Nightly Digital-Detox 📵🌙

A nightly digital detox means putting screens away for a set time before bed and doing something calm instead, like reading a paper book or stretching. It is one of the simplest changes to an evening routine, and studies of bedtime phone and screen use suggest it can help you fall asleep sooner and sleep longer.

Start small. Even 30 minutes counts: that is what the trial below tested. Set a reminder, charge your phone outside the bedroom or at least out of reach, and turn the ringer off for the night. If 60 minutes feels like too much, begin with 30 and add time once it feels normal.

In a randomized pilot trial with 38 participants, people asked to avoid their phone for 30 minutes before bed for four weeks fell asleep faster, slept longer and better, felt less keyed up before sleep, and did better on a working memory test than a control group (He et al., 2020). It was a small study, but the change it tested is easy to try.

Large studies of more than 9,000 and 10,000 young adolescents point the same way. Having a TV or internet-connected device in the bedroom, leaving the phone ringer on overnight, and texting or using social media at bedtime were linked to more trouble sleeping and, a year later, to shorter sleep (Nagata et al., 2023; Nagata et al., 2024). These studies show links, not proof of cause and effect.

Not every screen minute is equal. In a study that filmed the evenings of 79 young people, screen use in the two hours before bed did not affect most sleep measures, but it delayed falling asleep, and each extra 10 minutes of screen time once in bed meant less sleep, especially with gaming or doing several things at once (Brosnan et al., 2024). The practical lesson: if a full detox feels hard, start by keeping screens out of bed.