No Smartphone in Bed! 🛌

No YouTube in the morning, while I'm still in bed. Not even having "reach for my phone" to be the first thing I do after waking up. I won't be placed into said categories any longer. I want none of it! I remember a time, far away in a distant past, when I banned my phone from the bedroom. A bed is for sleeping after all.

But then, what really defines a bedroom? Only lately I realised that my definition of this mental concept had blurred the line. For half a year, my bedroom was also a living room, as we had moved the bed mattress to our living room and in exchange moved our office into the former bedroom. The consequence was unexpected and as it seemed at the time: unavoidable. My smartphone had returned next to my bed at night, now that I got all confused by bedroom semantics. But one summer night, when the cars in front of our street-faced bed-slash-living-room-window were exceptionally loud, and the people residing there at night (for whatever reason) were exceptionally lunatic, my girlfriend had enough. In her typical frenzy, she did what she does best: she reorganised our flat (bless her). The bedroom ought to be moved back to its original location! The bedroom ought to be a bedroom again!

Now that the tides had turned, the world made sense again. Immediately it felt wrong to want my phone by my side at night. Why need it? Isn't its presence alone decreasing my sleep quality? There still is the occasional sleepless night, which at times feels like my new default. Is plugging in my earphones, starting a podcast with a 15 minute sleep timer an acceptable remedy? Or is it considered cheating? Am I relying on it too much? Associating my phone's proximity with guaranteed sleep? For that, I still don't have an answer.

But one thing is crystal clear: No smartphone in bed, man! 👲