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Using your smartphone close to bedtime is associated with poor sleep quality, but your phone doesn’t have to affect you negatively. Minimizing phone usage during the hour before bed, installing sleep apps, and adjusting your phone settings are three simple steps you can take to help you sleep better.

Discover ways your smartphone can help you fall asleep faster, defeat insomnia, and wake up refreshed.

Use Apps to Monitor Your Sleep Cycles

Image via Flickr by mislav-m

Using your phone to track your sleep cycles can be a game changer for those struggling to sleep well. During sleep, your body goes through various sleep states. You sleep deeply during some states and lightly during others. Waking during a deep sleep state makes you feel groggy and tired, and these feelings are hard to shake. The Sleep Cycle app can help you avoid this problem.

The Sleep Cycle app tracks your sleep by using your phone’s microphone to monitor the sounds you make or the accelerometer to track your movements. The app uses this information to wake you up when you enter a lighter sleep state in the morning, mimicking the way it feels to wake up naturally and improving your overall sleep quality.

Sleepbot is another app that tracks your sleep cycles. It gives you detailed reports of your sleep history that you can view on your phone and contains a journal where you can record pertinent sleep information.

Plan Ahead

Using your cellphone before bedtime can make falling asleep harder and may lead to a restless night. Studies show that the blue and white lights emitted by cellphone screens disrupt your brain’s ability to release melatonin, a hormone that tells your body it’s time to sleep.

The best way to combat this situation is to avoid using your phone during the hour before bed. Read a book, take a bath, or practice yoga instead.   

Adjust Your Phone’s Settings

In addition to a screen time moratorium before bed, adjusting your phone’s built-in lighting features can help. Bright screens in dark surroundings hurt your eyes, so dim the screen when you’re in a dark environment. On your iPhone, simply enable Auto Brightness in Settings.

iPhone users can also enable Night Shift. This feature changes the standard, cool colors of your screen to warmer ones, decreasing the amount of blue light emitted. Night Shift can help your brain produce the right amount of melatonin at the correct time.

Listen to Soothing Music

For some people, a silent room leads to a sleepless night. For them, listening to soothing music, white noise, or someone reading may help.

Pzizz, a soothing sleep app, uses an algorithm to mix sounds optimized to help you fall asleep fast and sleep well. You choose the tracks you like and program it to play for up to 24 hours. Pzizz learns the types of sounds you prefer and makes suggestions based on your preferences.  

While you may think that bedtime stories are for kids only, nothing could be further from the truth. Listening to someone reading aloud is calming no matter how old you are. Check out Audible, an audiobook service that gives you access to thousands of read-aloud titles. 

An Updated iPhone and a Good Data Plan Can Help

While a smartphone can improve your sleep quality, your data plan and phone will determine how much it can help. Some carriers, such as T-Mobile, offer unlimited data plans that will let you stream music continuously without going over your monthly data allotment.

An updated phone is necessary for downloading the apps you need to improve your sleep quality. Apple’s iPhone 8 Plus contains the hardware you’ll need for downloading, and its intuitive user interface makes it incredibly easy to operate. Combine these features with T-Mobile’s reliable 4G LTE network, and an iPhone 8 Plus with an unlimited data plan from T-Mobile could provide almost everything you need to help you sleep better and feel refreshed the next day.

When used properly, your smartphone can help you fall asleep faster and sleep better. Adjusting your settings and taking advantage of sleep apps can help you relax, determine changes you need to make, and improve your overall sleep quality.