Phones need 'bed mode' to protect sleep(bbc.com)
bbc.com
Phones need 'bed mode' to protect sleep
http://www.bbc.com/news/health-34744859
62 comments
And yet Apple recently forced f.lux to take down the sideloaded version of their iOS app despite the fact that they have no public APIs available to do what f.lux does.
See here: https://justgetflux.com/sideload/#notanymore
HN Posting: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10556375
See here: https://justgetflux.com/sideload/#notanymore
HN Posting: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10556375
I haven't done any mobile development, so forgive my ignorance. But the concept of a program not being "allowed" on my device is bizarre to me.
Kudos to the BBC for increasing awareness of this issue with non-technical device users, who will need manufacturers to implement bedtime mode as a factory-installed feature.
Previous industries have sold products with negative health impacts, with changes eventually coming from consumer pushback, government regulation and/or class-action lawsuits.
There must be at least one mainstream device manufacturer who has a large advertising budget and can take a leadership position by implementing bedtime mode and advertising the health benefits.
Previous industries have sold products with negative health impacts, with changes eventually coming from consumer pushback, government regulation and/or class-action lawsuits.
There must be at least one mainstream device manufacturer who has a large advertising budget and can take a leadership position by implementing bedtime mode and advertising the health benefits.
When reading about circadian light it helps to remember that the actual biological research is still a bit thin. There are a couple of studies out there that show that light of other wavelengths reduces the effect of the blue light on melatonin. Since the problem is normally caused by the bright white areas on the screen it is possible that all that is required is to turn down the overall brightness at night.
Incidentally, this effect might explain why people complain that typical office lighting isn't bright enough to cause sufficient melatonin suppression during the day.
Incidentally, this effect might explain why people complain that typical office lighting isn't bright enough to cause sufficient melatonin suppression during the day.
This is the obvious change immediately made by anyone whose health is affected. If the lowest level of brightness were sufficient, users would not need to seek out apps like f.lux.
People get addicted to their phones to the point that it disrupts their sleep and harms their health. A bed mode is not going to change that. People need to recognise the damage their habits are doing and work to change them.
Actually a bed mode will make a substantial difference.
Looking at phones or laptops or whatever screens at nighttime suppresses melatonin, which leads to people not feeling sleepy when they should, which makes them much more likely to continue looking at their screen than if they became as tired as normal.
It’s certainly possible to stay up doing something without blue light (e.g. reading by candlelight or a dim incandescent flashlight), but blue light makes a huge difference, and actively fights people’s ability to exercise self control.
Working to change habits is all well and good, but instead of telling someone who habitually binges on candy and cookies to stop eating any snacks at all, period, it would be a more successful intervention to take the candy and cookies away and fill their refrigerator with carrot sticks.
Looking at phones or laptops or whatever screens at nighttime suppresses melatonin, which leads to people not feeling sleepy when they should, which makes them much more likely to continue looking at their screen than if they became as tired as normal.
It’s certainly possible to stay up doing something without blue light (e.g. reading by candlelight or a dim incandescent flashlight), but blue light makes a huge difference, and actively fights people’s ability to exercise self control.
Working to change habits is all well and good, but instead of telling someone who habitually binges on candy and cookies to stop eating any snacks at all, period, it would be a more successful intervention to take the candy and cookies away and fill their refrigerator with carrot sticks.
In my experience, using a screen colour app just encourages me to use my phone more not less. Even with these apps a phone will still emit a large amount of blue light and having the light source so close to my face I still notice it disrupts my sleep.
If you believe using your phone late at night is harmful to you at all then why continue to maintain a that behaviour? Wouldn't it be much more beneficial to your health to avoid screens altogether at night? I'm not saying that it is easy but I believe it's a good healthy goal to aim for just like getting exercise and eating well.
To your point about unhealthy eating habits I totally agree. I just don't see phone addiction normally talked about as often as diet and exercise which is why I wanted to mention it.
If you believe using your phone late at night is harmful to you at all then why continue to maintain a that behaviour? Wouldn't it be much more beneficial to your health to avoid screens altogether at night? I'm not saying that it is easy but I believe it's a good healthy goal to aim for just like getting exercise and eating well.
To your point about unhealthy eating habits I totally agree. I just don't see phone addiction normally talked about as often as diet and exercise which is why I wanted to mention it.
If you believe using your phone late at night is harmful to you at all then why continue to maintain a that behaviour?
Paraphrasing from one of your previous posts, "if you really have to question every action that might be harmful then you would never go outside, put anything in your mouth, go to the bathroom etc. Your question really only makes sense when considering activities that have a relatively high risk of harm in which case the answer has to come down to two things. Firstly how harmful is this activity? And secondly, how much harm am I willing to take?"
If a bed mode is enough to make the disruption to one's sleep negligible, why not use the phone late at night?
Paraphrasing from one of your previous posts, "if you really have to question every action that might be harmful then you would never go outside, put anything in your mouth, go to the bathroom etc. Your question really only makes sense when considering activities that have a relatively high risk of harm in which case the answer has to come down to two things. Firstly how harmful is this activity? And secondly, how much harm am I willing to take?"
If a bed mode is enough to make the disruption to one's sleep negligible, why not use the phone late at night?
> If you believe using your phone late at night is harmful to you at all
If you’re asking about me personally, I don’t use a smartphone at night. I thought we were talking about what actions smartphone vendors could take to help their customers’ health.
> Even with these apps a phone will still emit a large amount of blue light and having the light source so close to my face I still notice it disrupts my sleep.
If you use f.lux on a Mac, you can make it incredibly orange almost completely blocking out the "blue" channel on the display. It also includes a "darkroom" mode which inverts the display colors and turns black text on white into red text on black.
If you’re asking about me personally, I don’t use a smartphone at night. I thought we were talking about what actions smartphone vendors could take to help their customers’ health.
> Even with these apps a phone will still emit a large amount of blue light and having the light source so close to my face I still notice it disrupts my sleep.
If you use f.lux on a Mac, you can make it incredibly orange almost completely blocking out the "blue" channel on the display. It also includes a "darkroom" mode which inverts the display colors and turns black text on white into red text on black.
Where does reading a book on an iPad fall in the spectrum?
While I do think my Mac is overly blue, I also think that f.lux is ridiculously yellow. I've turned down the yellowness considerably compared to the defaults, and still find myself turning it off in the evening, because suddenly everything becomes washy yellow.
If you allow your eyes to adapt, the yellowness really isn’t a big deal, unless you’re doing something color sensitive like making art. Just stop worrying about precisely what colors are on screen.
Even if you’re casually looking at photographs, watching a television show, or playing a game, your eyes can compensate pretty well for a significant reduction in the amount of blue light, and you can have a perfectly acceptable experience.
Note, you’ll also want to dim or turn off other lights at night. In particular white LEDs of CCT ≥4000K are terrible at night, both wrecking night vision and disrupting sleep rhythm.
If you’re in an otherwise dark room, you can turn your display brightness as low as it will go and turn f.lux to its orangest possible setting and still browse the web, answer emails, write code, etc. perfectly fine. At such an extreme setting you might not be able to effectively enjoy photographs or movies anymore, but maybe right before bed isn’t the best time to look at photographs anyway.
Even if you’re casually looking at photographs, watching a television show, or playing a game, your eyes can compensate pretty well for a significant reduction in the amount of blue light, and you can have a perfectly acceptable experience.
Note, you’ll also want to dim or turn off other lights at night. In particular white LEDs of CCT ≥4000K are terrible at night, both wrecking night vision and disrupting sleep rhythm.
If you’re in an otherwise dark room, you can turn your display brightness as low as it will go and turn f.lux to its orangest possible setting and still browse the web, answer emails, write code, etc. perfectly fine. At such an extreme setting you might not be able to effectively enjoy photographs or movies anymore, but maybe right before bed isn’t the best time to look at photographs anyway.
I find f.lux unusable for quite a few TV shows on Netflix on my Macbook. I don't have an issue with the colours, but it introduces artefacts in very bright areas which are really annoying. Sure I probably shouldn't watch Netflix before bed, and I don't when I need to be up early etc., and I probably could fiddle with settings to fix it - but it is noticeable and annoying.
Yeah, it somehow screws with full screen QuickTime video playback. I think in those cases the video player is trying to bypass some of the standard OS display processing and send data straight to the screen to save power, or similar.
I’ve found VLC doesn’t have an issue, but I’m not sure if you could use VLC to play Netflix videos.
I’ve found VLC doesn’t have an issue, but I’m not sure if you could use VLC to play Netflix videos.
Why would it not be good to look at pictures before bed?
Do you have it set so that it changes colors gradually? It's much easier to get used to if you have it change over the course of an hour instead of instantly.
It seems to be worse with the modern f.lux mode than classic f.lux.
If you turn it on slowly enough you wot notice until you look at another screen.
I had the same experience when I spent an hour in a white tent. When I stepped outside everything looked super blue, and I had not noticed until then that the light in the tent was in fact super yellow.
I had the same experience when I spent an hour in a white tent. When I stepped outside everything looked super blue, and I had not noticed until then that the light in the tent was in fact super yellow.
Or people just need to put the phone down before going to sleep. Every non-infantile responsible adult is capable of that.
How hard can it be ?
How hard can it be ?
Implicit in your comment is the idea that no one should ever have any legitimate reason to use a mobile device before going to bed. While I have no doubt many users have to check Facebook one more time or some other compulsive behavior that you imagine, there are users who need to set an alarm for the morning, check what they have to do tomorrow, or even check up on some mission-critical status for work.
Some adults use their phones before going to sleep in order to be non-infantile and responsible.
Some adults use their phones before going to sleep in order to be non-infantile and responsible.
Super hard, and you know it. Plenty people's willpower is basically depleted by night time.
My own little lifehack here is that my phone stays downstairs, in the charger, when I go to bed. I use an old phone without wifi or SIM to act as a simple, programmable, non-annoying alarm clock. It means that by the time I'm down, I don't need to resist to urge to just check HN one more time.
My own little lifehack here is that my phone stays downstairs, in the charger, when I go to bed. I use an old phone without wifi or SIM to act as a simple, programmable, non-annoying alarm clock. It means that by the time I'm down, I don't need to resist to urge to just check HN one more time.
You did not read the article... It's not about putting down the phone, it's about the light it emits.
Maybe he did. The blue tones are no problem if you simply don't look at the damn thing all evening.
Or if you install software to control color temperature.
I sometimes like to read a book before going to sleep: it's always been a nice, calming activity for me. I also sometimes read books on my phone, and I think that's probably going to become more common (for me and in general) over time. Which of those is the "infantile, irresponsible" part?
As other said it is not necessarily about the using the phone it's about the light emitted from screens of all our devices.
T
he issue also applies to using other screens at night. Like watching TV right until you go to bed, or even in bed. I guess using your phone in bed to set an alarm and whatnot is a more common case and thus is used as the example.
Oh, sure. But how about infantile and/or irresponsible ones? I heard there are a lot of us here... ;)
It's not a matter of putting the phone down "before" sleep. That's easy. It's a matter of putting away all screens a full two hours before you want to sleep. That is an enormous pain, no matter how easy it is. And it's so easy to fix.
Or you could just put the phone/tablet/computer aside an hour or two before bedtime. It's probably not a popular solution, people get defensive when you suggest they put their phone away.
Anybody know if f.lux is working on an Android version? Their FAQ is mute on the issue.
I switched from twilight to cf.lumen the other day, it's vastly better as it properly colors your screen.
There is something like f.lux for Android. It's called Twilight.
Twilight seems less thorough than f.lux and more like a simple filter. When f.luxs runs on my desktop, the blacks are still black. On Twilight, they get a red tint to them.
Twilight's permissions requirements include device and application history, bookmarks, etc. Why would that be necessary?
CyanogenMod has something equal to f.lux already built in. It's called LiveDisplay.
And it's great, because it doesn't just switch on time of day and location, but also appears to use the RGB sensor to try to match the white point of the screen with the colour of the light in the room. It's especially nice with Android's adaptive auto-brightness and an OLED screen.
Twilight on Android works well.
Lux is also an great option for Android!
For those wearing glasses, you can opt for special coating that filters some of the blue light out.
The one I got was ~$40 option when I last ordered new glasses, and was branded "digital protection glasses" and "Kodak BlueReflect".
The one I got was ~$40 option when I last ordered new glasses, and was branded "digital protection glasses" and "Kodak BlueReflect".
Orange safety glasses entirely block those wavelengths. This kind of thing: http://amzn.com/B003OBZ64M/
If looking through your glasses doesn’t make everything look significantly yellower/oranger than usual when you first put them on, then it’s not blocking too much blue light. You can try to find a spec sheet with the spectral transmission distribution to get a full idea.
If looking through your glasses doesn’t make everything look significantly yellower/oranger than usual when you first put them on, then it’s not blocking too much blue light. You can try to find a spec sheet with the spectral transmission distribution to get a full idea.
My brain must be wired up differently, but the best way for me to fall asleep is by watching youtube videos on my iPad. When I'm sufficiently tired, it's a matter of minutes before I'm asleep.
I believe that discovery was made decades ago, given the stories I've come across of people who fell asleep to 'The Late Show' with Carson, back when that was the last broadcast of the day.
Ahh, here are two links which mention those days: http://www.salon.com/2014/02/18/how_jimmy_fallon_and_the_roo... and https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/arts-and-entertainment/w... .
Ahh, here are two links which mention those days: http://www.salon.com/2014/02/18/how_jimmy_fallon_and_the_roo... and https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/arts-and-entertainment/w... .
I don't understand why Google hasn't implemented this yet. It's easy to do that and has a huge value. I always had to root my phone just to do this.
Dictating what is "easy to do" is an insult to software producers everywhere. If you'd like to know more about how "simple" things can take lots of effort to deploy in heavily-used production software, consider reading Raymond Chen's Old New Thing blog for a while.
The Do Not Disturb feature with defined DND times goes a long way on iOS. Definitely recommend it, and yes, receiving notifications at 2AM can be a total pain.
It's called the power off button?
Seriously, what is wrong with people, turn the thing off.
Future "news": Food needs to stop being so tasty so people don't eat too much.
Seriously, what is wrong with people, turn the thing off.
Future "news": Food needs to stop being so tasty so people don't eat too much.
I and most of my acquaintances no longer have a traditional landline phone. My smartphone is the only way to contact me in an emergency. If friends or family need to reach me to extricate them from a bad situation or come to the hospital, etc., I want to be reachable. It's only happened a few times in my life, thankfully, but I don't like the idea of being completely unreachable until I wake up and turn my phone back on.
That said, I could turn off wifi and cellular data, but that's one more thing to remember to do every night. I suppose if you find the temptation overwhelming, it could be worth it though.
My point is just that turning off the phone is not as simple of a decision as you make it sound.
That said, I could turn off wifi and cellular data, but that's one more thing to remember to do every night. I suppose if you find the temptation overwhelming, it could be worth it though.
My point is just that turning off the phone is not as simple of a decision as you make it sound.
touching "airplane mode" is too hard for you?
it's a pull down, one click if you set it up right
also, some phones with 5.1 or 6.0 can change modes automatically depending on time of day and can turn off mobile data and wifi - you can leave voice enabled for "emergencies"
it's a pull down, one click if you set it up right
also, some phones with 5.1 or 6.0 can change modes automatically depending on time of day and can turn off mobile data and wifi - you can leave voice enabled for "emergencies"
Are you claiming that airplane mode will let people receive emergency calls? I am pretty sure that is not the case.
Sorry I had two thoughts in that last post.
If you need emergency calls, you can just turn off wifi and mobile data which leaves voice (and I think sms) intact.
If you need emergency calls, you can just turn off wifi and mobile data which leaves voice (and I think sms) intact.
Did you read my comment? That's exactly what I said, right? You can turn off wifi and cellular data to just get calls (and sms).
Your comment acted like turning off the phone was the obvious solution everybody was missing, and my point was that it's more complicated.
Your comment acted like turning off the phone was the obvious solution everybody was missing, and my point was that it's more complicated.
Your joke is sort of true. Snack foods generally have an excessively high ratio of palatability/satiation.
(I'd like to see it change because individuals make the choice, not by fiat, so let's not have an argument about it)
(I'd like to see it change because individuals make the choice, not by fiat, so let's not have an argument about it)
Isn't that the "do not disturb" settings in iOS?
No the article is talking about the blue light affecting hormone production. "Do not disturb" does nothing for that.
Precisely this.
I did find that it doesn't meet my needs exactly, however. I favorited a number of inbound numbers such as Pingdom and co-workers to allow for alerts to come through but it doesn't apply to SMS messaging. They simply get muted, even if the number is in your favorites. I had to turn off "Do Not Disturb" simply because overrides wouldn't be triggered by SMS messages.
I believe it should apply to both SMS and phone for the overrides.
I did find that it doesn't meet my needs exactly, however. I favorited a number of inbound numbers such as Pingdom and co-workers to allow for alerts to come through but it doesn't apply to SMS messaging. They simply get muted, even if the number is in your favorites. I had to turn off "Do Not Disturb" simply because overrides wouldn't be triggered by SMS messages.
I believe it should apply to both SMS and phone for the overrides.
[1] http://jonls.dk/redshift/