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Just bekause you believe it doesn’t mean you have to obey it
How are you supposed to stop being sleepy in the morning without pulling out your phone.
I believe what science is saying. I’m just not going to follow it. If I try to sleep without reading something my brain will start ruminating on things and then I’m definitely not getting to sleep. All my reading materials are on a screen.
I tried buying more physical books. I have a small stack of it, but I can’t motivate myself to actually keep reading them. And there’s always the danger that I find a page turner that’ll keep me reading the entire night …
It’s not a settled issue. There are research papers that show evidence that blue light affects sleep, which is not the same thing as blue light makes your sleep worse.
So does it make sleep better?
I just listen to podcasts at a volume low enough that I have to try to listen, tires my brain out
For me i trained my mind to quiet when i hear wreck of the edmund fitzgerald. I also use sleep talk down videos, audio only, to distract my brain long enough for sleep to strangle it into submission to avoid yhe darkness.
Also, FYI, when scientists say “blue light” they don’t mean literally the colour blue, they mean short wavelength light typically emitted by LEDs.
As far as the hue goes, the results in animal testing have been inconsistent, there’s a paper from 2022 that says it has no influence, and this one from 2020 that actually found the opposite to be the case https://www.cell.com/current-biology/fulltext/S0960-9822(19)31368-5
In my personal experience I do the exact opposite of all conventional advice as admittedly a diagnosed ADHDer.
I cannot sleep without a good scroll and never have, before phones I had books and before I could read as a child I had music and my mom to read to me.
As an adult if I keep listening to something or reading something intently while comfy I will eventually and fairly quickly fall asleep.
I also sleep much better when I sleep immediately after or while scrolling/reading/doing anything than if I try to sleep “normally”.
The number one way for me personally not to fall asleep is to “try” to sleep. Any sort of “ritual” around sleeping or attempt to deprive myself of stimulation and my mind will go pretty crazy with infinite thoughts and infinite random bullshit and I will fling out of bed in an hour full of energy and start projects, after working on something for 10-20 min I’ll feel sleepy again and could even fall asleep while doing them easily, much more so than in plain dark.
It also helps me to not have any sort of ritual and just sleep whenever I feel sleepy if the circumstances allow. I have no idea why or how neurotypicals have sleep schedules and I’ve given up on understanding it. For me, as long as I get 8 hours or so it doesn’t actually matter at all when I get them, i will feel as fresh and awake waking up at 3AM as I would at 10PM or 7AM as long as I get my hours.
So I pretty much get 8 hours, and sometimes more every day and I feel nice and fresh when I wake up usually with sad exceptions during particularly rough work weeks where I end up staying up way late.
All’s I’m saying is YMMV, I’ve never had any issues with sleep nor do I feel particularly tired, I don’t drink coffee nor alcohol, but if I ever explain this to a doctor they go nuts and assume I have insomnia, they try to offer “treatment” when I literally don’t have any problems with this at all.
If you ever hear that “science” says something, go digging for the source and make sure “science” is actually saying it and not just 1 dubious study that the internet has latched onto and continuously parrots while ignoring contradicting evidence.
Aye, true that, I don’t think I said anything contradictory to what you replied with.
Blue light being bad is a conspiracy theory by big eyewear to sell more glasses (I’m being tongue in cheek but I think its kinda true). I don’t have the link but I read some paper about how its more likely that the reduced blinking rate while watching screens is the real culprit
Weirdly I have a similar conspiracy about noise makers for children. They all tend to come with a colored light, that is super bright. While there are studies that have shown sleeping with a light when you are younger makes you 5x more likely to need corrective lenses when you are older.
https://alfredvalley.itch.io/diedream
Designed to be played before falling asleep,
I like to play chess in my head.
I believe science, that’s why I use my tablet instead
Science has citations, not tweets.
Science means knowing better than trusting reports that affirm preconceived notions.
https://www.npr.org/2025/03/21/g-s1-55153/screens-and-sleep-maybe-not-so-bad
Just because I don’t follow the recommendation doesn’t mean I disbelieve it. Science also says I should eat better and exercise more and do less drugs 🤷♂️
Drugs are made with science
It’s true in that almost every food item is made “with science” (university-educated food technicians, biochemists, engineers etc.) these days, but you hardly need science to make common drugs like alcohol, caffeine or nicotine. Coffee and tobacco are just plants, and fruit will spontaneously start fermenting all on their own.
counterpoint:
The first reliably documented report of Psilocybe semilanceata intoxication involved a British family in 1799, who prepared a meal with mushrooms they had picked in London’s Green Park
Fascinating! I looked up that 1799 report - here’s the link for anyone else interested.
It’s actually neutral on the subject of what you should do. That is for medicine and public health policy, or even personal choice.
some things we do just to see how bad they’ll make us feel
I mean, those two things aren’t mutually exclusive. I can believe the science AND ALSO engage in behaviors it says are unhealthy for me.
I have night light mode on my phone. So I’m good!!!
That’s not a scientific thing tho ! Proven to have no effect in fact.
Apple wouldn’t lie to me.
Proven*
Samples sizes are always small, confounding variables poorly controlled and control groups often contaminated.
Long term effect are also poorly studied.
Proven to have no effect in fact.
I thought the blue light was the problem.
I agree. I believe science but I seriously think the BIPM (Bureau International des Poids et Mesures) is wrong. They made SI bad by glossing over the necessary base unit of angle, there should be 8 base dimension, not 7.
Except it’s not a unit, it’s a unitless ratio. You’d have one for every number of dimension. The mol is arguably the extra one.
I seriously disagree with you, your you’re wrong.
here’s an article which supports my reasoning https://arxiv.org/pdf/2108.05704
No one stops you from putting radians and steradians in your units. But it’s unitless by definition.
Me trying not to murder my partner who I love very much when her phone suddenly blasts out Instagram brain-rot at 11pm and I’m trying to maintain a vaguely healthy bedtime ritual.
I work incredibly hard during the day so it’s not hard for me to fall asleep at night even if I’m staring at my phone and even if I stare at it first thing when I wake up in the morning. My circadian rhythms cannot be defeated. I love sleeping all night & working me arse off all day.
Science is totally right here, I have no doubt. It’s just… that I have zero regard for my own health.
It’s a matter of effort vs reward. Will it make it easier to sleep? Yes. Will it make it easier enough to be worth not using my phone? No.
Just because I believe doesn’t mean I listen.
I get why you shouldn’t use it before bed but why not after waking up? If it keeps you awake shouldn’t it help you wake up?
This stuff is sciencey, not science.
allegedly
you are priming your brain for distraction
that info comes from Julie Morgenstern, an organizing & productivity consultant, so I dunno how scientific it is…
That is under the purview of my field of science (Industrial Organization Psychology), so it can be plenty scientific. However looking at her bio she is not an IO psychologist and has no formal training on the subject so take anything she says with a grain of salt.
Also, it’s forbes
God damn, I can’t find any solid research that backs up the claims of it being bad for you, granted I didn’t do a thorough search, but I did still look and came out empty handed.
Just after you wake up, for about 30-60 minutes, you’re in a state known as sleep inertia. The CDC recommends not doing critical tasks during this period, but that could just be because it affects performance. They do also say that bright light can more quickly restore performance, which a phone screen most certainly is.
So, let’s look into it a bit more. Granted, I can’t find anything more than a couple psychologists saying this, so take it with a grain of salt, but it seems like it mostly does come down to you priming your brain for distraction, as was initially stated. You have the least amount of built-up fatigue when you wake up, but if you go on the app that is designed to take as much time and attention of yours as possible, then you are giving away your least-fatigued time of the day to social media, before you do anything productive.
The more things you do in a day, the more fatigued your brain gets, and the harder it is to actually get other things done afterward. On top of that, it can also just be a behavioral thing. If you repeatedly get on your phone every time after you wake up, you are telling your brain “waking up = get on phone,” and not something like “waking up = get out of bed and brush teeth” or “waking up = get breakfast.”
This can build a dependency over time, which then leads you to, as previously mentioned, taking the time you are least mentally fatigued, fatiguing your brain with high-speed flows of information, and only then actually expending the remainder of your energy on everything else you need to do.
That’s a good way to start my work day then because I’m constantly moving from one fire to another.
