I never quite fell in love with smartwatches, but I do credit my brief time with one for sparking the most positive change to my life for years: relegating my smartphone to the hallway.
With only one plug socket by my bed, and no space for an adaptor, I had to choose one device to win the hallowed bedside charging position. Thanks to my desire to eke out one final hour of standing time to goose my activity tracking, the watch won.
It turns out that keeping your bedroom a phone-free zone is a really, really good thing. Within days, I was reading more in the evening, and getting out of bed faster in the morning. Within weeks, I was sleeping noticeably better, and feeling fewer symptoms of my anxiety disorder at night.
Not that any of this should have surprised me. There’s a growing body of evidence that pulling out your phone in bed is one of the worst things you can do.
Matthew Walker, UC Berkley professor and author of Why We Sleep, places the blame on light in general, and screens in particular: “Stay away from screens, especially those LED screens — they emit blue light that actually puts the breaks on melatonin. And those blue-light emitting devices fool your brain into thinking that it’s still daytime, even though it’s nighttime and you want to get to sleep.”
Some phones now attempt to compensate for the blue light emission. Since 2016, iPhones have had an optional feature, Night Shift, which changes the colour balance of the phone after sunset. As an optional feature, though, with a sliding scale of intensity, it’s not really clear whether it actually works: even Apple will only go so far as to note that “this may help you get a better night’s sleep”.
And anyway, the physiological effects of blue light are only one reason to keep devices out of the bedroom. Far worse – in my experience, at least – is the psychological damage.
In short, social media sucks, and if you have a phone near your bed, it all but guarantees that some social network will intrude into your consciousness in those precious minutes before sleep. A study published in 2017 in the journal Sleep found that “social media use in the 30 minutes before bed is independently associated with disturbed sleep among young adults”. And the trend seems to be linear: the more social media use there is, the more likely sleep is to be disturbed.
It feels telling that I exiled my phone from my bedroom around the same time I began reading the horror bestseller House of Leaves, yet still found myself with fewer sleepless nights. Although, admittedly, what nightmares there were were much worse until I moved on to lighter fare.
Lest it sound like I’m presenting myself as a virtuously technology-free ascetic, living a life of paper, ink and face-to-face conversations, don’t worry: the phone has been replaced with a Kindle.
In fact, the starkest biggest advantage of changing my habits? I get out of bed quicker. Not because I’ve had more sleep, though – just that, well, I’ve still got to check my notifications within seconds of waking up. Now, though, that involves getting on my feet first. Look, it’s a start, OK?
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