As I wake up once again, exhausted and cranky, with my phone wedged under my pillow, I decide something has to change.
According to my screen time reports, I spend an average of seven hours and four minutes a day surfing the internet. I have developed the terrible habit of using my phone in bed and falling asleep with the light flickering.
And I’m convinced it’s affecting the quality of my sleep, leaving me irritable all day long.
Evidence suggests I’m not alone. Eight in ten people keep their phones on at night, according to research by Sleep Hero. And studies show that excessive use of our phones at night can lead to us having difficulty falling asleep and therefore spending less time sleeping.
Isolde Walters found that when she stopped using her phone before bed, her dreams became more vivid.
So that night, determined to break the hold my smartphone had on me, I plugged it into the charger in my living room and headed to bed.
I read 20 pages of a book before my eyes start to close and I notice how much calmer I feel when I turn off the light.
But instead of the peaceful awakening I had imagined for the next morning, I jolt awake half an hour before my alarm clock goes off, reeling from one of the most vivid dreams I can remember. This is unusual for me. I rarely remember any of my dreams, and certainly not in as much detail as this one.
I dreamed that I was dating three men and that I had arranged to meet them all at the same time and in the same place, Liverpool Street Station.
Ten minutes before the appointed meeting time, my dream self realized the impending disaster, but it was too late.
All the grooms from the dream appeared before me. One of them was wearing a shiny blue PVC coat that looked so real I could almost feel the shiny material under my fingers as the panic rose. And then I woke up.
The dream seemed more real to me than any other I can remember.
Again the next day, I woke up abruptly before my alarm went off, reeling from a sensory sleep.
This time it was more fragmented. All I could remember was stuffing slices of exotic fruit into my bra. And the next night, I woke up in a panic because I had dreamed that I was trying to interview Taylor Swift and asking her all the wrong questions.
Could these surprising dreams for three consecutive nights then be a coincidence, or could they be related to my new technology-free bedtime?
A friend told me she had experienced something similar after leaving her phone on at night.
“Last night was particularly intense, almost like a hallucination,” he said.
Eight out of ten people keep their phones on at night, according to research by Sleep Hero
There are no scientific studies on the effects that a smartphone can have on our dreams, but we do know some basic aspects about our dream life.
A typical night’s sleep consists of five sleep cycles, each lasting about 90 minutes. The first four are considered quiet sleep and the final stage is REM (rapid eye movement) sleep. It is during REM that we typically dream and process memories.
Could sleeping without my device have affected my REM sleep? I asked Dr. Neil Stanley, who has studied sleep for more than 40 years. He offered a totally unexpected and rather worrying explanation.
He explained to me that the difference in the last three nights was not that I was dreaming differently, but that I was… Waking up in the midst of these dreams, and thus remembering them.
“We have four or five dreams a night, but if you don’t wake up during a dream, the dream essentially doesn’t exist,” he explains.
“But why would I be waking up?” I asked.
“Maybe it’s because you’re anxious,” she suggests. “You’re thinking, ‘Where’s my phone? ’ It could be separation anxiety.”
Surely I couldn’t be so addicted to my smartphone that I wouldn’t be able to sleep without it?
Dr Sophie Bostock recommends a gradual approach to reducing phone use before bed, by turning on airplane mode.
“The problem is not the device, but the mindset surrounding the device,” Dr. Stanley continues.
“You’re attached to your smartphone, you’re dependent on it. So it makes sense that being without it would cause separation anxiety.”
He noted that there was an easy way to test his theory.
‘Take the phone back into the bedroom and see if the dreams stop.’
So that night, my iPhone went back to my nightstand, and later under my pillow, and I fell asleep watching a YouTube video.
Just as Dr. Stanley had predicted, the wild dreams had disappeared. Or at least, if I dreamed, I don’t remember them.
Sleep expert and coach Dr. Sophie Bostock agreed with Dr. Stanley.
‘If your brain associates your phone with being in control, being in touch with people, and it’s usually within reach when you’re in bed, when you change that, part of your brain is likely to become anxious.
‘My hypothesis would be that this separation anxiety can make your sleep a little bit lighter. And what usually happens when we’re a little bit nervous or our emotions are running high for whatever reason is that we have more intense REM sleep.
‘Intense emotions tend to lead to more intense dreams.’
So the panic of being separated from my smartphone was causing me to wake up suddenly every night. It’s a tricky diagnosis: I know that sleeping with my phone next to me is bad, but if I can’t sleep without it, what can I do?
Dr. Bostock suggested I take a gradual approach to quitting my phone.
‘Try a transition period where you keep it in the bedroom but put it on airplane mode for a while. Then maybe turn it off but keep it nearby. And then a few nights later, put it in another room.’
For now, my smartphone sits on the bedside table, but it’s in airplane mode so I won’t be tempted by the sound of an incoming text or social media notification. Eventually, I hope to be able to move it into the living room without the panic that sends me awake suddenly, fumbling in the dark for the electronic device that has unwittingly become a security blanket my body can’t live without.
