If you’ll allow me to get personal for a moment, as of this writing, I’ve been struggling with a long stretch of insomnia. I find it hard to get to sleep in anything less than 45 minutes, and if I wake up in the middle of the night, there’s a risk I’ll be up for an hour or more. Mostly this can be chalked up to anxiety issues, but it may also be a side effect of the medication I’ve been taking.
That’s made it essential to do anything and everything I can to get better sleep, including making changes on devices like my iPhone. Don’t worry — you don’t necessarily have to give up listening to podcasts or watching YouTube as you drift off. If those help you unwind, you should most definitely keep them in your routine, as long as you’re careful about what you consume and how.
Turning on Night Shift
Be aggressive with this one
This one is more critical than you might think. As I explained in my piece on TVs and sleep, any amount of light exposure over 8 lux will suppress the production of melatonin, a hormone that helps regulate your circadian rhythm. It’s why taking a melatonin supplement can sometimes be as effective for sleep as antihistamines. Blue light is especially powerful at suppressing melatonin — so ideally, you should avoid as many bright LED or OLED screens as you can in the 2 to 3 hours before you want to doze off.
Many of us can’t or don’t want to do that, though. I use a custom YouTube playlist to relax, usually chock-full of EUC videos. To mitigate the damage, one iOS feature I switch on is Night Shift, which shifts colors towards the warm end of the spectrum, reducing the amount of blue light.
You can activate that by heading to Settings -> Display & Brightness -> Night Shift. By default, it turns on at sunset and off at sunrise, but I’d actually recommend switching to a fixed schedule. In some regions, winter sunsets happen before 5PM, and you don’t want to be unusually sleepy at 8 if your bedtime is 10 or 11. Not that Night Shift is a magic bullet — it’s just a piece in the puzzle.
To get the most out of the feature, you’ll also want to swipe the Color Temperature slider as far to the right as possible. While this is going to noticeably skew the colors of apps and videos, it’s necessary to reduce blue light as much as possible. You might even find the look pleasant after a while.
Setting brightness to 50% or lower
Keep Auto-Brightness on, though
If you reduce screen brightness, your iPhone can have a minimal impact on melatonin. In fact, there’s not much point in turning on Night Shift if you don’t keep brightness in check. To use a sound analogy, leaving your brightness cranked is like expecting to go sleep with an 80dB speaker in the room just because you put on Enigma instead of Motorhead.
How far down does your brightness need to be? The further the better, but a broad rule of thumb is that it should be at 50% or less. Even that may be too high, mostly if you’re like me and want to stare at something as you fall asleep.
Make sure Auto-Brightness is on under Settings -> Accessibility -> Display & Text Size. This keeps brightness relative to ambient lighting conditions — so if nothing else, 50% in a dark room will be substantially dimmer than 50% in daylight. You might also consider using Reduce White Point, which affects the intensity of bright colors. I leave that one off.
Limiting volume spikes
Your sensitivity may vary
The effects of sound on sleep tend to be more subjective. When I was younger, I didn’t have to turn the volume down much, and I could fall asleep to just about anything. I once put on a harsh noise album by Merzbow. Today, though, I’m much more sensitive, to the extent that a raised voice in a sitcom might startle me.
On an iPhone, there are a few ways to deal with audio issues. If you turn on Reduce Loud Sounds under Settings -> Sounds & Haptics, iOS will limit spikes on your iPhone without dampening quieter sounds. There may be similar options in the apps for third-party speakers and headphones. Consider turning this tech off when you’re watching a movie or listening to music — otherwise, you won’t get the full dynamic range.
If the worry is maximum decibel levels, you’ve got a couple of options. Under the Built-In Speaker section of Sounds & Haptics, there’s a Volume Limit menu which can impose a cap between 20 and 90%. Within Sounds & Haptics -> Headphone Safety, there’s a Reduce Loud Audio toggle with a more direct decibel slider, although it only goes as low as 75dB, about as much as a vacuum cleaner.
Making AirPods or Beats pause when you fall asleep
A feature that should be universal
I’m actually not a fan of wearing earbuds to bed. On any given night, I’m liable to change positions many times. So unless I’m wearing a product specially designed for side sleepers, one or both of the buds are bound to pop out. It’s a shame, considering how useful active noise cancellation can be.
If you’re lucky enough to stay (relatively) still, you can set AirPods to pause automatically when you fall asleep while listening to something. Appropriately enough, all you have to do is go to Settings -> [AirPods name] and toggle Pause Media When Falling Asleep. Apple doesn’t explain how this works — in all probability, though, the buds detect when you’re motionless for an extended period of time. Expect to rewind a bit when you wake up. You’ll need the AirPods 4, AirPods Pro 2, or AirPods Pro 3.
An identical option exists for some Beats products, such as the Powerbeats Pro 2. The only difference is that you need to navigate to Settings -> [Beats name] instead. While there’s no official compatibility roster, my bet would be that all of Beats’ current-gen wireless earbuds are equipped.
Enabling Sleep Focus
Leave room for emergencies
One of the better additions to iOS in recent years is Focus modes. Think of them as a more flexible version of Do Not Disturb — you can choose to allow certain notifications through, but block others. A custom Reading focus, for instance, might allow apps like Kindle or Apple Books, but wall off social media.
Sleep Focus is a default option, and gets special treatment. For one, you can sync it with your sleep schedule(s) in Apple Health, ensuring that it turns on when you’re supposed to be in bed, and off when your alarm wakes you up. To make this happen, open Health, then search for Sleep. Under Your Schedule, tap Full Schedule & Options. Create one or more schedules if you haven’t already, then enable Use Schedule for Sleep Focus.
With or without Health sync, go to Settings -> Focus -> Sleep to customize which people and apps are allowed to trigger notifications. My suggestion is to allow any contacts that might try to reach you in an emergency, such as your partner, but silence everything else. If you’re worried about missing an important message anyway, be sure to leave Intelligent Breakthrough & Silencing active. This will let Priority notifications through unless an app or person has specifically been allowed or blocked.
