

Video games and sleep loss - phames
http://blog.sleepio.com/2012/12/02/video-games-and-sleep-loss/

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bobsy
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.

~~~
Cthulhu_
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).

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Tichy
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.

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

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belorn
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.

~~~
hartror
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.

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ayh2
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.

~~~
debacle
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.

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razzmataz
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...

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

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fmavituna
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.

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bluepaper
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?

~~~
arrrg
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.)

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rjzzleep
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>

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gr3yh47
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.

~~~
xyzzyb
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?

~~~
VLM
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.

~~~
xyzzyb
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.

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fghh45sdfhr3
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.

~~~
Osmium
> 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.)

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ekianjo
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.

~~~
bryanlarsen
"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...](http://www.medicinenet.com/script/main/art.asp?articlekey=52516)

~~~
eumenides1
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.

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jrogers65
Did they control for drug (caffeine) consumption?

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AndrewWorsnop
That is a woefully low sample size...

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maked00
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.

~~~
phames
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.

