Day 126 – The Puzzle – New Sleeping Routine That’s Working

This is the easiest hack of all; it’s like going back to 2006 before our smartphones ruled our lives.

One rule we’ve stuck to as adults we’ve never had a TV in our room.  

WHY?  Research shows that when you train your body to lay in bed and ONLY go to sleep, versus watching TV, you properly train your brain about WHY you’re in your bed.  

Well, that worked great for me until the past few years.  While we never added a TV to our bedroom, I did add one to my hand, my iPhone.  Up until a week ago, my nighttime ritual became to lay in bed and find every reason possible to play on my phone and obsess about the next day.  

So I came up with an idea.  I would no longer take my phone to bed and work towards being off it and a laptop for an hour before bed.  The only problem was I love my iPhone alarm. 

I’ve found the ring I love and a volume that doesn’t wake my wife when I get up a few hours before her daily.  

Then it hit me.  I had two extra iPhones on my desk that I’ve collected through the years.  I took one and deleted everything possible from it and did not hook it up to wifi.  And I left it in airplane mode.  As you can see in the picture above, there’s only one icon on it: the alarm clock. 

Well, I’m six nights into this idea, I’ve had zero issues falling asleep, and I’m waking up more refreshed.  

So there you go, my simple sleep hack.  Back to the basics: no TV and no smartphone.

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