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

york.ac.uk

621–630 of 706 posts

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

#621

When I see all these "phone ban" experiments, I always wonder, is the phone that's the issue, or is it the apps/websites tailored for engagement (a.k.a addiction)? Maybe instead of banning kids from using phones, they should consider banning companies from making their apps addictive on purpose.

Obviously it's the apps. If you would give all kids phones that could only call and play snake they wouldn't be so engaged with it all the time. Most modern social media apps are now redesigned to allow for endless doomscrolling. YouTube, TikTok, Instagram all allow to scroll through content fed to you by an algorithm without even being able to preview the next video. It just slams it in your face. It's extremely add…

I mean, snake still has a lot of appeal.

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

#622
post #96

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It’s well documented that need for sleep continuously declines with age. However what you are saying is likely also true, which combine to make kids really sleep deprived.

Until what age? I've always seemed to need a lot of sleep. I'm a night-owl. For about 1 month, a few years back, I suddenly started waking up early, like 6am (in Winter). Had a couple of hours before anyone else was up. It was great. I didn't plan it, it just happened. And as easily as it arrived, it departed. I've tried to forcibly repeat it, but I just wake and feel awful, am super sleepy and get nothing done. Wish…

Peoples sleep duration on average gradually and steadily declines from as much as 11-19 hours as an infant, down to 5-8 on average for 65+. There is no rapid sudden drop, and possibly no age where it stops going down either.

However, peoples individual need for sleep varies substantially on top of that, and can go up or down based on a lot of other factors. Medications, mental health, sleep apnea, diet, exercise, etc. can influence your need for sleep and how restful the sleep you get is.

If you're sleeping 12 hours and still feeling awful, there is likely something very wrong you need to look into. I'd go to a doctor and get a sleep study, but if nothing else you can get a logging pulse oximeter, and/or sleep tracker like an Oura ring. It is possible you are not really sleeping but having short waking events, and/or apnea events from sleep apnea that is keeping your sleep from being restful.

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

#623
post #568

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I had unfiltered internet access from around the age of ten onwards. I can confidently say that was a horrible idea and I would have been much better off as a person without it.

i think about this a lot as someone who had unfiltered access to the internet since being a kid around 2010. on the one hand i learned to understand english as a young boy, on my own, without realizing. on the other hand i've seen videos of beheadings, terrorist acts, violent accidents, war crimes and many more, lovely things. that being said...still not sure if it's a net-negative. feels positive to me, just not wit…

I heard rumours of such content on the Internet as a teenager in the 1990's. I was never curious enough to seek it out, but there are plenty who were and plenty of those didn't understand how it would affect them. The latter group are the ones that we have to be concerned about. After all there is a world of difference between knowing of or seeing acts of violence and normalizing violence. Depending how far normalizing goes, it may end up being a net-negative for society as a whole.

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

#624

Disclosure: I work for a social media company. However I live in the UK. Most schools in the UK ban phones in school. The difference here is that in this study phones were taken away for 21 days, even after school. They lost access to the phone completely during that time. I am less convinced that we should wholesale ban phones for kids, because in the UK at least, there is no longer any culture of letting kids go ou…

> because …, there is no longer any culture of letting kids go out and socialise

Are you frakking kidding me? We can bring that back. That’s no reason to allow social media + mobile phones to poison society and youth.

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

#625
post #624

Disclosure: I work for a social media company. However I live in the UK. Most schools in the UK ban phones in school. The difference here is that in this study phones were taken away for 21 days, even after school. They lost access to the phone completely during that time. I am less convinced that we should wholesale ban phones for kids, because in the UK at least, there is no longer any culture of letting kids go ou…

> because …, there is no longer any culture of letting kids go out and socialise Are you frakking kidding me? We can bring that back. That’s no reason to allow social media + mobile phones to poison society and youth.

> We can bring that back. I agree with all of your points. I am not 100% sure how to do this (if anyone has guidance I would appreciate the insight). My personal anecdote is that my 8yo goes to school with other children who's parents have a low understanding of the impact social media is having on them and their children. I was shocked when my daughter came home and told me that her best friend had an iPhone and a Tiktok account. I spoke with her friend's Mom about it and she said that it's fine because she follows her and sees everything that she's doing on it. I respectfully disagreed but this is very real. I expect that over the next couple of years the majority of her friend's socializing will move into messaging apps. I am terrified.

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

#626
I'd like to see this study done with activity trackers on the children to look at 1) changes in exercise 2) actual sleep time results.

Not that I don't believe the results, but I we don't need to do self reported studies anymore, and having someone guess how much sleep they got is notoriously unreliable.

Without the phones, did the children play outside more (exercise), and of course, did they do an activity like read in bed rather than scrolling - thereby removing the late hour dopamine hit.

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

#627
post #491

Earlier quoted context omitted.

At some point I think humanity is going to have to really declare war on addiction. I’ve been thinking about this for years. It’s not unprecedented. China threw off the yoke of opium for one example. I’m all for free speech and I am against drug criminalization— as long as in both cases the stuff is not particularly addictive. The deliberate use of addiction to ensnare, monetize, or control other people whether throu…

I like the idea of fighting addiction, but it can't be law-based. For example, I find chess to be addictive, is that evil? What action shall we take against it?

I think it would have to be reserved for egregious cases to start with, and perhaps that would be enough to have a chilling effect and scare people away from intentional addiction engineering.

I share concerns about this but I feel like eventually it won’t matter. We are getting so good at addicting each other and it’s getting so ubiquitous that eventually I think there will be a crusade with a lot of collateral damage.

Either that or we will just accept a society with a massive Matrix-like addict slave class. Maybe that’s the outcome.

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

#628

Do you ever get periods of time where you're just not interested in your phone? Periods of time when you don't even feel the compulsion to unlock your phone and scroll, so there's no real willpower required to abstain from it? That's the state of mind I want to be at. I don't want to have to lock away the phone from myself or unplug my router. I do get those streaks of no doom scrolling from time to time, perhaps for…

It is the default for me. A smartphone is a versatile but inferior device in terms of UX.

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

#629

I'd like to see this study done with activity trackers on the children to look at 1) changes in exercise 2) actual sleep time results. Not that I don't believe the results, but I we don't need to do self reported studies anymore, and having someone guess how much sleep they got is notoriously unreliable. Without the phones, did the children play outside more (exercise), and of course, did they do an activity like rea…

The kids were wearing smart watches for the study. Source: The TV show, Episode 1, about 9 minutes in.

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

#630

Disclosure: I work for a social media company. However I live in the UK. Most schools in the UK ban phones in school. The difference here is that in this study phones were taken away for 21 days, even after school. They lost access to the phone completely during that time. I am less convinced that we should wholesale ban phones for kids, because in the UK at least, there is no longer any culture of letting kids go ou…

> there is no longer any culture of letting kids go out and socialise. Could this have died due to tech?

Not really, no.

People have been talking about the "death of the third place" for a while, now.

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