How to Stop Scrolling Your Phone in Bed (and Actually Get to Sleep)

By Antonio Neves

To stop scrolling your phone in bed, decide on a bedtime you'll actually keep, charge the phone outside the bedroom, and spend two minutes before bed writing down tomorrow's open tasks and answering one question: "What will make tomorrow a success?" Once tomorrow is on paper, your brain has less reason to keep you up, and the phone isn't within reach when it tries.

The hard part is doing it on a Tuesday night when you're tired, the house is finally quiet, and the phone is right there.

You get in bed at 10:30. You tell yourself five minutes. Then it's 12:15, you've watched a guy restore a rusty shovel, and you're reading comments from strangers about a show you don't even watch.

Researchers at Utrecht University have a name for this. In 2014 Floor Kroese and her colleagues published a paper in Frontiers in Psychology called "Bedtime procrastination: introducing a new area of procrastination." They defined it as "failing to go to bed at the intended time, while no external circumstances prevent a person from doing so." In their online survey of 177 people, the ones who reported more bedtime procrastination were also more likely to say they weren't getting enough sleep, even after the researchers accounted for demographics and self regulation.

Look at the last part of that definition. Nobody's keeping you up. No crying baby, no night shift, no emergency. You meant to go to bed and you didn't.

The phone version has a name too: "revenge bedtime procrastination." The day belonged to your boss, your inbox and everybody who needed something from you, so the hour after everyone's asleep feels like the only time that's yours. And you're not gonna give it up easy. I get it. The catch is you're spending that hour on whatever the app decides to show you next.

There's a second thing going on. When you lie down, all the stuff you didn't finish today and all the stuff waiting tomorrow shows up at once. The phone is a quick way to not think about it.

In January 2025 my family lost our home in the Los Angeles wildfires. When I say we lost our home, I mean it doesn't exist. After that, each morning I asked myself one question: what will make today a success? Not the year, not the month, not the week. Just this day.

That question became The 1-Day Method. And it works at night too. Answer the question for tomorrow before you get in bed and the open loops have somewhere to go besides your head. Then the phone goes in the other room.

If you want the page to do this on, the free Starter Kit has it: the question, your 3 priorities, the daily acts and a spot for the day's wins. Print it and write tomorrow's answer on it tonight, before the phone goes to the kitchen.

Bedtime procrastination is about missing the time you meant to go to bed, so start by having a real one. Not the 9:30 your best self picks on a Sunday. The one you could hit four nights out of five. If you usually fall asleep around 12:30, an 11:45 bedtime is a real improvement and you can actually hit it.

Then set a phone time 30 minutes before that. That's when the phone goes on the charger, not when you start thinking about it.

If you only do one step, do this one. If the phone charges on your nightstand, you're asking yourself to say no to it over and over, at the exact time of day when saying no is hardest. If it charges in the kitchen, you only have to say no once, at the doorway.

Pick a spot and make it the spot. Kitchen counter, hallway table, a shelf by the front door. If you use your phone as an alarm, get a cheap alarm clock. It's a small price for not having the whole internet sitting next to your pillow.

In 2018 Michael Scullin and his team at Baylor University brought 57 adults ages 18 to 30 into a sleep lab. Before bed, half of them wrote a to do list for the next few days, and half wrote down what they'd already finished. The to do list group fell asleep about nine minutes faster, and the more specific their lists were, the faster they fell asleep.

There's older research that lines up with it. In a 2011 paper, psychologists E.J. Masicampo and Roy Baumeister found that unfinished goals keep intruding on your thoughts, and that making a specific plan for them quiets them, even before you've done anything.

So before you get in bed, write two things:

One note from the Scullin study: the group that wrote what they'd finished fell asleep slower. So if you track your wins, do that earlier in the evening, and keep the open list for right before bed. More on that in Should You Plan Your Day the Night Before or in the Morning?

Your hands are used to holding something before sleep. Give them something that doesn't refresh. A paper book. A magazine. The page you just wrote tomorrow's plan on.

It doesn't have to be productive. A paper book has chapters, and a chapter ending gives you a natural place to stop. The feed never gives you one.

If the late scroll is how you take time back from the day, taking the phone away without replacing that time won't last. So put something that's actually yours earlier in the evening. Twenty minutes with a show you chose on purpose. A walk. A call with somebody you like. That way 11 PM isn't the only time all day that was yours.

And when you blow it, which you will, don't make it a whole thing. In Phillippa Lally's habit study at University College London, missing a single day didn't materially set people back. Plug the phone in the kitchen tomorrow and keep going.

You're reading this at midnight with the phone in your hand. Fair enough. For tonight, do this.

Get up. Walk the phone to wherever it's going to charge from now on and plug it in there. Grab a pen and the back of an envelope and write the one thing that would make tomorrow a success. Then go back to bed with nothing in your hands.

The bedtime and the evening hour can start tomorrow.

One more thing. If you put the phone away and still lie awake most nights, or you wake up at 3 AM every night with your mind racing, that's worth bringing to a doctor. Sometimes the phone is the problem and sometimes it's what you reach for because something else is going on.

If mornings are the other half of your phone problem, read How to Stop Checking Email First Thing in the Morning. Same phone, other end of the day. And if you want a cleaner way to end the workday before you even get home, here's an end of day shutdown ritual.

Usually because the late night hour feels like the only time that's yours, and because lying down brings up everything you didn't finish today and everything waiting tomorrow. The phone is a quick way to avoid both. Researchers call going to bed later than you meant to, when nothing is stopping you, bedtime procrastination.

Bedtime procrastination is failing to go to bed at the time you intended, when nothing outside your control is keeping you up. Floor Kroese and colleagues at Utrecht University introduced the term in 2014. In their survey of 177 people, more bedtime procrastination went along with more reports of not getting enough sleep.

The bigger issue is time. If scrolling pushes you past the bedtime you meant to keep, you lose sleep you planned on having, and Kroese's survey linked that pattern with insufficient sleep. Charging the phone outside the bedroom is the simplest way to stop it from happening.

Spend two minutes writing tomorrow's open tasks and one line answering "What will make tomorrow a success?" In a 2018 Baylor University sleep lab study, people who wrote a to do list for the next few days fell asleep about nine minutes faster than people who wrote down what they'd already finished. Then read something on paper.

Get a cheap alarm clock and charge the phone in another room. If you have to keep the phone nearby, put it across the room, face down, so getting to it means getting out of bed.

I wrote The 1-Day Method after the fire, and it's short on purpose. It walks through the question, the Essential 3 and the Top 5.

The 1-Day Method Planner is the paper version of the question I asked every morning after the fire. Each day has room for your success line, your Essential 3, up to five focused tasks, the Top 5 and your wins. On a night like the one in this post, that's step 3 on one page: tomorrow's answer and your 3, written before bed, so the page goes on the nightstand and the phone goes to the kitchen. Tech Free is one of the Top 5, so it's right there while you plan. It's undated, it covers 90 days, it takes under 5 minutes a day, and it's $29.99.

Not ready to buy anything? Grab the free Starter Kit and write tomorrow's answer on it before you plug the phone in somewhere else.

Antonio Neves is an author, keynote speaker, and former journalist for NBC, PBS, and MTV Networks. He's delivered more than 400 keynotes for companies like Google, McDonald's, and Visa. After his family lost their home in the 2025 Los Angeles wildfires, he created The 1-Day Method to rebuild his life one day at a time.