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Comment by adulau | Hacker News Reader

The most important part is "The people who did not use a phone before bed had the highest quality of sleep."

This has been consistently my experience -- if I am awake at night and use a phone, I will almost never get back to sleep; reading (on a book or on a frontlit kindle) means that I'll start to feel sleepy and go back to sleep. This is independent of brightness or color of the screen so far as I can tell.

But then again, it's not a great experiment because there are times I reach for the phone and times I reach for a book, and those may reflect the amount of stress or tiredness I feel at the time; i.e. how much interactivity and restlessness I am desiring or experiencing.

The null results I do not find surprising but I would love to see more research on using phones vs. reading vs. e-ink reading and how that influences sleep patterns.

I read in bed on a Kindle and have found that lower brightness is helpful in calming before bed, regardless of whether I have the warmth up or down. The "dark mode" feature that inverts the screen I have actually have pretty poor experience with - I find it harder to read the words which leads to more straining which is counter productive. The only "benefit" I see of this feature is to decrease the overall light in the room which might be helpful for others sharing the bed etc.

>people who did not use a phone before bed had the highest quality of sleep

>This has been consistently my experience -- if I am awake at night and use a phone, I will almost never get back to sleep

these are not the same thing, and this confusion is part of the reason it is difficult to track good information on this topic.

"not falling asleep" is not "low quality sleep", it's simply "no sleep"

also, sleep researchers report that people who think they are insomniac often get a lot more sleep than they think they are getting, so self reports are not that useful.

personally, i would like to wake up an hour later in the morning, hours after I had no trouble falling asleep, and after hours of no trouble sleeping. With all the talk about sleep, I never hear advice tuned to my situation, but the claims are that it does.

Whilst I don't think this is wrong in the general case, I don't think it's always right either. I commonly watch movies or series on my phone or tablet in bed. Always with a very dim screen and very low volume - and also with night shift on, or whatever it's called.

Sometimes I wake up in the middle of the night to go to the bathroom and can't sleep straight away, so I watch a bit more TV on my phone, maybe up to 1h or so, and then go to sleep again.

Some of my best nights have been that way. 7-8h in total sleep, with screens before and during this time. Some of those nights were so good that I didn't even feel like having a coffee during the day, and didn't feel any sleepiness or fogginess at work.

To me, the 2 things that have the greatest impact on my sleep quality are what and when I've eaten the day before; and how and how much I moved. A long walk is usually enough, whereas strenuous exercise (a long and hard climbing session for instance) can be disruptive to my sleep due to the muscle inflammation.

But do we have anything to say that phones are a causative factor?

(Am actually considering an external, e-paper, "secondary" phone screen ...)

Do you have a specific device in mind?

Yes. Lost track of it. Will find it ...

Got it!

- https://shop.dasung.com/products/dasung-6-7-e-ink-phone-moni...

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