Gamers and grannies – more in common than meets the eye?
A question from the briliant audience at the National Care Forum event in Liverpool last week got my brain buzzing – lighting systems designed for grannies help gamers get to sleep too?
Perhaps they have more in common than first meets the eye?
After all, they both spend the majority of their days sitting indoors in chairs positioned to mininise glare from windows on their screen, often with curtains tightly drawn against the sun, relying on domestic lighting that’s often a fraction of the levels their body clocks need to stay on track. Teens and their grandparents struggle to switch off at night, too. That may be because their brains are buzzing and they feel wide awake – or simply dread lying in the dark for hours waiting for elusive sleep to come.
That feeling tired and wired is the double-whammy generated by the dual mechanism that drives the sleep-wake cycle.
The first is the internal clock driven by patterns of light exposure that trigger release or suppression of hormones including melatonin and cortisol. These levels are regulated by the ‘master clock’ or SCN which then cascades to ‘peripheral clocks’ in every call and organ in the body. The second reason you feel ready to sleep is the ‘homeostatic’ sleep drive – the build-up of chemicals including adenonsine over time which make you start to yawn after a busy day. In an ideal world, those two drives work together: it’s getting dark, you’ve had an active day and you’re heading for a safe, cool place to rest. You sleep, homeostatic sleep drive drains away, the sun rises, you get up… job done.
But signals like food, social interaction, exercise and heat in the evening give your brain the impression that it needs to keep you on your game, putting that homeostatic drive on hold, you burn through somehow and get a ‘second wind’ – even if you know you’ll feel exhausted the next day.
So it’s even more important for gamers and grannies to get more light at the right time of day.
Large-scale biobank studies show that people who have the brightest days and the darkest nights are happiest, healthiest and live longer than those who live in a constant twilight, even accounting for socio-economic and other factors that affect longevity and quality of life – Low daytime light and bright night-time light are associated with psychiatric disorders: an objective light study in >85,000 UK Biobank participants, Brighter nights and darker days predict higher mortality risk: A prospective analysis of personal light exposure in >88,000 individuals.
This is borne out by a recent rerun of the classic e-reader study – the one that said people who read on an e-reader find it harder to fall asleep than those who read an old-fashioned book.
They found that people who spent the day in the kind of light levels you get in the average teen bedroom (or care home lounge) – 90 lux – did indeed struggle to sleep after reading on screen. But those who had spent the day under brighter light – 500 lux – like sitting close to a window or the light levels delivered by a circadian lighting system experienced little or no difference at all – From Sunlight to Screens: Modeling When Light Exposure Matters Most for Sleep and Circadian Health.
In that context, perhaps it’s not surprising that teens who got outside in the morning (and didn’t look at their phones in bed), get more sleep – Associations between habitual light exposure-related behaviors and sleep timing and sleep complaints in an international community sample.
At the other end of the age range, this work in a supported living facility used circadian-informed lighting to help residents get a better night’s sleep – Effects of enhanced circadian lighting on well-being among older adults: Pilot data from a 16-week placebo-controlled trial.
Environmental nudges can help staff too.
Jo Cheshire of WCS Care pointed out that one of her staff members found herself naturally switching off the computer and heading home at the same time every day and realised she’d been ‘nudged’ by the subtle shift in the quality of light delivered by the circadian lighting in the care facility.
Knowledge is power
Giving both adolescents and older adults clear and relatable information about why sleep matters and strategies to manage those choices for themselves makes a measurable difference too – School-Based Sleep Education Interventions for Adolescents, with similar results at the other end of the age scale – A 6-month educational program improves sleep behaviour in community-dwelling frail older adults: A randomised controlled trial.
Of course, if you’re hunting down aliens in a multi-player video game at 2am or simply dread sitting alone in the dark, it’s always going to be hard to switch off.
But maybe using light to set the clock and offer a gentle reminder that it’s time to wind down and providing simple tools to help us all cope with feelings that can make it hard to make friends with the dark – could be a step in the right direction.
Ice cream – colours count
Vanilla ice cream goes down a treat any time of year.
But it seems that we enjoy it for different reasons in summer and winter in another powerful demonstration of cross-modal correspondence – the way your brain adds up words and colours to create expectations about taste and temperature – even when you’re enjoying the same product. In the summer, blue tones and descriptors like cool, refreshing and natural make a cone more inviting. In winter, we steer well clear of those cues, reaching for comforting deep amber packaging and the language of luxury and indulgence – Seasonal changes influence preferences for the sensory profiles of ice cream.
Whatever the season, you’re more likely to opt for a second scoop in softer, warmer light than in bright, cool light which seems to be linked to how alert, or relaxed you feel – Bright lights, healthy choices, Food Emotional Perception and Eating Willingness Under Different Lighting Colors: A Preliminary Study Based on Consumer Facial Expression Analysis.
For older people who often struggle to get enough protein and vitamins, making sure the dining room creates a domestic atmosphere is likely to help them tuck in. Using different-coloured plates to increase contrast might also help. One small-scale study in a residential care home in Barnsley. UK used blue plates to replicate an experiment from 2004, finding that residents in the intervention group were eating up to 26% more than the controls – Eating with Colour:An Audit Investigating the Effect of Coloured Plates on Nutritional Intake in Patients with Dementia. While blue plates may help older adults eat more, other studies suggest that black – Assessing the influence of the color of the plate on the perception of a complex food in a restaurant setting, or even red, are worth a try – Impact of three different plate colours on short-term satiety and energy intake: a randomized controlled trial.