Best Smartphone Features for Better Sleep
Staring at your phone all night is the biggest obstacle to a good night’s rest. However, there are many ways to mitigate the negative impact smartphones have on our sleep schedule. When used properly, your smartphone can even be a useful tool for improving your sleep. Here are some of the best ways your smartphone can help you enjoy a full night’s rest.
Use blue light filters
To begin with, your smartphone is preventing you from sleeping well: blue light. Study after study shows that excessive exposure to blue light makes it difficult to fall asleep , and that’s exactly what all of our phones, computers, and televisions catch our eyes.
Luckily, Android’s Night Light and iOS’s Night Shift can filter out at least some of that blue light, which should help you relax and fall asleep faster. You can manually enable or disable these filters, or, or configure them to turn on automatically at a specific time. You can also change the intensity and color temperature in your device’s settings.
If the Android Night Light filter is not strong enough for you (or not available on your device), third-party apps like Twilight can make the screen appear redder and dimmer.
In addition to these filters, dimming your smartphone’s brightness can also help reduce blue light effects. Android and iOS allow you to adjust the brightness of your phone from the notification bar, but iOS can further reduce the brightness in the accessibility menu .
Use your phone’s built-in sleep modes and sleep trackers
Android phones and iPhones have built-in sleep modes to remind you when it’s time to go to bed, reduce nighttime distractions, and help you sleep better every night.
iOS
IPhones running iOS 14 and up have three built-in sleep assist features :
- Sleep Schedule: Allows you to set the wake-up time and bedtime for each day of the week. Your iPhone will remind you when it’s time to go to bed.
- Shutdown: This mode turns on Do Not Disturb mode and removes distracting apps from the lock screen.
- Sleep Mode: allows you to select which phone features and types of notifications are allowed during sleep. If you have an Apple watch, this mode also tracks the duration and quality of your sleep each night, which is useful information that doctors can use to find sleep problems.
You can find and customize these modes in the iOS Health app under Sleep.
Android
Android Night Mode is essentially a combination of all the different iOS sleep aids features into one.
Sleep mode will remind you when sleep is imminent and can wake you up more gently with the sunrise alarm, which slowly illuminates the display with orange light a few minutes before the alarm goes off. It also automatically turns on various settings such as Do Not Disturb when it’s time to go to bed.
You can customize your alarms and reminders in the Bedtime tab of the default Clock app, and customize which app features and restrictions are enabled in Settings> Digital Wellbeing> Sleep .
The only thing missing in night mode is dedicated sleep tracking. Android doesn’t have a built-in sleep tracker like iOS, but devices like Amazon’s Halo or Fitbit smartwatches will use their own apps. You can also use a third party tracker like Sleep as Android .
Manually adjust your phone settings for better sleep
Sleep assist modes in Android and iOS are convenient, but they are not available for all devices and do not cover all existing sleep assistance features. While sleep tracking apps and wearables provide critical information about our sleep quality, not everyone can spend the money (or time) setting them up.
Here are some additional smartphone settings you should enable for better sleep. Moreover, they are available to everyone:
- Turn on Do Not Disturb mode before bed. Do not disturb on your phone mutes all notifications, but you can set exceptions if needed. So nothing will wake you up while you are resting. You can turn it on manually or set it to turn on automatically under certain circumstances (including when your phone is in sleep mode). Likewise, you can turn on airplane mode to disconnect your phone from all network connections and other devices.
- Set hard time limits for the applications you use most. You can set the screen time limits and the use of applications in the Applications Settings Android or iOS . This will help if you find it difficult to break away from TikTok while lying in bed.
- Turn on your phone’s dark mode . Dark mode alone won’t necessarily help you sleep better, but a darker interface can be easier on the eyes in dimly lit environments. I also find it improves the efficiency of the blue light filtering modes. You can turn on dark mode manually or set it to turn on automatically at certain times of the day. Enabling your device’s dark mode will force apps to use their dark theme, if they have one.
Honestly, the best solution is to just turn off your smartphone an hour before bed and not worry about it until you wake up, but this is not possible for everyone. However, the settings and features we’ve covered in this guide should help reduce your smartphone’s impact on your sleep.