The Year I Accidentally Started Sleeping Better
Reducing My Phone Usage, One Year On: Article 1
I thought about pretending like I planned out reducing my phone usage and documenting it. I didn't. Well, I kinda did but everything falling together the way it did was part luck and part conscious. To give you some backstory, I received my first “mobile phone” at the ripe old age of 13—28 years ago. Jesus. Okay, moving on…It was a means to keep in touch with my mum while she traveled the world and I stayed with my cousin on this little dinky island of New Zealand—the North Island to be roughly exact. Where I engaged in such activities as:
Trike riding—you know, a motorbike with an extra wheel
Stepping in cow patties
Hanging out at hāngīs
Fixing fences
Riding quads (motorbike with two extra wheels)
Drinking alcohol (responsibly—I waited till I got home to do it irresponsibly)
Welding
Panel beating (wife beating minus the wife and the abuse with car panels)
Watching kids play Tomb Raider on their fancy computer
Eavesdropping on strangers’ phone calls (was easier back then, wasn’t all this fancy encryption on cell connections as we know it today)
Calling my friends long distance from my mobile phone, because of course I did
My first phone was a Philips Diga.
This absolute menace of a phone:
While my friends at school and probably a couple in our neighborhood had the cool Nokias, I was stuck with this thing. Despite what it looks like in the image, the screen could only show a single line of text (the rest of the screen had little icons and stuff). This meant that when anyone sent some ASCII image I had no idea what it looked like because I couldn't see the whole thing at once—it just slowly scrolled across row-by-row as a single line. To put it in perspective how painful it was to use, here's some fun (read: rough) calculations based on receiving a single SMS (capped at 160 characters):
Philips Diga vs Nokia 3210 showdown
Philips Diga
You can only see 12 characters at a time on the screen of the Diga and the other characters slowly scroll across the screen.
So,
That’s ≈ 14
14 “screens” to read a single message.
Nokia 3210
On this bad boy you can see 45 characters at a time.
≈ 4
4 screens and you'd be done reading.
If we assume 2 second read time of the message and each screen scroll is 2 seconds for the Philips Diga, then:
For the Nokia you can go back and forth screens instantly—you don't have to wait arbitrarily to read a message.
Every time someone sent me a message they were unwittingly wasting 26 seconds of my life. How many messages do you send a month? At one of my previous jobs I worked with a guy who would regularly send 2,000 SMS a month. Two-thousand. He was probably using a Hiptop or something, because there’s no way you’d catch me writing 2,000 SMS a month without a QWERTY keyboard. For the uninitiated, this is how everyone use to type messages. If you wanted to send, “Hello world”, this is how you did it:
H – press 4 twice → 44
e – press 3 twice → 33
l – press 5 three times → 555
l – press 5 three times → 555
o – press 6 three times → 666
(space) – press 0 once → 0
w – press 9 one time → 9
o – press 6 three times → 666
r – press 7 three times → 777
l – press 5 three times → 555
d – press 3 one time → 3
Pro tip: If you want to save more time writing messages, give gesture typing a go.
≈ 72
≈ 5
Five messages an hour, every hour of being awake, every day, every week. Regardless of work or anything else.
Madness.
If I was him I would have lost 14 hours of my life every month just waiting to read the messages. This is probably one of many reasons Philips was never a big player when it came to phones. Funnily enough these types of screens (LCD with a separate back-light) weren't bad for our eyes and our mental well-being the same way modern phones are. Sure, they were simple, but at the same time looking back that's one of the reasons that made them so great.
Calls, SMS, saving contacts.
That was it.
They didn't destroy our attention span with 100 different apps desperate for us to notice them like some needy ex showing up at your house at 3am promising they'll change.
They didn't advertise to us 24/7 through 9×16 billboards pretending to be games or useful apps.
They didn't track every metric known to man and dob us into intelligence agencies and the police for wrongthink.
That was the beauty of them.
Why do you think Apple insists on using minimalist designs? Because they work, we love them, because simplicity is beautiful—it's easy to understand. Simplicity lets us focus on whats important.
With that out the way, on to part 1:
Sleep Quality and Duration.
For as long as I can remember I've struggled with sleep. I could just never figure out how to do it right. When I was in my late thirties I was diagnosed with ADHD. This shed some light on my sleep issues, but I still wasn't able to shed my way to restful and rejuvenative sleep. I've made a bunch of improvements over the years yet no matter what I did, waking up “ready to tackle the day” seemed out of reach.
Those damn screens.
One of the first areas of impact after reducing my screen time was sleep. Like many of you, I was a sucker for a little late-night screen time. A cheeky social media check here, a harmless scroll there right before bed stretched itself into an hour or more—then of course I needed some “me” time so I'd load up a movie and before I knew it 1am rolled around. I'd absent-mindedly brush my teeth and stumble into bed. Why couldn't I just be tired at the right time like a “normal” person? That’s it, though—I did. I was. I ignored it and suppressed by staring at my phone. All those bright lights, especially that devious blue one responsible for keeping our brains active and alert, were enablers and hormone pushers (dopamine). Encouraging me to ignore my primal, it’s time to sleep urges. Here's an example of how extreme it had become:
11 hours and 32 minutes.
This was the day I started taking (technically the 21st) data. Maybe my subconscious knew something was up, maybe it was fate, doesn't matter—what gets measured can be improved. And X (Twitter), of all places! X and YouTube (New Pipe is a different front-end for YouTube—it allows you to download video and audio from YouTube, among other things—it's a pretty great alternative for the YouTube app). There's no icon for them because I uninstalled both.
This is where it all started and for the next 12 months I started tracking my phone usage. In addition, I was already keeping track of my weight and sleep/fitness and tried to journal stuff, though that was a bit hit-or-miss in terms of consistency. The results tell a compelling story of digital minimalism in action. Come with me now on the first of 7 parts that will go through how a year of less phone time affected my sleep, creativity, physical health, daily habits, relationships and more. Each part draws on both quantitative and qualitative data (journals, etc) that will paint a picture of personal transformation-and how you can achieve the same or better.
During the period in 2024 my watch reported I was getting 6 hours sleep a night, on average. In reality it would have been less. Due to how it collects data and “senses” when I'm asleep I dare say it would be closer to 5.5 if we're talking average each night, possibly less. For example, if I'm sitting or laying very still around bedtime (programmed for between 2200 and 0600) my watch reports me as sleeping. This changed when I started curbing my phone use. By the fall, and especially once I committed to a serious cutback (January, 2025) a clear inverse correlation between my screen time and sleep duration emerged. Not only did my sleep duration improve, but the quality as well. If we take two periods for comparison it’ll become clear. Take October 2024 for instance, where my phone usage peaked at over 7.3 hours per day, I averaged 6.2 hours sleep—and remember this was also poor quality sleep. Then, during the period of March–April 2025, my phone usage had less than halved to roughly 3.5 hours and I was clearing more than 7 hours a night of better quality sleep. Regularly. The change is visible in the data: less stimulation in the evening from my phone led to more quality time in bed and deeper rest. I'd cracked it.
As I mentioned before, it wasn’t just the length of my sleep that improved but also my perception, I noted my own experience. I created a template in Logseq to help me track how I was feeling. One of the questions was, “Was I present and mindful throughout the day?” On the days where I answered “Yes” I generally reported ‘easier’ evenings and more relaxed bedtime. By early 2025 I was describing in my Logseq journals that I was feeling more rested and alert in the mornings, something I've struggled with most of my life. Reducing my overall phone usage and all but eliminating the tantalising glow of my phone before bed also helped me establish a more consistent sleep schedule. My Garmin watch will be the first to back me up on this: my average sleep rose from ~ 6.1 hours (less in reality) in September 2024 to about 7.0 hours (a number closer to reality) by February 2025. I was not only sleeping longer (objectively and subjectively) but I also had fewer middle-of-the-night wake-ups (in September my watch reported an average of 30 minutes awake during the night, which halved by the new year).
To sum it all up, reducing my phone usage (especially late-night screen time) paid me immediate dividends when it came to sleep. I did a ‘soft’ phone usage reduction during
’s 30-day social media detox, where I still had some rough nights—because I noticed when I'm more stressed or overly tired I was more likely to rely on that little glowing rectangle. Which in turn feeds into a vicious cycle and makes it all worse. Example, on day 6 of the challenge I noted, “Was still a bit stressed and was using my phone more than normal” late at night, and that was with 108 minutes of screen time and 423 notifications (yes, every one of those notifications screws with your attention and focus). As I progressed through the detox, the habit of checking my phone at night weakened. By the end of the year I was much more conscious and I was writing that falling asleep was easier and that, “consistent sleep is vital... lack of sleep exacerbates attention issues.” This shows how much better I felt when I guarded my “wind- down” time.How can you maximise your sleep quality and duration?
Throw your phone away—if thats not an option, continue below when starting
Have a “phone curfew” (e.g. no screens after 8 pm)
Create a strict no-phone zone in the bedroom
Batch notifications—only check messages twice a day
Infusing some Adterian psychology into the mix, think about it like this:
Holism: Look at sleep and phone use as an integrated whole—improving one uplifts the other
Encouragement: Frame each phone- free evening as a small victory, not a deprivation
Subscribe or whatever—this is the first of 7 articles based on analysing the data from the past 12 months.
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