Areas › Focus, starting, and ADHD › Systems for daily life
Charge the phone in another room overnight. Not face down, not on the far side of the bed: another room, so that reaching it means standing up.
Distance is what does the work here, which is why the halfway versions never hold. If you use it as an alarm, a cheap clock settles that for the price of a coffee. The first few nights feel strangely bare and then they stop feeling like anything. With teenagers this works better as a household shelf by the door that everyone's phone goes on, adults included, than as a rule imposed on one person.
Qur’an and Sunnah
God has set a due measure for everything (Quran 65:3). The night has a measure too, and the phone is not what it is for.
وَيَرۡزُقۡهُ مِنۡ حَيۡثُ لَا يَحۡتَسِبُۚ وَمَن يَتَوَكَّلۡ عَلَى ٱللَّهِ فَهُوَ حَسۡبُهُۥٓۚ إِنَّ ٱللَّهَ بَٰلِغُ أَمۡرِهِۦۚ قَدۡ جَعَلَ ٱللَّهُ لِكُلِّ شَيۡءࣲ قَدۡرࣰ ا
and will provide for them from an unexpected source; God will be enough for those who put their trust in Him. God achieves His purpose; God has set a due measure for everything
Qur’an 65:3read it in the library
Translation: M.A.S. Abdel Haleem, The Qur'an, Oxford University Press, 2004.
What the research says
Measurement work in habit research supports automaticity, how little thought a routine takes, rather than sheer repetition, as the ingredient that makes a routine hold. Dropping the phone on a shelf as you pass it every night is exactly the kind of fixed, cue driven step that measure was built to describe. That work is about how habits are measured, not about sleep or attention, so the sleep benefit here is sensible reasoning rather than a finding.
Gardner B, Abraham C, Lally P, de Bruijn GJ. (2012). Towards parsimony in habit measurement: testing the convergent and predictive validity of an automaticity subscale of the Self-Report Habit Index.. The international journal of behavioral nutrition and physical activity doi
Strength of evidence: one line of research. A single study, or a theoretical account.
Why it works
Getting to sleep is already slow for many of us, and a phone within arm's reach turns a slow start into hours that the next day has to pay for.
This one is still a draft. It is waiting on a scholar and a clinician to read it before it is published.
Near this one
If you have been the one holding someone's schedule, meals and reminders together, do not put all of it down on the day they leave. Pass it over a piece at a time, each with a date on it.
Light movement while you work is not stolen from the work. Rocking a foot, standing up, a slow circuit of the room on a call: for many people the concentration goes up rather than down.
When a decision is looming, write the options out rather than talking them through. A test is coming: do nothing, make a revision timetable, ask for extra help. Three lines on paper.