eastbound wrote: post #230
safety1st wrote: post #164

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…

By do you ruminate negative thoughts? That’s my excuse for keeping my phone playing at night: I’m single, and despite being a successful professional and trying hard at dating when I was younger, my private life is full of bad experiences. I think about it and get angry. Youtube masks it. Yes I’ve seen psychologists but no, really, they try to où the blame on me but every time it’s the others who bullied me. Anyway —…

Sometimes have the same issue (rumination).

I listen to podcasts and youtube science, tech ans history videos (with non exiting voices and without music or other sounds) to block out thoughts. It works. I guess audiobooks should work too.

Mind you I keep thinking that I should try meditation to build up my capacity at directing my thoughts, but with everything going on I can't seem to find the time.

Using my phone for anything else though (reading, watching videos) have the inverse effect and keep me awake.

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

#302

Post by gretch »

DrawTR wrote: post #262
andrei_says_ wrote: post #119

I bought something called brick which lets me lock some apps with a Bluetooth app. I have to walk to a different room and touch my phone to the little cube magneted to my fridge in order to unlock them. Just this extra friction has halved my screen time. No phone in bed no phone while I’m working and no phone on weekends while I’m bored. Instant improvement in mental clarity and quality of life.

For what it's worth, the product demands $50 for what is essentially a probably (not endorsing it!) find the NFC code online and just dump it to a tag of your own.

If you know how to do all of this, you probably make more than $100 per hour at your day job (maybe a lot more!).

In which case you can jump through all those hoops, or you can just go to work for 30 minutes and then buy it.

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

#303

Post by slavik81 »

andai wrote: post #128
gregwebs wrote: post #51

> 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.

I did a project once where I put my phone away before bed (switched off and in another room) and kept it off for the first few hours of the day, along with my wifi router. I usually got so much done during that time that I'd prefer to keep them off for a few more hours, even after I was "allowed" to turn them back on.

On the other hand, I locked my phone in a rental car and it took a week for them to mail it back to me. I was surprised, but I found that it made very little difference. I did not feel like I had any more time than usual.

The only real impact was that I was locked out of anything that required two-factor authentication.

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

#304

Post by ArnoVW »

card_zero wrote: post #172
safety1st wrote: post #164

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.

Being interrupted by people at your desk is a known productivity issue. Why would phones be different ?

When I work at home or during evenings when I can focus for long duration my productivity explodes.

I have no issue believing the level of impact.

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

#305

Post by andai »

eastbound wrote: post #230
safety1st wrote: post #164

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…

By do you ruminate negative thoughts? That’s my excuse for keeping my phone playing at night: I’m single, and despite being a successful professional and trying hard at dating when I was younger, my private life is full of bad experiences. I think about it and get angry. Youtube masks it. Yes I’ve seen psychologists but no, really, they try to où the blame on me but every time it’s the others who bullied me. Anyway —…

Meditation helped me a lot. You can train yourself to notice when your mind is doing something unpleasant or unproductive. When you notice that, it typically just stops, and you wonder why you were even doing it in the first place.

I'd recommend (ironically) an app for that, but the important part is that you practice every day, even if only for a few minutes.

Alternatively, being too busy and/or social to spend any time thinking — I joked the other day that I had "backdoored" my way into enlightenment by simply having no time/energy to think.

I didnt create that situation on purpose, both aspects are due to poverty (working two jobs and living in shared accomodations) but they've both had powerful unexpected benefits, to the point where I'm not much looking forward to getting my own place and going back to being alone all the time again.

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

#306

Post by richrichie »

mattlondon wrote: post #239
safety1st wrote: post #208

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes, I think so. For one thing, reading on a phone is harder and leads to worse retention. The content you consume is likely to be shorter and less intellectually valuable. Maybe more importantly, doing anything on a phone seems to encourage a shorter attention span and switching over to other activities, such as tapping useless notifications and doomscrolling your way into anger, unhappiness, depression, anxiety etc…

Why would reading on a phone be any less intellectually valuable? A book is a book regardless. Just uninstall the social apps and/or turn off notifications if you are easily distracted. It's not rocket science (which incidentally you can learn on a phone if you wanted)

Theoretically yes. In practice it is extremely difficult to say no to the short dopamine shots that a smart phone can deliver. Perhaps, comparable how alcoholics struggle to drink moderately.

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

#307

Post by andai »

card_zero wrote: post #172
safety1st wrote: post #164

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 waste time without a phone and you can do programming fairly productively on a phone (I lived without a laptop for 6 months, did everything in Termux!). But there's a right tool for every job, and the phone is designed to steal your soul (attention), designed to encourage mindless consumption, and interrupt you as often as possible.

This is part of a bigger principle I've noticed where I can rely on sheer willpower, or I can simply make a small change to my environment (e.g. move the phone to another room) and that's a much more efficient way to achieve the same result.

It's partly about reducing the Temptation, and partly about setting a strong intention / setting a strong message to yourself. If you're serious about getting some real work done, then why are you even looking at your phone?

Eventually you can get to the point where wasting time in any way starts to feel gross and you catch yourself more and more, but for most people it takes a bit of recalibration to get there.

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

#308

Post by rmbyrro »

slavik81 wrote: post #303
andai wrote: post #128

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I did a project once where I put my phone away before bed (switched off and in another room) and kept it off for the first few hours of the day, along with my wifi router. I usually got so much done during that time that I'd prefer to keep them off for a few more hours, even after I was "allowed" to turn them back on.

On the other hand, I locked my phone in a rental car and it took a week for them to mail it back to me. I was surprised, but I found that it made very little difference. I did not feel like I had any more time than usual. The only real impact was that I was locked out of anything that required two-factor authentication.

losing 2fa gives me anxiety. google auth is sync'ing now. it's a terrible idea from a security standpoint, though, which gives me even more anxiety... i guess i can't avoid security-related anxieties

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

#309

Post by funcDropShadow »

mattlondon wrote: post #239
safety1st wrote: post #208

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes, I think so. For one thing, reading on a phone is harder and leads to worse retention. The content you consume is likely to be shorter and less intellectually valuable. Maybe more importantly, doing anything on a phone seems to encourage a shorter attention span and switching over to other activities, such as tapping useless notifications and doomscrolling your way into anger, unhappiness, depression, anxiety etc…

Why would reading on a phone be any less intellectually valuable? A book is a book regardless. Just uninstall the social apps and/or turn off notifications if you are easily distracted. It's not rocket science (which incidentally you can learn on a phone if you wanted)

Because many people will read different content than in physical book form.

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

#310

Post by maccard »

jader201 wrote: post #192
card_zero wrote: post #177

> 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 would have been very surprised to have seen a difference in cognitive ability this quickly

Sleep deprivation is really, really bad for you. Here [0] is one example that tries to measure reaction times compared to drinking (in the context of driving). Being tired is pretty much being drunk. Here [1] is another on cognitive activity.

It’s not surprising to me in the slightest (anecdotally, I suffer from bouts of insomnia and my behaviour, mood and cognitive performance in work is definitely lower during those times. Even a single nights sleep shows a huge change in my mood INE) that if reducing smartphone usage they get more sleep that they pretty much immediately saw improvements.

[0] https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/32571274/ [1] https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/23029352/

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