Bedtime phone habits: what helps you sleep, and what is a myth

Most of us sleep next to our phones. In a 2022 Gallup survey of US adults, 72% of smartphone owners said they keep it near them at night while sleeping, and 64% said they check it as soon as they wake up. (Gallup, 2022)

Whether that hurts your sleep, and why, is more interesting than the usual advice suggests.

The blue light story is weaker than you have heard

The familiar explanation is that light from the screen suppresses melatonin and keeps you awake. Screens do suppress melatonin. The measured effect on actually falling asleep is small.

A 2024 review in Sleep Medicine Reviews went through the experiments. In the studies it covers, bright screens before bed delayed sleep by a few minutes: 3.3 minutes in one, and 9.9 minutes after five nights of reading on a light-emitting e-reader compared with a printed book. The reviewers' summary is that the effect on falling asleep is under ten minutes, if it exists at all. (Bauducco et al., 2024)

So night mode and amber glasses are not doing much. Blue light is not nothing, but it is not the main event.

What does matter

The same review points to two mechanisms with better support.

Displacement. The phone does not stop you sleeping. It stops you going to sleep. You meant to put it down at eleven and it is now ten to one. The time comes straight out of your night.

Disruption. Notifications, buzzes, and the habit of checking when you stir at 3am.

The review also notes that the relationship runs both ways. People who cannot sleep reach for the phone, which makes it look as though the phone caused the bad night.

What the studies of people show

For children and teenagers the evidence is large and consistent. A meta-analysis in JAMA Pediatrics pooled 20 studies covering more than 125,000 children aged 6 to 19. Using a device at bedtime was associated with roughly double the odds of not getting enough sleep. Having a device in the bedroom at night, even without using it, was also associated with worse sleep. (Carter et al., 2016) These are associations, mostly from surveys, so they cannot prove cause.

For adults there is less. A survey of 844 Belgian adults found that texting or calling after lights out was associated with taking longer to fall asleep, more disturbed sleep and more tiredness. (Exelmans and Van den Bulck, 2016)

And there is one small experiment. Researchers asked 49 adults to keep their phones out of the bedroom for a week and compared them with 46 who carried on as usual. The no-phone group reported small improvements in happiness and quality of life, and better sleep was the most common thing they mentioned afterwards. Most said they would consider keeping it up. It was a short study of self-selected volunteers, and its authors call the effects small. (Hughes and Burke, 2018)

What the official advice says

The American Academy of Pediatrics advises avoiding screens for about an hour before bed and keeping phones out of children's bedrooms at night. (AAP)

The National Sleep Foundation suggests a screen cut-off one to two hours before bed and keeping the phone out of the bed itself. (National Sleep Foundation)

Habits worth keeping

Given all that, here is what the evidence supports, in rough order of effect.

1. Decide when the phone stops, not when you sleep. Displacement is the main problem, so the fix is a fixed time after which the scrolling apps are closed. Bedtime follows.

2. Charge the phone out of arm's reach. Across the room is good. Outside the bedroom is better. If it is your alarm, a basic alarm clock solves that.

3. Silence the night. A Sleep Focus or Do Not Disturb schedule stops the buzzes. Allow calls from the few people who might really need you.

4. If the phone stays, make it boring. The 2024 review suggests flight mode, stopping at your intended bedtime, and choosing less engaging content. An audiobook or a podcast with a sleep timer is very different from a feed.

5. Do not use the phone to deal with being awake. If you wake at 3am, the phone is the one thing guaranteed to keep you up.

Making the cut-off stick

The trouble with habit 1 is that it is you, at 11pm, who has to enforce it, and that is the version of you least able to.

Free options first. Screen Time can schedule a block every night, and it holds if someone else sets the passcode. We cover the setup in does Screen Time actually work.

Brick sells a bedside beacon, Brick Night ($129), which blocks apps automatically while you are in your bedroom during set hours and unblocks them when you leave the room.

With moss, you would set a schedule for the evening, or tap the stone on your way to bed, and leave the stone somewhere that is not the bedroom: the kitchen counter works well. Your alarm, calls and anything else you did not lock keep working. In the morning, the apps come back when you walk to the stone, which is a good reason to get up. If you live with someone, you can do it together and see that they are in.

The short version

Do not worry much about blue light. Worry about the hour you lose to "five more minutes". Pick a time the phone stops, put distance between you and it, and silence it overnight. Those three do most of the work.