Today we explore how technology is making us lonely, how a new pair of glasses may be expanding your idea of a computer screen, and how hitting the snooze button too many times could ruin your sleep hygiene.
Today we explore how technology is making us lonely, how a new pair of glasses may be expanding your idea of a computer screen, and how hitting the snooze button too many times could ruin your sleep hygiene.
Techno-Lonely
TV Glasses
Snooze Button
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Find episode transcripts here: https://curiosity-daily-4e53644e.simplecast.com/episodes/techno-lonely-tv-glasses-snooze-button
NATE: Hi! You’re about to get smarter in just a few minutes with Curiosity Daily from Discovery. Time flies when you’re learnin’ super cool stuff. I’m Nate.
CALLI: And I’m Calli. If you’re dropping in for the first time, welcome to Curiosity, where we aim to blow your mind by helping you to grow your mind. If you’re a loyal listener, welcome back!
NATE: Today you’ll learn about how technology is making us lonely, a new pair of glasses may be expanding your idea of a computer screen, and how hitting the snooze button too many times could ruin your sleep hygiene.
CALLI: Without further ado, let’s satisfy some curiosity!
[SFX: WHOOSH]
CALLI: Did you know that even though we might FEEL more connected to people with social media, we might actually be more disconnected than ever before?
NATE: Well, that doesn’t sound good. But yeah, as much as I love seeing what my friends are doing on social media, I’d really rather just see my friends.
CALLI: I get that. And it’s certainly been harder in the last few years with the pandemic. But a lot of research shows that maintaining friendships and making new ones in real life is crucial to protect our psychological, emotional, and physical health! We have more technology at our disposal, we’re busier than ever, and many of us now work from home, but that all means it's more important than ever to get out, and interact with others!
NATE: It IS really easy to feel isolated some days, but how does technology make us feel lonelier?
CALLI: Okay so, we’ll start with social media. People are more likely to feel insecure when they make comparisons to what they see online, whether it’s realistic or not. Plus, when we plan every event with evites and can track our friends' locations, we miss a bit of the spontaneity in life! Rates of loneliness have nearly doubled between 2012 and 2018 alone, and they’re now higher than ever. Adolescents actually seem to be feeling it the most!
NATE: Is the whole problem online then? If I log off, will I feel more connected?
CALLI: You might, but there are other forces at play too. Of course the pandemic contributed to a growing sense of social isolation, but things as simple as remote work or urban planning also contribute to it. We spend more time at home or in our cars than ever before, and growing suburbs means we don’t just bump into strangers nearly as much as we used to. Connecting with a stranger can be a meaningful human connection, like chatting with someone in line at the coffee shop for example…and watching someone drop food off at your door and waiting ‘til they leave to open the door doesn’t count!
NATE: Okay I know you said loneliness is on the rise, but do we need to be worried? Doesn’t everyone get lonely sometimes?
CALLI: Sure! We all have periods where we feel lonely, but it becomes a problem when those periods last longer and longer. If you can’t stop fixating on how lonely you feel and have trouble connecting with other people, you might have chronic loneliness. Since the pandemic, more of us probably have the disorder than we realize. And being alone for too long can have some pretty wild effects. Isolation can cause depression, anxiety, and lead to substance abuse, but researchers say it also changes our brain structure and how we think! The older generation can even see an increase in the risk of dementia. And, I have a pretty crazy statistic to tell you that you might not even believe.
NATE: Okay, hit me.
CALLI: Put simply: chronic isolation is as bad for you as smoking 15 cigarettes A DAY!
NATE: WHAT! Really? That’s terrifying. How can I be sure I don’t accidentally slide into periods of isolation for too long?
CALLI: See your friends! It’s important to have more face-to-face conversations, and I don't just mean over Zoom. Get out and meet people in person, and work to keep conversations going with your friends, no matter where they are in the world. Opening lines of communication can help you feel, and be, more connected. And next time you want a burger, go pick it up yourself, and make a bad joke to the cashier!
NATE: Well, this all makes me extra glad that we have this podcast to do.
CALLI: I feel the same way. They say chatting with colleagues is a great way to fight isolation, and so is doing podcasts with your best friends.
[SFX: WHOOSH]
NATE: Imagine if instead of investing in an extra monitor for your work-from-home office, you could just put on a pair of…glasses?
CALLI: Glasses? Do you mean binoculars that make my tiny tablet screen look bigger?
NATE: No! The Lenovo Glasses T1 are glasses that connect to your phone and have their own small screen. Well, two small screens to be more accurate. They allow you, and only you, to see images that seem absolutely massive! It’s like you’re in the image itself!
CALLI: So is this the new era of smart glasses?
NATE: Technically, they aren’t actually smart glasses because they don’t have any computing power or do augmented reality. They’re just an external screen, small enough that it fits on your face, with the benefit of built-in hi-fi speakers.
CALLI: I looked at a picture of them, and they definitely seem a bit bulky, but not anywhere near the size of a regular TV screen.
NATE: Each eye has a micro OLED screen, with 1920 X 1080 resolution in each eye, and a 60Hz refresh rate, which is pretty common on TVs and laptops. So you have the same amount of pixels and definition as your devices, enough to make things super hi-def but obviously much closer to the eye than any current technology we use on a regular basis. It’s like being in a movie theater but you can only look at the screen.
CALLI: I mean that sounds pretty good, but I’m not sure my parents would like them, she always used to warn me “Don’t sit too close to the TV or you’ll burn your eyes out.”
NATE: Sure, I get that, and I’ll definitely be reading some of the first reviews when they hit the market to make sure people aren’t getting any eye fatigue or anything. The glasses apparently have Low Blue Light technology, to keep blue light out of your eyes, and blue light is one of the things that adds to eye strain and fatigue. We even did a story recently where we talked about the aging effects of too much blue light. They also put in technology to reduce any screen flickering, which should make viewing more comfortable.
CALLI: I mean, I guess that is pretty cool. But I guess the million dollar question is, why do we need this? I mean can’t I just watch things on my phone?
NATE: Sure, you can, but do you really want to watch Inception or Dunkirk on such a small screen? So much of our entertainment is moving to our phones and tablets, and those little screens aren’t always the best for our viewing. These glasses are more like you’re watching on a movie theater screen, but they still fit in your pocket!
They’re also great for business people. Imagine, you’re in an airport, or on a train, and you have sensitive documents you really need to look at, but you’re worried about people looking over your shoulder. If you put your screen directly on your face, no one else can see what you’re looking at!
CALLI: Oh that would be cool! I just hate when people look at what I’m doing on my computer, even if it’s nothing important. I’m coming around on the idea of these glasses, but what are the downsides?
NATE: Well, you have to plug them directly into your device with a USB-C cord, and we don’t know how much power they’ll drain. Plus, you’ll need to be seated to use them! It’s not like you can look through an episode of House of the Dragon to see what's on the sidewalk in front of you!
CALLI: Ha, I guess that’s true.
[SFX: WHOOSH]
CALLI: Are you more of a night owl or a morning person?
NATE: Well it really depends on the day but I’d say that I wake up pretty well in the morning if I did a good job at going to bed on time the night before, which doesn’t always happen. But if I got the right amount of sleep I can get up and start going and working on stuff. Why do you ask?
CALLI: Because I’m a bit of a night owl and I’ve been having some trouble waking up recently. This is probably due to the fact that I’ve been splurging Final Fantasy 14 and I now wake up in the morning and I’ve been snoozing my alarm over and over, which I felt wasn’t a great habit so I looked into the science behind what are called, “Habitual snoozers,” and what it is that causes the term that I’m going to personally coin myself here: over-snoozification.
NATE: Over-snoozification, very nice.
CALLI: You’re welcome.
NATE: There is seriously a study for everything and yet I’m always surprised. What did you find about these snooze enthusiasts?
CALLI: So, did you know that snoozing your alarm over and over makes you a habitual snoozer? I know I just used that term but that’s an actual thing.
NATE: Habitual snoozer, okay. Is it bad to be a habitual snoozer?
CALLI: Well, first I wanna explain the difference between what a habitual snoozer is and a habitual sleeper. Habitual sleeper sounds more like what you are. It’s someone who gets a consistent amount of sleep every night, around 6-9 hours, like a healthy amount. A habitual SNOOZER, someone like me that can’t stop hitting the snooze button.
NATE: Okay, I feel like I’m probably more of a habitual sleeper? Because I really don’t use a snooze button, I hate the snooze button because I hate my alarm sound and I don’t want to hear it over and over again. Is this common being a habitual snoozer?
CALLI: It is common, but actually less common than you might think. A recent study found that 57% of participants were habitual snoozers. That’s still a majority but not like a vast majority, I would have thought it would be like 70% or something like that. The CDC estimates that 1 in 3 Americans doesn’t get enough sleep in general so that definitely relates to why we see that number of snoozers.
NATE: 57% yeah, that’s not like everybody, it’s most people but it’s barely most people. So that makes some sense. So, is this like a study where scientists were watching to see if people used the snooze button or were they just asking, “Hey do you use the snooze button?” And relying on people to self report?
CALLI: That’s a great question. And the answer is kind of both. The study worked with 450 adults with full-time salary employment and they were surveyed via daily questionnaires. Each participant also had to wear a device that measured their sleep duration and heart rates, for all of them the monitor noted when a participant actually woke up. And some of the findings weren’t that surprising: for instance, the people most likely to hit the snooze button were self-declared “night owls,” like me or as I like to call it in the morning, a permanently exhausted pigeon. However, the data broke down a lot differently when taking gender into account. Women were actually WAY more likely to hit the snooze button than men by 50 percent.
NATE: Oh! Okay so, it’s most people but barely but like a lot more women use the snooze button than men do.
CALLI: Yes. Absolutely, so you and me, we are right in that demographic.
NATE: We follow this beautifully, but what does the data mean for everyone?
CALLI: Well, full time workers aren’t getting enough sleep obviously, but FEMALE full time workers are pushing it even more than men. Every participant was somebody who’s been in the workforce for years, they all had advanced college degrees, they were all over the age of 25. Regardless of gender, this group had bad sleep habits, but the women were more likely to snooze. But, one thing to keep in mind, is that this only focuses on one part of society. This isn’t taking into account low-income households, teenagers, or any other type of population that could be more sleep deprived. They weren’t surveyed this is a very small control group.
NATE: Alright so the real numbers could be lower, could be higher, maybe teenagers have 90 percent of them using the snooze button or something like that.
CALLI: I don’t know, teenagers are getting kinda responsible these days.
NATE: Oh boy, is that a thing? I gotta admit I don’t interact with too many teenagers right now.
CALLI: I’m just having hope for the future generations.
NATE: Alright, carry on with your hope.
CALLI: K! All of this doesn’t really take away from the biggest finding of the study: every single respondent who woke up without an alarm was shown to sleep longer, consume less caffeine, and have a much better mental health day than anybody relying on an alarm. This shows that when the body is allowed to sleep as long as it wants, it experiences a “stress” response right before waking that makes an individual feel more alert throughout the day.
NATE: How does having an alarm, or not having an alarm affect this? Like what about the alarm or lack is changing this stress response that makes someone feel more alert.
CALLI: It’s actually something called sleep inertia: the feeling we get of being tired or groggy after waking up. Turns out if you disrupt a natural sleep cycle, it bypasses the body’s natural stress response and leaves you with a wonky brain chemistry. To put it simply, if you don’t have that jolt of alertness, you won’t be alert.
NATE: But I guess it has to be a natural jolt of alertness and not an alarm-inspired jolt. Does this mean generally that alarms are bad and we shouldn’t be using them to wake up?
CALLI: We don’t actually know that for sure in the long term, especially since many people use their alarms as more of a safety precaution than a hard stop to their sleep. I will admit that sometimes I will just wake up before my alarm and that tends to be when I feel like I’m the most rested. We need more research from more walks of life to know for sure. And what we do know is that there ARE actually a few benefits to snoozing. That extra bit of sleep might allow your body to gamble on if it wants to give you that alert feeling, AND it might reduce dependence on caffeine. Some stress is good for the body, that’s why we have a “fight or flight response.” Therefore: even though waking up on your own is preferable, the snooze button CAN actually be good for you. Hah! Knew it.
NATE: I just came up with a great word for habitual snoozers. “En-snooze-iasts.”
CALLI: No.
NATE: Yeah.
[SFX: WHOOSH]
NATE: Let’s recap what we learned today to wrap up.
CALLI: While technology might have you believe that we are more connected than ever, loneliness and isolation are on the rise, and can have harmful health effects. Fight loneliness, and protect your health, by getting out, seeing your friends, and connecting with others.
NATE: New computer glasses are changing the way we can watch content and use computers in public. By connecting the glasses to your phone, these new glasses provide a life-sized screen that is just sitting on the bridge of your nose.
CALLI: Did you hit the snooze button today to get a little extra sleep? Turns out you might have poor sleep hygiene! Nearly 57 percent of workers were found to have hit the snooze button to get a couple more minutes of sleep and reported being groggier through the day. Although it may sound impossible to some of us, getting to bed earlier so we can wake up WITHOUT an alarm might be the most beneficial way to cut down on that groggy morning we know and love so much.