So What, Who Cares (vol 2, issue 4) How electronics are the enemy of sleep, part N in an ongoing series
Hello! Welcome to the end of the first full working week of 2015. Let's all agree to never do this again.
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More from the "electronics in the bedroom are bad for you" files: If you're bringing your electronic device into the bedroom with you, it could be the only thing you end up cuddling. As the NYT reports:
A study published last month in The International Journal of Neuropsychotherapy, for example, found that when one person in a relationship is using some forms of technology more than the other, it makes the second person feel ignored and insecure.
Or as your therapist may say, it brings up a whole lot of abandonment issue.
“Engaging in technology separate to a partner while in the presence of them encourages a disconnection rather than a connection,” said Christina Leggett, a senior researcher at the School of Psychology at the University of Queensland in Australia, who wrote the study with Pieter J. Rossouw, a professor there. “Disconnection in relationships tends to lead to feelings of dissatisfaction and comprises an individual’s sense of safety, attachment and control.”
If you're already sleeping alone, you should still leave the Kindle outside the bedroom door: another study found that people who used e-readers before tucking in took longer to fall asleep, and were less alert the next morning, compared to people who read old-fashioned paper books before turning off the lights. As if the sleep-quality issue weren't insult enough, further studies have reiterated the idea that reading retention and comprehension is better when you stick to paper over Paperwhites.
So what? Consider this quality-of-life news. You already know about the deleterious effects of sleep deprivation on adults and children alike (vol 2, issue 2).
Who cares? I've said it before and I'll say it again: Sleep-hacking is beginning to trend as a big U.S. cultural thing. Expect to see a lot of solutions that let people measure sleep time and sleep quality; expect to see p
eople writing about sleep hygiene and sleep quality; expect time-management and life-hacking types to try and fit "hack your sleep" into the every-minute-must-be-optimized-or-it's-wasted mindset.
While we're all fretting about sleep quality, we're also going to be getting an earful about how sleeping a solid seven to eight hours nightly is a cultural construct and not a biological one, and how our ancestors used to have all sorts of things to do at 2 a.m. and they still managed to get a lot of sleep, and how sleeping in intervals like Thomas Jefferson can unlock your potential.
What we should also bear in mind: As with so many other health-related things in the U.S., the ability to get good sleep has a strong socioeconomic component, and a strongly gendered component.
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Your pop culture note of the day: I spent the past weekend catching up on the podcast Denzel Washington Is The Greatest Actor of All Time Period, and it is just a delight. Co-hosts W. Kamau Bell and Kevin Avery have a great chemistry; they're both hilarious, smart and unabashedly enthusiastic -- yet not uncritical -- consumers of pop culture. The podcast is a master class in cinema history of the last twenty years and there's a tumblr for us Denzealots to follow along.
Avery and Bell are doing the movies in alphabetical order -- more or less -- and I assure you, you don't have to have seen the movies they're talking about to enjoy the discussions they have about and around the movie.
Subscribe to the podcast via the iTunes store or Soundcloud.
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