Hacker News Reader

Comment by siquick | Hacker News Reader

I try and avoid screens before sleep but also use a Kindle for reading before sleeping - wondering if the e-ink displays count as screen time in studies like this?

View on HN

From anecdotal experience, it makes essentially no difference.

I read for an hour or two before bed every night. Paper, kindle, or my current iPad mini make no real difference to my sleep.

Dim lights, relaxing, and trying to clear my brain of distractions other than what I’m reading make more of a difference. It’s almost but not quite like meditation.

LED backlight might. If no backlight probably fine.

What about yellow(ish) backlight? I switched to Kobo bc of that

No, only actually candlelight is fine. Ideally an open fire. However reading itself is unnatural so it can only lead to negative outcomes..

I take it you you’re sarcastic but natural is dying at age twenty from a broken leg, miss me with natural living

I know it's just an example, but it didn't take modern medicine for us not to die of broken legs at twenty. There's some risks sure, but the norm was presumably lying down and resting because it (especially doing anything else) bloody hurts, it gradually healing, and then varying degrees of hobbling for the rest of life because it healed without a splint.

(And then it wouldn't be that surprising I don't think if we figured out splints long before anything you might call medicine.)

We didn’t need modern medicine to heal broken bones but for sure more than what was „naturally“ available.

You can switch out broken bones for „being dragged from the campfire into the dark and devoured“ - another natural occurrence that I gladly live without

This is surely sarcastic, right?

IIRC, most of the evidence regarding screens before bed being detrimental were focused on the "blue light" thing, so a warmer light is probably better.

(I think the science behind blue light being bad for us is still up for debate, but it's hard for me to ignore the amount of anecdata I've heard, including my own experience using flux and the like)

Blue light has been shown to affect alertness in the evening in 13 young men here https://journals.physiology.org/doi/full/10.1152/japplphysio...

Would be interested in studies refuting this.

Yeah but you need some light in order to read, and most lights are LED nowadays. That said, I have a Philips wake-up light that has a very pleasant yellow and dimmable light. I wonder what its frequency is though, some cheaper leds don't blink fast enough and especially when I'm tired it's noticeable. I just checked it with the slow-mo camera of my phone, my overhead lamps have a visible flickering, but the wake-up light has an interesting shuttering / interlacing effect, when I up the brightness (which increases brightness and shifts the light more to white) it seems to alternate between a white and orange light source. Might be multiple bulbs interlacing.

Anyway, LED backlight shouldn't be a problem if it's not white light. Best to have some additional light in the room though, to reduce contrast / eye strain between the screen and the background.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com