Gregory Ferenstein | The Verge

How I keep screens from causing me insomnia

2015-03-24T10:26:08-04:00

One of the best night’s sleep in recent memory was when I was engrossed in a print edition of the Harry Potter series. I recall falling blissfully asleep to dimly lit paper pages of adventurous wizards and waking up with a surge of sustained focus. At the time, I attributed my refreshing sleep to the joyous relaxation of a good book before bed.

But, then I discovered that exposure to nighttime artificial light — including, possibly, the iPhone I would normally read on — has been wreaking havoc on humanity’s natural sleep cycle. Most recently, researchers at Harvard Medical School found that volunteers who dozed off to e-readers experienced less REM sleep, a vital portion of deep sleep associated with improved cognitive functioning.

The study was sort of a bummer

The study was sort of a bummer; reading before bed is one of life’s little pleasures, and the paper book is going the way of the steam engine, at least for me. The news reports seemed like we had to choose between reading and a good night’s sleep.

Fortunately, there are a few cheap solutions that can take the sting out of artificial light. My favorite use orange light, which doesn’t trigger our brain’s alert system in the same way that a brightly lit blue sky does. There are various products, such as special lighting and software that turns computer monitors a brownish hue, but I use something simpler: “blue-blocker” sunglasses.

The sun as both Ambien and alarm clock

The key to using these tools properly is to understand the timing of our natural sleep rhythms. Humans are born with a pre-programmed sleep setting tethered to the setting of the Sun. As the sky fades from bright blue to dim gold, our brains secrete hormones to gradually drift off into restful slumber. Eight hours later, Earth’s natural dimmer turns up the brightness and awakens us to a new day.

Our light sensitivity is so finely attuned that it even responds to moonlight, the only major source of the blue spectrum light at night prior to the industrial revolution. The natural world is affected as well. As the full moon peaked, nighttime became more raucous, as animals hunted and fornicated under the brightly lit nighttime sky. A study found that on average, people fall asleep about five minutes later during a full moon and get 20 minutes less overall sleep.

Edison’s invention changed nighttime forever

But then, Edison’s invention changed nighttime forever. Street lamps flooded cities with 24 hours of artificial sunlight. We worked more regimented hours and — slowly — we become part of a social evolution that created one big unnatural block of nighttime sleep.

Humans were probably almost unaware that their habits were changing. “As to whether people were aware of the impact of artificial lighting on their sleep, I’ve not seen any evidence that they were,” says Virginia Tech sleep historian Roger Ekirch. As computers flood our bedrooms with more and more artificial light, many have not noticed how their sleep gets worse and worse.

A simple solution: tint light orange

If blue light tells our bodies to wake up, there’s a simple solution: use red light instead. That’s what the American Medical Association recommends. After warning of the horrendous impacts of artificial light-induced sleeplessness (potential carcinogenic effects related to melatonin suppression, obesity, diabetes, depression, mood disorders, and reproductive problems), the AMA says that “this effect can be minimized by using dim red lighting in the nighttime bedroom environment.”

There are various products on the market designed to reduce ambient artificial light pollution. F.Lux is a free software program that filters blue light from computer screens. “Smart bulbs” automatically dims light bulbs with the setting of the sun. At the Consumer Electronics Show, health tracker startup, Misfit, has launched a smart bulb that is timed to change colors with a user’s sleeping patterns.

The best solution is also the most low-tech

But the best solution is also the most low-tech: “blue blocker” sunglasses. These awkward, wide-lens, orange-tinted sunglasses look like they fell out of a Miami Vice fan club for cataract patients, but they work wonders. Without blue blockers, study participants experienced a 46 percent reduction in the brain’s sleep chemical, melatonin. As such, they’ve been successfully used to improve ADHD symptoms in sleep-deprived youth. Another study found that they “may be useful in adolescents as a countermeasure for alerting effects induced by light exposure through LED screens.”

I was persuaded, so I’d started wearing blue blockers at night a few months ago after reading some initial reports about the effect of artificial light on sleep — but I’d never tried to quantify their effectiveness. After reading the Harvard study, I decided to see whether they were actually working.

A self experiment

I decided to ditch my blue blockers for a night and measure the change in sleep patterns using my Basis Peak band. (It’s worth noting that I’m attached to my laptop or iPhone until the very last minute I drift to sleep every night without fail.)

During the night I ditched my blue blockers, my Rapid Eye Movement (REM) deep sleep took a big hit. Just as participants in the original e-reader study experienced, my REM dropped about 5 percent. Considering I usually get around 30 percent on a good night and 19 percent on a bad night, that’s a serious impact.

My REM dropped about 5 percent

A few caveats: It’s a sample-size of one (me), so this is more of an attempt to put some numbers behind the drowsiness-inducing effects I felt intuitively. It’s also possible the placebo effect played a role — that’s when a person is so convinced the glasses will help with sleep that they do. Some studies have found that as much of half of the effect of sleeping pills are simply placebo.

In any case, the feeling of sleepiness that blue blockers cause is reason enough for me to keep wearing them. While wearing the glasses, I feel a natural sleepiness wash over me in about an hour. If, for some reason, I have to take the blue blockers off before I go to bed, it feels like a jolt of coffee. My brain immediately wakes up a bit; blue light is caffeine for the eyes.

An easy fix for screen insomnia

Blue blockers are a delightfully simple, low-tech solution — no fancy smart bulbs or software needed. It also doesn’t matter that I live in a city constantly surrounded by street lamps and retail shops that flood my room with blue light through the cracks in my curtains.

I use other tech as well. I installed F.lux on my Mac, which starts dimming my screen at sundown. It’s a nice way to mentally prepare my body for rest at the proper time.

In the near future, smart light bulbs may automatically dim the lights in our house to simulate the rising and setting of the sun. Until then, my $15 sunglasses are my new bedtime companion, because no technology should get in the way of falling to sleep with a good book.

Verge Video: Lucid Dreaming – In search of the holy grail of sleep

7 minutes in hell: one brutal workout with the Microsoft Band and Basis Peak

2014-11-12T10:28:40-05:00

I once believed exercise is necessarily just prolonged self-torture. I dreaded spending over an hour at the gym, which turned me into a yo-yo exerciser. For brief periods, I’d manage to find both the motivation and time in my schedule, only to fall off the wagon when my days got too busy.

But then I discovered that many top athletes exercise 20 minutes or less each workout. It turns out many of the benefits from exercise come from a precious few seconds of exhaustion, which triggers the body to build muscle in preparation for future strenuous activity.

A clever group of fitness researchers at the Human Performance Institute designed a circuit training routine that brings exhaustion to most major muscle groups in 7 minutes flat. The published results of the so-called “Scientific 7-Minute Workout” went viral: now, even the New York Times and the Pebble smartwatch have apps for users eager for a convenient way to incorporate it into their routines.

The key to high-intensity burst workouts is to strike that delicate balance between collapse-to-the-floor exhaustion and a pleasant sweat. If I train too easy, my body won’t think it needs to make physiological improvements; If I work too hard in the beginning, I won’t be able to finish all of the movements.

The key to exercising quickly is to get your heart rate right

“In my opinion, and broadly speaking, exercise intensity must be relatively high in order to gain cardiovascular conditioning from brief, interval style workouts,” Martin Gibola, a short-exercise enthusiast and McMaster’s Professor, wrote in an email. “That is essentially the trade-off for the reduced time commitment involved. While there is no hard and fast rule, average heart rate during the intervals should be at least ~80-85 percent of maximum.”

This is where technology plays a vital role: training at the very specific 80 percent of maximum heart rate is difficult to do. (Maximum heart rate is more obvious, at least for anyone who’s ever run until their knees buckled.) If I rely solely on my intuition, the incentive to take it easy overrides my sense of intensity.

Getting accurate data is important, but carrying a professional grade chest strap everywhere is a real pain in the neck. Fortunately, two new wearables, the Basis Peak and the Microsoft Band, promise to track my heart rate in real time.

Previously, popular health trackers only did resting heart rate (sub-130 bpm). The only non-chest strap alternative was the Mio Alpha watch — but it wasn’t meant to be worn all day, so I still had to remember to carry some extra device on me.

To test out how well each of the new 24/7 wearables could handle short-burst workouts, I wore four devices during my workout and checked my heart rate during each minute. The baseline is the chest strap: the closer each gets to a Polar H7, a professional-grade device, the more accurate.

The workout

The Scientific 7-Minute Workout includes 12 exercises at 30 seconds each and 10 seconds of rest between each one: jumping jacks, wall sit, pushups, crunches, step-up onto chair, squats, tricep dips on chair, plank hold, high-knee runs, lunges, pushup one-handed hold, and side plank. (Since it was designed for beginners, I increased the intensity of each workout to include a jump.)

Minute One, Jumping jacks: I feel like I could do this forever, and begin seriously question whether this 7-minute “workout” is even doing anything for me. I look down at my watch, and see only 144 beats per minute (and I should be at least 160). I crank jumping jacks into high gear to spike my heart rate.

Minute two, jumping push-ups: I finally hit 167 bpm and am feeling a good stride. Now it feels like a workout! I bang through a dozen pushups without a rest. I got this.

Minute three, jumping on onto chair: my optimism fades as I barely squeak through without stopping to rest. My effort slightly dips to 165 bpm; it’s already noticeably harder to sustain the same level of effort.

Minute four, tricep chair dips: I hit my runners’ high. Embracing the pain, I burn through dips as fast as gravity will allow. 172 bpm. Did I overdo it? Eh, probably not.

Minute 5, stationary high knee running: I definitely over did. Why did I over do it!? I get through half the 30-second sprint before slowing to a crawl. Thankfully, I’m at 170 bpm and realize I can slow down a bit as I edge toward the finish.

Minute 6, jumping lunges: I get a second runners high, fueled by nothing but the optimism that I’m going to make through. I clock in at 173 dpm. I’m way overdoing it; I don’t care. I will beat this damn workout! I will own it!

Minute 7, holding one-arm side plank: I realize how long seven minutes of pain can seem. I push as hard as I can to maintain good form, barely holding myself up from falling. As the time buzzes, I collapse to the ground. I made it.

It is here, on the floor, covered in sweat, that I realize seven minutes can, indeed, be workout. My heart rate proves that.

Throughout the workout, the Microsoft Band was consistently closest to the chest strap, though it did occasionally vary in a big way. Not only does it record exercise-grade heart rate with impressive accuracy, it also has a function to automatically count reps. I could program my own version of the 7-Minute Workout and know whether I was improving over time, by seeing if I could perform more reps during each workout in the future. As such, it is now my default fitness band.

	Polar chest strap	Microsoft Band	Basis Peak	Mio Alpha
Minute 1	144	144	118	140
Minute 2	165	131	117	134
Minute 3	167	157	N/A	165
Minute 4	172	164	68	171
Minute 5	170	172	103	168
Minute 6	173	156	90	167
Minute 7	145	127	127	143

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The Basis Peak was near-useless; only toward the end did it register anything even close to the chest strap. It also updates with a 10-second lag, which seems like a major oversight in engineering, as it severely limits the use cases for Basis Peak. The Basis team tells me that the heart rate monitor is really only good for steady-state exercises, like a light run or bike ride, and that seems right. The watch won’t help anyone who goes to the gym or a spin class.

Exercise doesn’t have to be marathon of self-torture. It can be a sprint of self-torture. It’s possible to get most of the mental and physical benefits of exercise from short-burst workouts. And the most delightful benefit of a brief workout is that it can be done anywhere: in the airport, in the office, anywhere you can find a spacious corner when days get too busy.

Fortunately, the next wave of fitness devices is helping aspiring health-nuts perform these workouts anywhere they happen to find a short break. The Microsoft Band is my new favorite fitness device, because it can measure both exercise-grade heart rate with impressive accuracy and it can automatically count reps.

Getting in one’s daily exercise is as simple as putting on a tracker and performing the Scientific 7-Minute Workout instead of watching cat videos on YouTube. Or, better yet, watching cat videos and working out at the same time.

Photography by Josh Lowensohn

The smartest socks ever: hacking my running with Sensoria’s fitness tracker

2014-10-09T12:37:46-04:00

I’ve recently discovered that running is a deliciously simple and effective way to get fit. In less time than it takes me to commute to my gym, I can experience all the sweaty goodness of a stress-relieving workout and take a tour of San Francisco’s beautiful neighborhoods. But I made the amateur mistake of assuming that since running is simple, it should also be easy.

Unlike every other form of workout I’ve tried, from yoga to weightlifting, I didn’t bother to get a coach. And, after four months of regular running, my terrible technique caught up with me and the chronic pain has left my running shoes collecting dust in the closet.

My story is all too common among the millions of aspiring health nuts who use running as their entrance into fitness. One experimental study published last year in the Orthopaedic Journal of Sports Medicine found that roughly a third of new runners sustain some form of injury in under a year.

There’s such a hunger for a tech solution that one device manufacturer, Sensoria raised $100,000 in crowdfunding and another $5 million in investment for a concept smart sock that can detect and improve running technique.

The resulting product is the Sensoria, a $149 anklet device attached to a special running sock. It coaches users with real-time analysis of their foot-striking position and stride. It will be available to its crowd-funders later this year and available to the public in Q1 2015.

I took the Sensoria out for an exclusive spin around San Francisco’s famous hills to see if a sock that’s priced roughly its weight in gold could be the saving grace of injured runners everywhere.

The Sensoria itself is a horseshoe anklet that attaches to a special sock via five brass knuckle-like magnets stitched near the lower shin area. Special sensors in the bottom of the sock measure where the foot makes contact with the ground and for how long. The anklet, which contains a CPU that analyzes data from the sensors, is so light that I would forget I had it on. It’s discreet enough to go unnoticed on the streets unless a stranger is looking close enough at my feet to see a small hump in the sock.

The real magic is in the smartphone app, which displays a detailed heat map of where pressure is being placed on your foot, along with detailed statistics on foot contact time, cadence, steps taken, stride length, and speed (Sensoria also makes a shirt with an embedded heart-rate monitor, which works in tandem with its software).

Even to a proud data nerd, all these statistics can seem overwhelming. So, Sensoria interacts with the user through an automated coaching assistant that yells out simplified advice when it detects poor form. “You’re failing to land on ball,” it chirps in my ear, if I fail to heel-strike consistently for more than 30 seconds. If my stride becomes irregular (a mistake that can result in debilitating injury), Sensoria chimes in with a “Pick up the pace!” command.

To appease both perfectionist marathon fanatics and newbie joggers, Sensoria takes a Swiss-like neutrality to rabid internal debates within the running community on proper form. Its default, for novice users, recommends landing on the ball of the foot — known as “forefoot striking”. Experts have the option to switch to heel striking and can precisely narrow in on their preferred cadence per minute.

For the sake of experimentation, I left on all the defaults for my initial run up San Francisco’s famous fog-covered trails.

I took Sensoria out for an late evening, 4-mile run up one of San Francisco’s famous routs, Bernal Heights. Two miles of flat street running and 400 feet of winding upward elevation on a paved trail let me see how the smart sock could handle all sorts of environments.

Immediately, my sock told me my running technique was lacking; I was still on my home block when I triggered its first warning that I was failing to properly land on the ball of my foot. After a few minutes of frustrating correction, I eventually got up high enough on my toes to quiet Mara, my lovingly-named virtual coach.

Unfortunately, half a mile later, I was duped into believing that I had instantly become the image of running perfection. The anklet had become unhinged: without notification, it just stopped giving advice. I spent the next 3 miles nervously checking my phone every time it went quiet, even though I had eventually adjusted my sock to keep it reliably paired.

Aside from this design bug, Sensoria performed admirably on flat streets. Running is perhaps uniquely prone to poor form because it’s so repetitive. Unless you have the motivation of Lance Armstrong or consume a bathtub full of caffeine, it’s near impossible for mere mortals to maintain concentration for 10,000+ monotonous steps.

On hills, Sensoria struggled. Even though it can keep track of elevation, it doesn’t quickly adjust its advice. During the hardest part of my run on a 30-degree incline at base of Bernal, Mara blared at me to maintain the same cadence I kept on flat streets.

The Sensoria did eventually adjust to the ascent, but only after a half-mile of badly timed instruction — a rather unpleasant experience when I would normally just quietly enjoy the view of San Francisco rooftops. I encountered the same frustrating bugs running back downhill and when I had to jog in place during red lights. Despite the less-than-perfect performance, Sensoria did live up to its promise. I feel like my technique improved and I enjoyed knowing that I was on track to a less injury-prone run.

For really serious runners, likely the target demographic for this, Sensoria is more likely to supplement a coach than to completely replace one. I took the wearable sock to my own technique guru, Kelly Starrett, famed Crossfit mobility expert and author of the upcoming Ready to Run.

As an initial diagnosis exam, he had me ditch my shoes and run barefoot; it’s a strategy he says naturally orients humans to run with proper forefoot striking and helps identify the best possible technique that they are currently capable of.

“You don’t need to spend $150 on a sock, you just need to run barefoot for two minutes,” he said.

Barefoot running exposed the limits and promise of Sensoria. In only a few seconds, Starrett noticed that I place a dangerous amount of weight on the outside of my foot (I “prance”, in his less-than-kind terminology).

During my initial run around San Francisco, I had unwittingly gamed Sensoria’s forefoot-striking system by keeping high on my toes, but this change was unlikely to solve the chronic pain caused by more fundamental problems. Apparently, I compensate my poor leg flexibility by bowing my feet outwards, which translates into terrible technique.

For right now, Sensoria can only sense poor technique coming from ball or heel striking, not overexertion on the inside or outside of the foot (“pronation“). Heapsylon tells me they hope to add this feature in the future.

Still, Starrett is bullish on Sensoria’s technology. Once I fix my underlying physiological issues, the smart sock will ensure that I maintain fidelity to my hard-trained technique through the entire run. He’s also excited that Sensoria could be applied to all kinds of sports, from basketball to rowing, as proper foot placement is a secret sauce to injury-resistant exercise.

Indeed, the unintended applications are rather expensive. I had the idea that Sensoria might be the ultimate shoe shopping aide, since it can sense which shoes naturally fit my foot while walking.

So, I secretly tested out the Sensoria with running shoes and a pair of old Birkenstocks. I wanted to see if their engineering team could see which shoe was easier on my knees without me telling them what I was wearing in each test. Sure enough, they correctly identified the Birkenstock as a “minimalist” shoe, which I had been wearing to ease the pressure on my legs during casual walks around my neighborhood.

It’ll be exciting to see what developers and coaches do with new wearable technology when they can get their hands on the latest versions.

Sensoria enters a crowded market of eager tech entrepreneurs who want to own a slice of the lucrative fitness market. Over the next year, a generation of wearables will make the evolution from simple step counting to advanced biological sensors.

For instance, the upcoming Athos shorts measure effort from major leg muscles to help athletes identify whether they’re using the most powerful parts of their body for each movement. The US Open tennis team partnered with e-clothing manufacturer Om Signal on a smart shirt that measures breathing and stress levels.

Even though Sensoria isn’t perfect, I’m still going to wear it during runs

Even though Sensoria isn’t perfect, I’m still going to wear it during runs. It’s worth using even with the bugs, which potentially could be fixed in the public version.

The most exciting aspect of Sensoria isn’t what it can currently do but how the next wave of wearables will transform the way we train. Countless runners take up the sport haphazardly, ignoring the collective wisdom of experts that has built up over decades.

As more smart clothing becomes technique-aware, amateurs will instantly be connected to cutting-edge science in an app that packages advice into simple real-time advice. The more data is collected on runners, the better data scientists can engineer advice to inspire the running masses into safe, peak performance.

For now, I’m eager to get back into running and I know I’ll need some sort of tech to keep me focused on injury-free technique.

Photography by Josh Lowensohn