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Comment by MrJagil | Hacker News Reader

“One of the biggest issues with picking up the phone right away in the morning is that when you have an object close to your face, it’s registered as a threat,” says Loeffler. “You wouldn’t want to wake up and look a bear in the face every morning. On a physiological level, it’s the same thing.”

This is interesting to me. It does make some evolutionary sense but at the same time, i wake up every morning and look at my girlfriends face, hopefully that does not subconsciously trigger the same response.

That said, the "sky before screens" idea has been rummaging in my mind since i first heard about it https://www.cyclingweekly.com/news/sky-before-screens-has-ma...

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This sounds like hocus pocus to me, along the lines of the claim that phone alert tones activate the "love centre" of the brain. Just so happens that the "love centre" is also the "vomiting centre" along with a load of other stuff. I'd treat this hand-wavy claim with the same kind of skepticism - your counter-example is an excellent one. I agree that looking at a phone first thing in the morning is a bad idea, but for very different reasons.

Striking a balance in our morning routines can be more beneficial overall.

I assume you don't mean an equal ratio of drivel and truly meaningful experiences, though I'd love to hear more.

I got into "deep work" a while ago, keeping my internet off until noon every day. It blew my mind how calm and focused I was when I didn't fill my head with nonsense first thing in the morning.

I think it also depends on what you’re doing on your phone. Big difference between waking up and checking Twitter and waking up and messaging a loved one across the world.

I'm unsure how much of a difference that really makes as there's lots of distractions in my (and probably most peoples) morning routine that are not related to my phone. Boring things like the hygiene routine but also things that come up and require thought such as (almost) empty grocery items or things related to the commute such as radio in the car or ads in public transit. While most of these are not specifically engineered to be attention seeking, I still see most of them as distracting and my focus only starts when I sit down to do some work.

It's all about your body's natural response to dopamine highs and lows.

Social media, doom scrolling, candy crush, etc. are all high-dopamine activities. After you engage in these activates for a while, then stop, you're left at a relative dopamine deficiency, which your brain abhors. It attempts to rectify the deficiency by encouraging you to engage in high-dopamine activities, which you experience as being 'distracted' from the relatively low-dopamine-rewarded work you're trying to focus on. If you avoid engaging in high-dopamine activities in the morning, your brain WILL be more amenable to focus on low-dopamine-rewarded work.

Read Dopamine Nation for a handy primer on this.

To be clear, I woke up, opened a sugar free red bull, and began working immediately.

The rule was to spend at least the first hour offline, but I'd find myself getting so much done, I'd want to keep going, and usually extend it to 3 or 4.

In fact I was so productive during this time, I found myself looking actually looking forward to work the next morning.

I generally avoided opening my email until lunchtime for the same reason. That meant I could work all morning while I was fresh and alert on the things that I had planned the day before. Then I'd spend the afternoon on the more administrative side of software development including planning what to do the next day.

My BS-meter also went off on this.

Mine too

Maybe if you attached googley eyes to your phone so your brain recognises it as a being? Worst thing my phone is gonna do in the morning is fall on my face and make me do a weird pouty lip airbag sort of move

Having said that I was washing my face this morning and in a moment of fight or flight I did rip the washcloth to shreds with my teeth

Bears also have eyes, so I imagine this wouldn’t inherently solve the problem.

Agreed that justification sounds like rubbish. Especially when one of their stated alternatives is to read a book. Unless you’re reading a digital book through a projector, that too is an object close to the face.

A while ago, there was a new wives’ tale going around how the red notification dot on replicate a slot machine so people would get addicted (1).

This was completely ignorant of Apple’s history of first using the numbered dot over the Apple Mail stamp icon that looked like a postmark.

I’m really skeptical of all these experts.

(1) https://www.nytimes.com/2018/02/27/magazine/red-dots-badge-p...

There is only one reason why my phone alerts: something gone wrong, and they need my attention.

I hate phone alerts with all my soul. I wish they never existed as a concept.

You do know that you can turn alerts off?

Given the first sentence, that seems quite likely.

Other things that are regularly close to my face: my glasses, several pillows in my bed, my fork as I eat, my children as I hug them.

Of course, my children can also jam their face into mine when they're being all manic and running around and that's not fun

But clearly, there is a big difference between "things I choose to put in front of my face" and "things that appear in front of my face outside of my own agency".

Similar to how you can't tickle yourself.

That wasn't even hard to figure out. First 15 minutes of the day, haven't gotten out of bed yet, with my phone in my face.

I also find it interesting how these sorts of articles never talk about reading books. I find that reading novels too much can also give me feelings of being stuck, not wanting to do anything else, just trundling along doing the same activity over and over again. It's how I got through all 9 books in The Expanse series in only a couple of months.

The problem isn't screens or light or not seeing the sky. It's over indulgence in consumption. It's just plain ol' addiction.

To me it completely explained why we wake up every morning with our hearts racing, thinking our pillow is attacking us.

Or why people who fall asleep cuddling their partners wake up in terror.

/s because Poe's law.

Best thing I’ve done is configure my iphone to not ring but just softly vibrate for calls/texts with “custom taps” and removed any “pending notifications” app badges to avoid this sense ouf urgency. Only thing left is silent breaking news from the Guardian and app notifications on the Lock Screen I can quickly glance at and discard in a tap.

That quote made me lose interest in anything that article had to say. It's such a ridiculous claim to say that everything that is close to my face is automatically registered as a threat, and I bet that 99.99% of things that regularly gets close to peoples faces (even disregarding smartphones from that statistic) are actually not threats at all. I don't think it makes evolutionary sense at all since it would cause us to perceive our babies and food as threats too.

Either that quote is taken wildly out of context or the interviewed therapist is full of shit.

I'm surprised you made it that far before filing it as the BS it is, given that "Screens" in general have been the enemy in that article.

Not what they display, how they operate or any other detail. No. Screens. A thing that displays information.

stanford.edu :)

Yes this sort of logic always maddens me. And it has extended to medicine for sure. Simplifying "screen time" as if what type of screen, the size of the screen, brightness, and what you are doing on it are insignificant. Anecdotally I had a "sleep specialist" actually give "no screens before bed" as medical advice. So what am I supposed to do- stare at the wall and think about if I'll be able to sleep? Reading a book will require more illumination which will disrupt circadian rhythm

What's more important is being conscious of what we are doing with screens at what times. I stop using my computer after 7pm typically, no social media before bed or upon waking

Two things work for me, either reading on my phone (I have a support thing) with the eye shield to avoid the blue light or listening to music until I feel sleepy enough to stop.

When it comes to bedtime reading, I found that nothing beats an OLED smartphone so long as you can fully control the brightness and the colors; e.g. a reading app that lets you set whatever you want - i.e. not Kindle - or else things like "color calibration" in GrapheneOS. That way, you can set the text to dull orange or red and dial the brightness very low. With OLED, the blacks are basically non-emissive, so the whole thing can be made extremely little light. This works even better if you gradually dial it down as your eyes get accommodated.

First time hearing about Sky before screens. Lifestyle advice that would work well with software as a profession, I imagine.

> i wake up every morning and look at my girlfriends face, hopefully that does not subconsciously trigger the same response

Giggled out loud, funniest thing I heard all day.

It is just-so. That is the primary method in evolutionary psychology.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Just-so_story

> wake up every morning and look at my girlfriends face, hopefully that does not subconsciously trigger the same response

Do you mean in her or in you?

This strikes me as likely over extrapolating from weak or shaky data. I highly doubt that objects close to you are generally registered as threats. that's absurd, and completely dependent on context, etc. No parent views their baby from a foot away as a threat. The phone is a different context as well, and might be a thread, but certainly not in the general sense.

> It does make some evolutionary sense

Does it? It sounds total bs to me.

"When you have an object close to your face, it's registered as food, because you need to get close to your meal to eat it."

"When you have an object close to your face, it's registered as love, because parents needs to get close to their child to look after them."

When you have a statement that you can bend in an arbitrary way and still make some sense out of it, it's nonesense.

Yeah, sometimes I put a morning banana by my bed, and I'm pretty sure my body doesn't treat it is a threat.

Seeking a charitable explanation, "near things are a threat" is a garbled form of "near things cause physiological arousal"?

That more-inclusive version would then cover cases like "delicious fruit" and "scary spider" and "the thing I put down next to me as a reminder to do something with it as soon as I got up."

I would put sounds much more in a category of threat assessment for the brain than objects. Waking up when there is a big sound (lightning, heavy machinery etc.) can really interrupt one, especially if you haven’t had your full REM cycle.

I do think objects can be affective, but one would never willingly put scary stuff near your bed, unless you’re into that sort of thing.

Now your phone can be threatening if you always expect the worst, e.g. your employer constantly prodding you with messages , but then you have bigger problems.

> morning banana by my bed

this person is living in the year 3200 with moves as smart as this one

Heh, I wish I could say it was because of time-optimized hustle grindset [0], but really I'm just trying to make myself actually eat in the mornings in case it helps me stop with the crazy late nights. [1]

[0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_o7qjN3KF8U

[1] https://www.mayoclinic.org/diseases-conditions/delayed-sleep...

And if a bear is close to your face, I'd think it's much too late.

You wouldn’t download a bear

> when you have an object close to your face, it’s registered as a threat,” says Loeffler

Someone sleeps alone.

Other than sounding "bad for you" for some reason to some people, what's wrong with waking up with a threat? Like why would that inherently be bad for you? Nobody explained that in the article and it's taken at face value.

What's wrong with "activating your fight or flight"? I could easily see some pop-sci book being written about how activating your fight or flight boosts testosterone or makes you more aware during your next tasks or whatever. Stress that makes you anxious is correlated with some diseases, but stress that you can deal with can many times be beneficial.

The problem is that basically nothing that happens on the phone is something you can deal with more effectively with a dose of stress hormones. Unless there is a text message that says you suddenly have to literally run somewhere and/or literally fight somebody, you will "deal with" it by like...posting more stuff yourself, and possibly not even that.

> You wouldn’t want to wake up and look a bear in the face every morning.

Sure I would! If I’m alive every day when I look at that bear, that’s a pretty good sign they don’t mean to harm me. In fact, sleeping next to a bear sounds like great protection from other predators, and quite warm and cosy too, like a giant cat.

> like a giant cat.

I'm pretty convinced my cat would eat me when I'm late with her lunch if she could.

> This is interesting to me. It does make some evolutionary sense but at the same time, i wake up every morning and look at my girlfriends face, hopefully that does not subconsciously trigger the same response.

Yeah, exactly. If my adult brain can distinguish between my wife's face and a bear, or my pillow and bear, why can't it distinguish between my phone and a bear? Plus, the phone is an object I hold in my hand. Is TFA saying that other objects I hold in my hand and bring close to my face so I can get a good look at them register as threats?

It reads like nonsense to me.

I've come across many people in life and I can't remember a single married couple saying anything positive about their circumstances.

I wonder if this theory, as bullshit as it probably is, is on to something?

> You wouldn’t want to wake up and look a bear in the face every morning

That guy has lived god knows how many years being blissfully unaware of the existence of furries.

Surely the same thing could be said about picking up a book or a newspaper first thing in the morning?

As someone who has woken up to looking a bear in the face while camping, I can say with 100% confidence that on a physiological level these are not the same thing.

So, hold the phone further away and it will become less appealing?

What if it's a nice bear

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