Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

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

york.ac.uk

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

341–350 of 706 posts

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

#341

Post by andai »

warner25 wrote: post #140
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.

> along with my wifi router I'm all about eliminating phones, but I'm curious to know what you accomplished for several hours without network connectivity in general. Whether I've been working from home or in an office, a network outage basically meant taking the rest of the day off because nothing could actually get done.

It was a solo project involving mostly creative work: curriculum design, game design, programming, writing tutorials.

I found myself missing Google for language and API related questions frequently, so I used DevDocs, a website that can also "install" itself in the browser to work offline. For the stuff I couldn't find there, I just made a note to Google it after lunch and worked around it or switched tasks.

Note that this was before LLMs got good at programming / saying mostly true things, so there was no loss from not having access to them. Recently I've been experimenting with local LLMs, though they're not quite there yet (the ones I can run at least), and they're already fun enough to be distracting!

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

#342

Post by andkenneth »

imaginationra wrote: post #340

Lifetime mobile phone abstinent human here. Sleep and mood (thumbs up) Waiting for everyone else to stop using the cursed devices and start to enjoy real life allowing themselves to be fully immersed in it for the first time(shrug) "Fully immersive" games are sought after but from my point of view people that use mobile phones have never been fully immersed in their physical reality before (its pretty sick bruh, ther…

I wish I could do this. Do you even use a flip phone or anything? Or simply no cell phone?

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

#343

Post by kwakubiney »

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…

So essentially almost every form of research?

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

#344

Post by andai »

safety1st wrote: post #164
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.

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…

Yeah, in my case the benefits were dramatic because I'm easily distracted and lose track of time. So I was like, I'm just going to eliminate all possible distractions. I found that very helpful.

Another effect was that I started to become somewhat more productive during times when I did have access to my phone, or rather, more reluctant to start wasting time even if the option was easily available to me.

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

#345

Post by Tenoke »

maccard wrote: post #310
jader201 wrote: post #192

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 in…

Driving performance after 24+ hours of being awake is pretty irrelevant to phones (even if they cause you to sleep less they don't cause you to not sleep at all), and it's just some brief effect with no reason to think otherwise from looking at this.

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

#346

Post by acron0 »

jader201 wrote: post #227
Liquix wrote: post #210

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> left with the unfortunate decision between phone addition, and social ostracism. This line of thinking perpetuates the problem. More people getting addicted does not mean addiction is a prerequisite to live a full life. It's never been more important to aggressively curtail phone use – and make unpopular decisions that your kids will thank you for later – than it is now.

I’m not sure if you have kids, but I’m not sure making the choice to ostracize your kids is one they’d thank you for later. And, certainly not all kids would. It very much depends on the kid / the impact said ostracism would have.

This is why it needs implementing systemically, and not ad hoc. If no one has social media, no one is being ostracised. If only one person opts out then yes, they risk being ostracised.

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

#347

Post by lugu »

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…

What is wrong with that? Isn't it how science works: you make an hypothesis and test it.

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

#348

Post by andai »

cardanome wrote: post #331
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…

The problem is that I can not pace myself. I can go cold turkey without any withdrawals. Not using no phone or computer on holidays? Not a problem. It would not be a great sacrifice for me to never touch a computing device ever again in my life. But that using the internet only at certain times thing? Absolutely not. There will always be an exception because I need to look up something really badly and once the excep…

I just had a text file "stuff to Google" and I Googled it later. There was always more work to do so I could either work around it or just do something else for a few hours and come back to it when I went back online.

Though most of the stuff was just documentation, so I just downloaded offline docs and reduced the need to Google stuff by an order of magnitude.

Of course, it's going to depend on what you're doing (I assume it works better for solo work) and what kind of resources are available.

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

#349

Post by supersrdjan »

card_zero wrote: post #201
it_citizen wrote: post #199

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Hypothesize then experiment

Uh-huh. You have a conjecture, you test it, and then you say "looks like reality didn't match our conjecture, the conjecture must be wrong." Except here they got a negative result and said "reality must be wrong". It's a determined effort to find specific results.

Aren't in this case they saying that their experiment might have been the wrong one, and that next time they have to do a different kind of test that takes a longer time span into consideration? They acknowledge the result that no changes in cognitive abilities take place within 21 days, and then from there make the next conjecture that such changes might happen later, which would require a different kind of test?

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

#350

Post by basisword »

imaginationra wrote: post #340

Lifetime mobile phone abstinent human here. Sleep and mood (thumbs up) Waiting for everyone else to stop using the cursed devices and start to enjoy real life allowing themselves to be fully immersed in it for the first time(shrug) "Fully immersive" games are sought after but from my point of view people that use mobile phones have never been fully immersed in their physical reality before (its pretty sick bruh, ther…

How do you accomplish this (in detail if you don't mind - I'm very curious)? How do you keep in contact with others? Does your job not require a phone for e.g. 2FA? I'm increasingly coming up against obstacles to no-phone life now. For example, certain venues only distribute concert tickets via a phone app and their 'workaround' if you don't have one is 'ask a friend'. Have there been situations you've come across (e.g. some sort of emergency) which have made you reconsider having no phone?
Post reply on HN