8 ms·

“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,”

“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-made-me-a-better-cyclist-could-it-work-for-you https://www.cyclingweekly.com/news/sky-before-screens-has-ma...

frereubu 2y ago
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.
- interludead 2y ago
  Striking a balance in our morning routines can be more beneficial overall.
  - andai 2y ago
    I assume you don't mean an equal ratio of drivel and truly meaningful experiences, though I'd love to hear more.
- andai 2y ago
  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.
  - thierrydamiba 2y ago
    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.
  - MaxMatti 2y ago
    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.
    - marcusverus 2y ago
      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.
    - andai 2y ago
      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.
  - ninalanyon 2y ago
    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.
- Torkel 2y ago
  +1 My BS-meter also went off on this.
  - PikaXGod 2y ago
    Mine too
- corobo 2y ago
  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
  - kulahan 2y ago
    Bears also have eyes, so I imagine this wouldn’t inherently solve the problem.
- latexr 2y ago
  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.
  - xattt 2y ago
    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-phones-notification.html https://www.nytimes.com/2018/02/27/magazine/red-dots-badge-p...
- defyonce 2y ago
  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.
  - ninalanyon 2y ago
    You do know that you can turn alerts off?
    - thfuran 2y ago
      Given the first sentence, that seems quite likely.
- moron4hire 2y ago
  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.
- pcthrowaway 2y ago
  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.
- Kailhus 2y ago
  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.
FrostKiwi 2y ago
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.
trashtester 2y ago
> 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?
raincole 2y ago
> 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.
- Terr_ 2y ago
  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."
  - prox 2y ago
    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.
  - heckelson 2y ago
    > morning banana by my bed this person is living in the year 3200 with moves as smart as this one
    - Terr_ 2y ago
      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 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_o7qjN3KF8U [1] https://www.mayoclinic.org/diseases-conditions/delayed-sleep-phase/symptoms-causes/syc-20353340 https://www.mayoclinic.org/diseases-conditions/delayed-sleep...
bartread 2y ago
> 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.
- Dalewyn 2y ago
  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?
drewcoo 2y ago
> when you have an object close to your face, it’s registered as a threat,” says Loeffler Someone sleeps alone.
anal_reactor 2y ago
> 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.
latexr 2y ago
> 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.
- RobotToaster 2y ago
  > like a giant cat. I'm pretty convinced my cat would eat me when I'm late with her lunch if she could.
ulrikrasmussen 2y ago
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.
- hypfer 2y ago
  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.
  - formerly_proven 2y ago
    stanford.edu :)
  - MavisBacon 2y ago
    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
    - felipereigosa 2y ago
      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.
jampekka 2y ago
It is just-so. That is the primary method in evolutionary psychology. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Just-so_story https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Just-so_story
tjpnz 2y ago
So, hold the phone further away and it will become less appealing?
vasco 2y ago
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.
- ElevenLathe 2y ago
  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.
mattacular 2y ago
What if it's a nice bear
VieEnCode 2y ago
Surely the same thing could be said about picking up a book or a newspaper first thing in the morning?
deleted 2y ago
[deleted]
etrautmann 2y ago
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.
Cheetah26 2y ago
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.

frereubu 2y ago

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.

interludead 2y ago
Striking a balance in our morning routines can be more beneficial overall.
- andai 2y ago
  I assume you don't mean an equal ratio of drivel and truly meaningful experiences, though I'd love to hear more.
andai 2y ago
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.
- thierrydamiba 2y ago
  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.
- MaxMatti 2y ago
  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.
  - marcusverus 2y ago
    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.
  - andai 2y ago
    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.
- ninalanyon 2y ago
  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.
Torkel 2y ago
+1 My BS-meter also went off on this.
- PikaXGod 2y ago
  Mine too
corobo 2y ago
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
- kulahan 2y ago
  Bears also have eyes, so I imagine this wouldn’t inherently solve the problem.
latexr 2y ago
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.
- xattt 2y ago
  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-phones-notification.html https://www.nytimes.com/2018/02/27/magazine/red-dots-badge-p...
defyonce 2y ago
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.
- ninalanyon 2y ago
  You do know that you can turn alerts off?
  - thfuran 2y ago
    Given the first sentence, that seems quite likely.
moron4hire 2y ago
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.
pcthrowaway 2y ago
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.
Kailhus 2y ago
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.

FrostKiwi 2y ago

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.

trashtester 2y ago

> 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?

raincole 2y ago

> 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.

Terr_ 2y ago
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."
- prox 2y ago
  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.
- heckelson 2y ago
  > morning banana by my bed this person is living in the year 3200 with moves as smart as this one
  - Terr_ 2y ago
    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 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_o7qjN3KF8U [1] https://www.mayoclinic.org/diseases-conditions/delayed-sleep-phase/symptoms-causes/syc-20353340 https://www.mayoclinic.org/diseases-conditions/delayed-sleep...

bartread 2y ago

> 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.

Dalewyn 2y ago
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?

drewcoo 2y ago

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

anal_reactor 2y ago

> 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.

latexr 2y ago

> 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.

RobotToaster 2y ago
> like a giant cat. I'm pretty convinced my cat would eat me when I'm late with her lunch if she could.

ulrikrasmussen 2y ago

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.

hypfer 2y ago
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.
- formerly_proven 2y ago
  stanford.edu :)
- MavisBacon 2y ago
  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
  - felipereigosa 2y ago
    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.

jampekka 2y ago

It is just-so. That is the primary method in evolutionary psychology. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Just-so_story https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Just-so_story

tjpnz 2y ago

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

vasco 2y ago

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.

ElevenLathe 2y ago
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.

mattacular 2y ago

What if it's a nice bear

VieEnCode 2y ago

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

deleted 2y ago

[deleted]

etrautmann 2y ago

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.

Cheetah26 2y ago

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.