Is it bad to keep smart phones in the bedroom you sleep in?

I live in a 1 bedroom apartment. My bedroom is part of my living space during the day, there really isn’t any way around that. At night, however, I like to make my bedroom as technology free as possible. This especially includes my phone. There are several reasons for this, but all of them relate to improving sleep.

Interruptions: This habit began years ago for me, before I even had a smartphone. It was an election year. Prior to that point, I slept with my phone turned on, next to the bed, in case some kind of emergency arose. The emergency never happened, but late night and early morning auto-calls from political groups and people taking surveys did happen. With the invention of the smartphone, we now have all sorts of beeping notifications and flashing lights to contend with as well. Most phones now have some kind of do not disturb mode, but I still use the original do not disturb, airplane mode. All radios are turned off, no notifications get through, and my alarms still work.

Temptation: The bed is a place for sleep and sex. It shouldn’t be a place to indulge in the endless distractions of the internet. I know of people who wake up in the middle of the night and instinctively check their phone notifications. James Altucher wrote about waking up in the middle of the night to check stocks, bank balances, and Amazon and website rankings. Good decisions aren’t usually made after 3 a.m. Hopefully we all have the discipline to put our phones down during sex, but somehow we continue to let them interrupt our sleep. Not having it around, or at least having all connectivity disabled, dramatically reduces the temptation. It is a small barrier, but an effective one.

Radio waves through my brain all night long: This is far from scientific consensus, but I’ve read things about the negative effects of radio waves from phones, WiFi, and other similar technologies, especially during sleep. You’d probably be fine if you didn’t do anything about this, but it doesn’t hurt anything to turn the phone to airplane mode.

Blue light: Screens emit a lot of blue light. Blue light at night makes your primitive caveman brain think it is the middle of the day and interferes with sleep. There are apps, filters, and glasses designed to reduce the blue light emissions from devices at night, but the best way to accomplish this is to stop using them as much when the sun goes down.

Information addiction: You can spend your whole life reading things on the internet without even getting close to reaching the end of it. Just one more article turns into looking up and the clock in a panic and calculating how many hours until you have to get up. The same thing happens when watching shows or movies or interacting with other people. Putting the devices away before trying to go to sleep can help reduce these unpleasant surprises.

Winding down at the end of the day: There’s something to be said for an evening ritual before going to sleep. A mental signal to the subconscious that it is time to start preparing to go to sleep. This could be as simple as dimming the lights, changing into sleep clothes, brushing teeth, reading for a while. It could be something more complex and symbolic. It probably shouldn’t be scrolling through the endless Facebook feed clicking like on silly pictures.

Battery life: As I said above, I put my phone on airplane mode when I go to bed. This, combined with Android’s new doze mode means that my phone uses almost no power overnight. Nobody likes waking up with a battery that is almost dead when you don’t have time to charge it in the morning. There’s no need for the phone to be connecting to various internet servers or doing anything while I’m asleep. Turning it off all the way would save even more power, but I like to use my phone as an alarm and with the sleep tracking function of my Fit-bit.

Being unreachable: Always connected, always on. I grew up in the age of dial up internet when very few people had cell phones. We couldn’t necessarily always contact someone. Emails might go unread for days. Social media didn’t exist. Phone calls sometimes went unanswered. Somehow, we all survived. Some people get a form of anxiety when they are separated from their devices and the internet. To me, this is a sign that you need to disconnect sometimes. I like going to bed knowing that for the next few hours, I am virtually unreachable. The emergency situations that we all worry about rarely happen. Sleep disruption does happen.

I wouldn’t go as far as to say that it is bad to keep or even use smartphones in the bedroom. Many people do this all the time and seem to be doing just fine. Keeping it somewhere else, turning it off, or putting it on airplane mode at night probably won’t drastically change your life, but there are compelling reasons to consider it.