How to stop doomscrolling before bed

The short version: late-night scrolling hurts your sleep mostly by taking time from it, not through blue light. The fixes that work give the last half hour before bed a different job: put the phone out of reach, set a stop time, and give your hands something that ends, like a book. If the phone stays by your bed anyway, make it harder to open the feed than to open the book.

What doomscrolling is

Merriam-Webster defines doomscrolling as spending too much time scrolling through content, especially news, that leaves you sad, anxious or angry. People were using the word online by 2018, and it went mainstream in 2020, when there was always another headline. Before bed it rarely feels like a choice. You open one app to check one thing and look up 40 minutes later.

Why it costs you sleep

The biggest problem is time. In a 2025 study of more than 45,000 young adults in Norway, each extra hour of screen use after getting into bed was linked to 24 minutes less sleep and 59% higher odds of insomnia symptoms. It made little difference whether that hour went to social media or something else. The screen time simply replaced sleep.

Blue light gets most of the attention, but the evidence is weaker than its reputation. The well-known lab results come from hours of reading on a bright tablet. At ordinary phone brightness, studies often find small or no effects, and a 2021 trial with 167 young adults found no difference in sleep between Night Shift on, Night Shift off, and no phone at all. Night mode won’t save a night you spend scrolling.

Why “just put it down” doesn’t work

Researchers call it bedtime procrastination: not going to bed at the time you meant to, when nothing is stopping you. It’s linked to lower self-regulation, and the end of a long day is exactly when you’re asking yourself to stop. Some people stay up on purpose, to claim time that work didn’t leave them. The internet calls that revenge bedtime procrastination.

Either way, willpower at 11pm is the weakest tool you have. The approaches below work because they make the decision earlier, or make scrolling slightly harder than the alternative.

Six things that work

1. Set a phone stop time. Sleep doctors suggest 30 to 60 minutes before bed. In a small randomized trial, people who stopped using their phone 30 minutes before bed fell asleep faster and slept longer after four weeks.
2. Charge it outside the bedroom. The American Academy of Sleep Medicine recommends it outright. In a review of studies with more than 125,000 children and teens, even having a device in the bedroom at night, without using it, was linked to worse sleep. Buy a cheap alarm clock if the phone is your alarm.
3. Add friction to the apps that pull you in. A small obstacle works better than you’d expect. In a 2023 study of the app one sec, which makes you wait a few seconds before an app opens, people dropped the attempt about a third of the time, and openings of the target apps fell by more than half over six weeks.
4. Replace the habit instead of only removing it. In a randomized trial with nearly 1,000 adults, 42% of those who read a book in bed for a week and finished the trial felt their sleep improved, against 28% of those who didn’t read. It was self-reported, but the direction is clear, and reading gives your hands a job.
5. Keep the bed for sleep. Sleep therapists use a technique called stimulus control: go to bed only when you’re sleepy, and get up if you can’t sleep, rather than lying there with a screen. It’s one of the methods the American Academy of Sleep Medicine recommends for insomnia.
6. Wake up at the same time every day. The CDC and the NHS both put a regular schedule near the top of their advice. A fixed wake time makes you sleepy at a predictable hour, which makes a stop time easier to keep.

A 30-minute wind-down that replaces the scroll

• 30 minutes before bed: phone on the charger, away from the bed. Lights low.
• Next 20 minutes: read. Pick a book you like more than the one you think you should read. Stop at the end of a chapter.
• Last 10 minutes: teeth, tomorrow’s alarm, lights off.

Keep it boring and the same every night. A routine you repeat stops needing a decision, and the decision is what you lose at 11pm.

If the phone stays by your bed anyway

Plenty of people read on their phone, use it as an alarm, or simply won’t move it. Then the goal changes: make the book easier to reach than the feed. That’s what FirstPage does.

• Your apps stay locked until you’ve read. Pick Instagram, TikTok, YouTube or any app, and set a daily goal in pages or minutes. Until you’ve read today’s pages, opening one of them shows how many pages are left and a button back to your book.
• An evening reading window. Set a window for, say, 10pm with a reminder when it starts. With more than one window a day (a Pro feature), your apps lock again at the start of each window until you’ve read for that one, so the evening scroll waits behind the evening chapter.
• Lock yourself out on purpose. You can lock everything for 30 minutes, an hour or two hours, which covers the stretch when you should be asleep.
• A book ends. A feed doesn’t. Reading on a phone is still a screen, so turn the brightness down and use the reader’s dimmer. But a chapter has a last page, and a feed is built so that it never does.

If you read paper books, keep doing that. They’re the better choice before sleep. FirstPage, a reading app blocker for Android, is for the nights when the phone is already in your hand.

Sources

• Merriam-Webster, “doomscrolling” and Words We’re Watching.
• Hjetland et al., Frontiers in Psychiatry, 2025. Screen use in bed and sleep in 45,202 students.
• Duraccio et al., Sleep Health, 2021. Night Shift and sleep in 167 young adults.
• Chang et al., PNAS, 2015. Light-emitting e-readers versus printed books before bed.
• Kroese et al., Frontiers in Psychology, 2014. Bedtime procrastination.
• Sleep Foundation, Revenge bedtime procrastination.
• He et al., PLoS ONE, 2020. Stopping phone use 30 minutes before bed.
• Carter et al., JAMA Pediatrics, 2016. Bedtime device use and sleep in children and teens.
• Grüning et al., PNAS, 2023. A one-tap delay before opening apps.
• Finucane et al., Trials, 2021. Reading a book in bed and sleep: a randomized trial.
• Edinger et al., Journal of Clinical Sleep Medicine, 2021. AASM guideline on behavioral treatments for insomnia.
• American Academy of Sleep Medicine, social media and bedtime survey, 2022; CDC, About sleep; NHS, Every Mind Matters: sleep.

This guide is general information, not medical advice. If you regularly can’t sleep, talk to a doctor.