Using your smartphone before hiding can cause sleep problems. In these three ways, you can avoid a bad night’s sleep by staring at your iPhone for too long at night.
This way you prevent sleeping problems due to smartphone use
You set your alarm, send a final app and still open YouTube, Instagram or your favorite game. Without you realizing it, it is then an hour later. For many this is a recognizable situation, just before going to sleep.
From an investigation of the National Institute for Public Health and the Environment (RIVM) It appears that Dutch youngsters who often or for a long time in the evening use a device with blue light sleep worse. Young people between thirteen and eighteen years old sleep about 40 minutes less every day due to smartphone use during the night.
It also ensures that you wake up more often. But for others, too, your phone doesn’t do much good before bedtime. A structurally poor night’s sleep can lead to other health problems. In these three ways you can set up your iPhone so that you travel effortlessly to dreamland.
1. Night Shift
The blue light emitted from the screens of iPhones, iPads and Macs, among others, is one of the things that make your phone harmful in the evening or at night. In combination with a dark environment and time, this blue light confuses your biological clock. This subsequently causes sleeping problems.
You can easily prevent this with Night Shift. Since iOS 9, you can use this function to significantly reduce the blue light, because your screen gets an orange glow. In the menu ‘Display and brightness’ in Settings you can activate the mode and set Night Shift to be on at fixed times.
You can activate the function quickly via the Control Panel. To do this, press firmly on the bar with 3D Touch to adjust your screen brightness and tap the ‘Night Shift’ icon.
2. Do Not Disturb mode
Do Not Disturb mode on your iPhone is the ideal way to take away the temptation of incoming notifications. Since iOS 12, Do Not Disturb can also be combined with Bedtime mode, which makes it easy to block notifications while you sleep.
Once you have set the times between which the mode should be activated, your iPhone will automatically enable or disable Do Not Disturb mode. If you set this, your screen will also darken a lot and you can tune Do Not Disturb to the Bedtime alarm in the Clock app.
3. Block apps with Screen Time
Can’t stop binge-watching YouTube videos or playing Fortnite while you’re already under the covers? Then Screen Time offers another solution. In addition to giving you insight into your iPhone usage, you can also enable ‘Downtime’.
You can easily switch this on via the settings, by specifying a time slot, just as with Do Not Disturb. Then all apps are blocked during that time, and you simply cannot open them. Via the ‘Always allowed’ option you can indicate which apps you can still open. But if you really want a phone-free night’s sleep, it feels a bit like cheating.
Check out more useful tips for your iPhone
- Enter, change or forget your iPhone SIM PIN? You can do this (11-4)
- How to transfer data from an old iPad to a new iPad (2-4)
- AirPods Pro: 8 tips to get the most out of the wireless earbuds (1-4)
- Empty an iPhone: this is how you prepare a device for sale (31-3)
- Tip: Share your WiFi password with an iPhone super fast (29-3)