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Comment by frereubu | Hacker News Reader

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.

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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.

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...

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

My BS-meter also went off on this.

Mine too

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