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this post was submitted on 16 Dec 2023
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I feel like it's almost propaganda at this point to disparage electronic media for reading and writing. Whether it's reading, writing, or notetaking, there are a lot of commonly cited studies that say real paper is always best.
I don't think the studies are very good...
I remember reading a study on sleep quality, purportedly testing whether people sleep better after reading a print book compared to a digital book. If I remember correctly, this is also one of the studies cited for the “blue light bad” trend.
The study found that reading digital books vs print harmed sleep. Their test conditions were something like this (note: I’m not exaggerating how ridiculous the setup was):
Print book: sit/lay in bed however you wish in a moderately lit room and read for some number of hours before you sleep.
Digital book: in the same room with the same lighting, an iPad is attached to a a device that holds it a prescribed distance from your face. The device cannot be moved, so you must sit in a particular position for the entire reading time. THE IPADS BRIGHTNESS SET TO MAXIMUM. You cannot adjust the brightness.
Yeah, I’m probably going to sleep worse after being forced to sit in the same position for multiple hours while being blinded.
Jeez. I can get behind the "blue light bad (at night)" thing, but that is a terrible design.
Even excessive pure red light would make it tough to sleep.
I went down a rabbit hole when the “blue light bad (at night)” thing hit 5-10 years ago. At the time I was curious about what the “dose” relationship was - ie, how much blue light did it take to affect your sleep - and how severely sleep was actually impacted.
What I found was that you will see lots of articles and health advice that said to avoid blue light and digital devices before sleep, but that when you dig into the source that all this advice was based on, it was a handful of really shady studies, such as the one I mentioned in my previous comment.
The belief that blue light affects sleep originated from research on the effect of sunlight on sleep patterns. But studies/articles makes a giant leap from the fact that bright sunlight has a measurable effect on sleep to the belief that any light that matches the sunlight spectrum also affects sleep.
Look at the s actual studies and read them. Draw your own conclusions about the quality of the study. What I found is that studies had to massively “crank up” the factors to show any effect. They do not attempt to replicate real-world usage of devices before sleep.
That's fair, but I had sleep problems for years that I've finally gotten under control through a bunch of things, one of which is blue light filters on devices towards the night. If it's a placebo effect, I don't want to lose it! Lmao
I don't think those are doing nothing. I often find blue-light filters are a lot easier on my eyes. But even so, brightness might have a more powerful effect, and I can attest that my phone's brightness comes all the way down at night.
Actually, even at minimum brightness with a blue light filter on, I still get annoyed when my dark-mode apps are interrupted by a giant, white block of anything.
Just ask Kramer.