Video games and sleep loss | Hacker News Reader

Video games and sleep loss

blog.sleepio.com

27 pointsphames32 comments

For me video games greatly affect my sleep. I was a teenager when I realized this and that was when I stopped playing games at around 9pm so my brain could reset and do something more relaxing.

I don't think this is exclusive to games. I often have the same problem going to bed straight after coding. I still have things on the mind.

I find the hardest game to sleep after is Starcraft. All that multitasking and thinking about a silly loss. Can take 30-40 minutes to get to sleep if I jump into bed directly after playing a game.

Did anyone use to play Ultima Online? Surely you had the recurrent dream of being dead and struggling to find your corpse? "Must find corpse! Can't lose stuff!" I would then wake up and remember I signed out at Brit bank, relax and go back to sleep. I had issues.

Well on the one hand it is brain activity - games and code excite the brain, and it can't simply click shut off and sleep.

On the other hand, it's light - the light from your computer screen goes straight into your eyes and to your brain, that tells you "IT'S STILL DAY". The brain / eyes need darkness / dusk to start producing melatonin, the sleep molecule.

So, turn off your screens, don't look at mobile phones, and if possible turn the TV off too, or at the very least dim them to the lowest brightness setting at least an hour before attempting to go to sleep, preferably two.

Software like f.lux will help too; studies show that white/blue lights will wake you up, while red, warm colors will make you sleepier. f.lux will make the screen a nice warm, soft red after sundown, mimicking natural sundown (while making it brighter / 'colder' during the day, keeping you awake while you work).

I started playing UO when I was 7, in 1998 or 1999. I just stopped in the past few years. No telling how much sleep I lost to that game!

In the article it says "they played a VIOLENT video game" (emphasis mine), yet the title only says "video games". For all we know, there might be sleep inducing video games.

Apart from that I wonder how much of it is just "sitting in front of a screen with artificial light" - isn't there an issue with certain wavelengths of artificial light affecting Melatonin production, which might also affect sleep?

All in all, the study does not sound very trustworthy to me. Because of the subject, I have no doubt it will picked up by all the newspapers and TV talk shows, though.

Yes blue light inhibits melatonin release, although to my knowledge there is still very little reliable research on in-situ, naturalistic use of devices on sleep.

Agreed that this is a small sample; however the use of both subjective and objective measures is a step forward.

The abstract says “novel, violent, fast-paced video game”. I assume the actual paper would also name the game, but I cannot access it.

The article lacks details over what type of experience the player had when playing, slightly rendering any conclusions useless until further studies.

Playing a computer game can be a spectrum of experiences, some that are very distant related to each other. For example, is the game that the person playing a single player game or multiplayer? strategy or action? The excitement level of doing some EVE trading a few hours before sleep, mining some ore in WoW, playing a tournament in starcraft, discussing politics in a facebook "game", playing a puzzle game like portal, playing an unforgiving game like nethack (and dieing), playing an fast reaction game like insert last released fps game here, are all, all, very different in the amount of excitement received.

What I would like to see, is the same study but with a game that’s basically a rather boring experience, but common with gamers. MMO Farming, practice matches vs AI, trading, windows card games and so on. That would allow us to separate the act of playing a video game, from the act of doing something exciting before sleeping.

They say violent so one assumes by violent they mean a violent action game. But what you says stands.

To add a general comment, no shit Sherlock, I just finished playing 2 hours of Planetside 2 and my adrenalin is sky high. I am going to need at least an hour of reading before bed.

Playing an hour or so of WOW helps me sleep better. This way, I remain in a relaxed/bored gaming mode when I hit the pillow. Otherwise, I would start thinking about work instead and become wild awake.

One piece of evidence doesn't necessarily contradict the other.

I definitely need about an hour of cool-down after work each day, but I've also noticed that I don't sleep as well as I'd like when I'm watching TV or gaming before bed versus reading or doing other things.

My next question is, how well does this compare to watching television before going to bed. Research shows that to be detrimental to sleep quality as well. I'd almost like to see a study with participants watching a screen of light before sleeping and measuring the quality of their sleep...

I thought it was the blue light suppressing the melatonin and circadian rhythm? Isn't that kind of the premise behind f.lux?

From personal experience this is not isolated to gaming. As a gamer and coder whenever I spend 2+ hours just before sleep on gaming, heavy coding, research I tend to get a bad sleep. I guess during coding / research it's because my mind stuck with certain problems (hence eureka moments in the morning). Also I look forward to the next morning so I can try out all these new ideas (which always causes me to wake earlier).

Right after gaming or a mind stimulating movie (i.e. Fight Club) again my mind is too busy with the stuff so sleep quality is worse than general.

For the last 4-5 years I consciously try to put a buffer between all these active engagements and my sleep by watching a sitcom or just doing light reading in between.

That seems like a rather small sample size, both in number of people involved and the fact that it the results seem to be based on only a couple of points. (what's the variation in the sleep patterns normally? What about other factors that may affect their sleeping patterns? e.g. previous nights' sleep, exposure to other media content while not at the sleep lab, etc.)

I'm genuinely interested. I do understand that this may be a basis for further study but how much can we really take from this study to encourage further research?

I agree it is a small sample - although not uncommon for psychology studies.

I'm going to see if Dr Kyle (who wrote the post) can hop on here to give us his view.

It was an experiment – not exactly a classic design – but still an experiment. In that context 17 participants are not ideal, but workable and typical. As you can imagine, getting people to sleep in a lab for two nights is hard and costs money that often isn’t there.

I wanted to read the actual paper to give some more detailed insight, but the website of the right database is currently down for maintenance. From their abstract I can see that from the outset they excluded everyone with existing sleeping difficulties. That implies that during recruitment and before the experiment started they already asked questions about sleeping patterns (to exclude outliers from the experiment).

I’m willing to bet that they also controlled for other variables, just like you mentioned, for example other media exposure or the previous nights’ sleep. That’s what you usually do.

(While searching for the paper I actually found some other papers about video gaming before sleeping. It seems like quite some found broadly similar results to this one, so in that context the result doesn’t seem super surprising. But note: This was just me browsing around and glancing at a few abstracts, by no means a thorough or even somewhat acceptable literature review.)

and this wouldn't happen to have anything to do with blue light suppressing melatonin more than anything else?

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Melatonin

http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3047226/

http://stereopsis.com/flux/research.html

look, The conlusion here is ridiculous. When playing a violent video game, you will see a rise in adrenaline. I'd be willing to bet that if you participate in any adrenaline-heightened activity for 2.5 hours and then go right to bed, you'll see sleep loss.

"Video games and sleep loss" what a crock.

Uhm, and? I’m confused and don’t really know what you want to say there. Maybe other activities also have the same result, but this study doesn’t seem to doubt that or claim otherwise.

The study doesn't seem to be claiming that videogames have an exclusively bad influence on sleep, merely that they have an influence on sleep. Where's the crock?

The crock is extremely poor experiment design. Automatic F in an experimental psych class, or the stat classes I've taken, or quant chem analysis class, or I'd assume pretty much any hard science. So some random and completely uncontrolled combination of viewing violence, artificial light, novelty response to something new (assuming the game was new to them...), adrenaline (duh), finger/hand exercise, skin exposure to plastic, last but by no means least magic video game cooties has an effect on sleep.

There's a subtle difference between anecdote, data, and information... Due to poor experimental design, this is an semi-interesting anecdote, nothing more. Which is too bad.

Edited note: Its the timing thats bad. Doing a huge wide ranging experiment is perfectly valid iff you've already got tons of verified data and info of ALL the constituent parts and can subtract that statistical noise from the huge # of variables experiment. Its like giving higgs boson search raw data to Newton as a first experiment rather than starting with an apple off a tree. For example, medical sample of adrenaline level at bed time fed into formula to subtract out effect of excitation. Then medical experiment using scrambled video signal so the same melatonin effect based on raw light level and average color/brightness can be subtracted out of the sleep data. After subtracting out about 10 correction factors they might have real data, or even info, instead of anecdote.

Yes, but again: they aren't stating that it's some property exclusive to videogames that affect sleep but something about playing videogames (including all side effects) can have an affect on the quality of sleep.

They had them play games right before bed. How is this different from reading right before bed? That's what often messes up my sleep. And I am in my 30s and know I shouldn't read in bed, even though I love to.

> How is this different from reading right before bed? That's what often messes up my sleep.

I think this just goes to show we're all different. For me, reading is a great way to relax to get the sleep. It's a way of focusing the attention on a single thing, and letting the other distractions fade away, whereas other activities (whether coding or gaming or otherwise) demand simultaneous focus on many different things.

And not to mention my books don't bathe my face in high energy photons... (I say this as another convert to Flux, but unfortunately I fear Flux isn't sufficient: I hear that research has shown just a few high energy photons are sufficient to suppress melatonin production. In which case you'd be better off wearing glasses with a blue filter.)

Wow, that's ground-breaking research. Doing something that maintains your brain more active for a longer time before sleeping makes your sleep worse. Nobel prize level at least.

I thought that the study would look at long-term effects of video games, at least.

Do you want to pay for such a study? I’m sure that many psychology or sociology departments would happily take your money.

But even with money, studying long term effects of media use is fiendishly difficult. Most studies looking at the impact of media use focus on short term effects, because that’s in many cases the only pragmatic solution.

For studying long term effects, experiments pretty much fall flat. You cannot control the media exposure of people for weeks and months. Even this experiment (probably) didn’t stop participants from using other media before they came to the lab, so control over media exposure was limited to the 2.5h or 50m.

So you have to rely on surveys and do a panel study (i.e. ask the same people the same questions at different points in time) – and that’s just messy. The randomization can no longer do all the work for you and you have to control for all variables that could plausibly also influence participants behavior, independent of media exposure. Expect mostly suggestions and never really solid results from that.

"Wow, that's ground-breaking research."

Just because everybody believes it doesn't make it true. Every once in a while people do a study on something that's widely believed and it turns out that the wide belief was wrong. One example: sugar makes kids hyper.[1] Yet studies show that the two aren't well correlated.

1: http://www.medicinenet.com/script/main/art.asp?articlekey=52...

I also agree that it's important to verify assumptions. I also think that the general comments in response to the article also indicate that a lot of us want to know more about the matter.

Is it the interactivity of the video game? Or is it light emitted by the monitor? Does surfing the web or watching TV engage us enough that it also cause similiar problems?

Lots of questions and lot of of limits to the study, but a good(I even dare say great) number of us are clearly going to be clearly affected by the outcome of a more detailed and exhaustive study.

I really hope to see more research in the area.

Did they control for drug (caffeine) consumption?

That is a woefully low sample size...

Idiots at work here. Subjective questionairres are always a total waste of time. They should have given participants a performance test of some kind. I will wager the gamers would perform as good or better than the non-gamers.

They did take objective measures, via polysomnography. It's one of the novel aspects of this study. Interesting that perceived difficulty getting to sleep after gaming was greater than that recorded via the polysomnography.

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