Smartphones aren’t exactly great for inducing a good night’s sleep, as they’re packed with apps for both entertainment and work, giving you two reasons to stay awake.
The blue artificial light from phone screens can also disrupt our biological clock, a 2014 Harvard study found, making it difficult to sleep.
A 2019 Saudi Arabian survey of medical professionals found that 92.4 percent of people use a smartphone right before bed, and those who do so are twice as likely to experience poor sleep.
A 2016 University of Pittsburgh study found that previous research suggested checking social media all day increases the risk of disturbed sleep, with heavy Facebook users three times more likely to have poor sleep.
Fortunately, today’s phones come with a variety of tools to limit the effects of blue light, social media stress, and the temptation to stream TV.
Phones can disrupt your sleep in several ways
Use Sleep Focus or Bedtime Mode
Both Apple and Android offer tools to help you sleep better by scheduling a bedtime and removing distractions, including notifications and phone calls.
Apple’s Sleep Focus mode can be found in the Health app and helps you sleep better by scheduling regular bedtimes (you can change this to have a different bedtime on weekends).
To set a Sleep Focus, go to Settings > Focus and then tap Sleep.
Sleep Focus lets you change several options to help you sleep better (Apple)
You can then choose which notifications you want to silence (you can choose to allow certain contacts to still send you messages, so for example you can receive messages from close family, but not from work).
Android users can find an even wider range of features in Bedtime Mode, which offers the ability to turn off the phone and even turn the screen to black and white to reduce distractions.
You can also choose to enable Do Not Disturb, which means only starred contacts and returning callers can reach you.
Bedtime mode can be found via Settings > Digital wellbeing > Bedtime mode. You can set it to activate at the same time every day, or whenever you turn on your phone after 9 p.m.
From the menu, go to Screen Options to turn your phone’s screen to black and white, dim the wallpaper, and disable your phone’s ‘always on’ clock display
Bedtime Mode can also provide information about your app usage around bedtime, and can also use the phone’s sensors to measure your sleep (by detecting motion and listening for snoring).
Use iPhone’s Secret Sleep Sounds Mode
For many people, the sounds of white noise or gently crashing waves are the perfect way to fall asleep – and iPhone can help you fall asleep without the need for any additional apps.
Just go to Settings > Accessibility > Audio/Visual > Background Noise.
The Background Sounds menu can help you fall asleep (Apple)
There you will find a menu with balanced noise, clear noise, rain, ocean and stream, which you can manually activate when you need to sleep.
Turn off blue light
During the day, light with blue wavelengths (including from electronic screens and energy-efficient lamps) improves attention, reaction speed and mood.
But at night, blue light can throw off your ‘body clock’ or circadian rhythm, according to research from Harvard, leading to reduced sleep quality.
Blue light has also been linked to obesity, cancer and heart disease, Harvard researchers warn.
Fortunately, both Android and iPhone offer the ability to ‘warm up’ the light from your phone’s screen in the hours before you go to bed.
Android’s night light mode eliminates blue light (Google)
To activate iPhone’s Night Shift, go to Settings > Display & Brightness, scroll down to Night Shift, and turn the switch on.
You can schedule Night Shift every day or choose to enable it manually.
You can also enable Night Shift directly from Control Center: press the brightness control icon, then tap the brightness icon to enable or disable Night Shift.
A similar function can be found on Android phones under Settings > Display > Night light.
You can schedule your phone’s screen to turn to orange light, or you can turn it on manually: You can also set an end time so it goes away when you’re ready to wake up.
Schedule dark mode
Bright light from your phone screen can be very distracting late at night, especially if you receive a notification that causes your phone screen to shine in a dark room.
You can set it to turn on dark mode so that your phone appears on a black screen to avoid dazzling you – and to make reading more comfortable in dark rooms.
On iPhone, go to Settings > Display & Brightness and select Automatic to enable the feature at night.