In general, a good night's sleep is essential to maintaining good health, but often times, you may find it difficult to check the notifications on your phone before bed. This often leads to surfing for hours late at night, falling asleep, and waking up the next day with low energy. While there are many other factors that can affect sleep, cell phone use before bed is the most common. To break this habit and sleep better, you can follow these tips:
1- Keep your phone away from where you sleep:
The most effective way to reduce phone use before bed is to keep it out of the bedroom. But you might be wondering why using your phone before bed is an unhealthy habit?
There are two main reasons why you should avoid using your phone before bed. First, your smartphone and other electronic devices emit blue light, which reduces production of melatonin, the hormone that helps your body sleep, affecting your productivity and sleep cycles. Second, your phone has an endless stream of digital content that keeps you up at night instead of helping you sleep.
Here's why you should never use your phone in bed. And try to create a technology-free sleep environment to improve your sleep quality. You can do this by keeping the charger and phone in a separate room or out of reach to avoid the urge to use your phone before bed.
2- Activate focus mode or standby mode:
If you have trouble keeping your smartphone out of the bedroom, you can use the built-in features to help you sleep better.
Example: You can set Sleep Focus on your iPhone and turn it on before you go to sleep to stop or minimize reminders. To do this, follow these steps:
- Go to the Settings app and select Focus.
- Click the plus (+) button and select the sleep option.
If you have an Android phone, you can enable sleep mode by following these steps:
- Go to the Settings app and select (Digital Wellbeing & Parental Controls).
- Activate bedtime mode.
3- Use the night mode or blue light filter:
As mentioned earlier, one of the top reasons why you should avoid your cell phone or other electronic devices is that the blue light from screens can negatively affect your sleep cycle.
However, you can use a blue light filter on your Android phone to reduce blue light exposure at certain times. You can also use the Night Shift feature to reduce the blue light on your iPhone.
On the other hand, you can switch the style of your phone to the dark mode (dark mode). Although this mode does not necessarily reduce blue light emissions, many users find that it reduces eye strain, especially when using the phone in a dark room.
4. Use apps to help you sleep:
You can choose from a number of third-party sleep aid apps to help you sleep better. An example of such an app is the Insight Timer, which includes soothing music snippets to help you relax before bed.
If you like bedtime stories, this app also has a lot of bedtime stories to help you fall asleep faster. It also contains many tips and tricks to help you sleep better.
The Insight Timer app is available on the App Store for iPhone users and on the Google Play Store for Android users.
5- Avoid checking your email before going to bed:
Checking your email before bed the next day to get ready for work may be a good idea, but it can turn into a long, late work. Plus, checking email before bed can act as a mental trigger to keep you awake instead of helping you fall asleep, leading to poor sleep and low energy the next day.
So it's best not to read your emails before bed and check them a few hours before bed to get ready for the next day.
To resist the urge to check your email late at night, you can turn on Focus on Sleep mode, Bedtime mode, or silent notifications.