Is your phone next to your bed ruining your sleep? Not the radiation

The short answer

The question almost always arrives as a question about radiation, and that is the part with the least behind it. The radiation has been measured, in thousands of people, and nothing turns up.

The device turns up. Not the hour on the sofa beforehand. The half hour you spend holding it in bed.

That distinction is why this piece exists, because the two ask completely different things of you. One would have you buy different hardware. The other one is putting the phone out of reach.

What does the research say?

The trouble with asking people about radiation is that anybody sleeping badly is looking for a cause, and the mast down the road is a good candidate. Ruling that out means measuring the exposure and measuring the sleep.

Two years earlier the same group had looked at 1,375 residents of Basel the same way, and found the same thing: no association between modelled exposure and sleep complaints, and none between phone use and sleeping badly ^[2].

In children it has been done once with more precision, and there is one number worth putting on the table.

Which study found something?

There is a study pointing the other way, and it belongs here even though it is small.

What does the phone in your bed do?

In 2024 researchers stopped asking youths what they did before bed and pointed cameras at them instead.

That is a kinder piece of advice than the usual one, and a more precise one. It is not the screen and it is not the hour before. It is what happens once you are in the bed.

The largest study of children and devices adds one more finding on top. Across 20 studies and 125,198 children, using a device at bedtime was associated with too little sleep, poor sleep and daytime sleepiness. And children who merely had a device within reach without using it also slept too little, at an odds ratio of 1.79 ^[6].

That last one is not a radiation finding, however much somebody would like to read it that way. A phone within reach is a phone that can buzz, and a head that knows something might arrive.

What do you do tonight?

The whole instruction is one sentence: put it out of reach.

That is also what happened when somebody ran it as a trial. Four weeks of restricting phone use around bedtime shortened sleep latency, lengthened sleep, improved sleep quality and mood, lowered pre-sleep arousal and improved working memory ^[7]. A small pilot, so the numbers are not the point. The direction is, and it agrees with everything above.

In order:

1. The phone sleeps in another room, or at minimum out of arm's reach. This is the advice. The rest is comfort.
2. An alarm clock that is not a phone, because the alarm is why it is next to you.
3. No scrolling once you are in bed, and no gaming or juggling three things. That is where the minutes go.
4. Aeroplane mode, if it settles you. There is no evidence you gain anything, and it costs you nothing. What it does do is silence notifications, which is the half that works.

For everything else that steers a night, the sleep guide has it: regularity, light, caffeine and temperature, with the studies attached.

What we make of it

Radiation is the most appealing explanation for sleeping badly because it sits outside you. It is something being done to you, and there is a product for sale against it.

The evidence points at something cheaper and less comfortable. Not the waves. The habit. And if a large study ever measures exposure properly and does find something, it will go here.