One of my worst habits is having my smartphone on my bedside table at night. I've known it's a horrible habit since before I even had a smartphone, but I guess the excitement when I first got it made it easy to ignore the problems with using it before bed, and by the time that excitement wore off, it was so natural to have it there I haven't tried to change.
There are multiple problems with using it before bed. The first is the issue of extra light sources. Before bed, limiting light is important because melatonin production occurs in the darkness of night. When I'm stimulating my eyes with extra light from a phone screen that production is delayed, making it more difficult to fall asleep at a reasonable time. The second issue is stress. For my mental health, I really shouldn't be checking my email 24/7, but with my phone easily accessible 24/7, I am pretty close to doing that some days. Often I check my email without even realizing that I checked it, because it's that routine. The third is that I don't need extra exposure to any radiation from my phone. I spend enough time with my phone, it doesn't seem like too much to ask that I be apart from it 8 hours each day while I sleep.
The other problem is that when I do go through periods where I have difficulty sleeping, I'm always tempted to use my smartphone. Sometimes it's to answer a question that has woken me up in the night, sometimes it's just as a distraction from whatever is going through my mind. The problem is that the light from the screen ends up keeping me up longer, making my insomnia even worse. Despite knowing that I'm making everything worse, in the middle of the night I have trouble stopping myself.
Considering taking this on, I had one ridiculous concern: "But I use it for an alarm, how will I wake up?" I say it's ridiculous because I had alarm clocks before I had cell phones, and because it's very rare that I need an alarm to wake me up. I'll just have to use the alarm on my watch on days that I need it.
So, for this week (and the weeks to follow), I'm leaving my cell phone outside the bedroom. It sounds like an incredibly easy challenge, but one that I've really needed to do for a long time and haven't, so it will be harder than it looks on paper. We'll see how well I do on Friday.
There are multiple problems with using it before bed. The first is the issue of extra light sources. Before bed, limiting light is important because melatonin production occurs in the darkness of night. When I'm stimulating my eyes with extra light from a phone screen that production is delayed, making it more difficult to fall asleep at a reasonable time. The second issue is stress. For my mental health, I really shouldn't be checking my email 24/7, but with my phone easily accessible 24/7, I am pretty close to doing that some days. Often I check my email without even realizing that I checked it, because it's that routine. The third is that I don't need extra exposure to any radiation from my phone. I spend enough time with my phone, it doesn't seem like too much to ask that I be apart from it 8 hours each day while I sleep.
The other problem is that when I do go through periods where I have difficulty sleeping, I'm always tempted to use my smartphone. Sometimes it's to answer a question that has woken me up in the night, sometimes it's just as a distraction from whatever is going through my mind. The problem is that the light from the screen ends up keeping me up longer, making my insomnia even worse. Despite knowing that I'm making everything worse, in the middle of the night I have trouble stopping myself.
Considering taking this on, I had one ridiculous concern: "But I use it for an alarm, how will I wake up?" I say it's ridiculous because I had alarm clocks before I had cell phones, and because it's very rare that I need an alarm to wake me up. I'll just have to use the alarm on my watch on days that I need it.
So, for this week (and the weeks to follow), I'm leaving my cell phone outside the bedroom. It sounds like an incredibly easy challenge, but one that I've really needed to do for a long time and haven't, so it will be harder than it looks on paper. We'll see how well I do on Friday.
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