Dear community,
Last week was momentous, both personally and professionally.
Personally, we were lucky to spend a few days in Houston celebrating my husband’s cousin and his new wife. Let me tell you: Nobody gets down quite like we do at a double Punjabi wedding — it’s all joy and bhangra for days.
Professionally, we hit a major milestone on a favorite mental health project.
One of the biggest gifts to come from my public disclosure of living with bipolar disorder in 2022 was new-found kinship with countless others who’d had similar journeys. Many of these reachouts led to fruitful collaborations, growth, and joint good mischief-making. This included joining the team behind Brainstorm, a documentary that inspires and educates about the bipolar spectrum — featuring cutting-edge research, innovation, and personal narratives — for which I’d served as a senior advisor since 2022.
Last week, we filmed my segments of the film — a moment that was years in the making! Some behind-the-scenes footage:
Ironically, as we’re on a journey to distance ourselves from our screens: I have misplaced my phone for the first time ever (my recovering inner perfectionist found that important to emphasize). After a mad dash to change a surprise diaper in a sleep-deprived post-wedding blur, I left it in a Houston airport bathroom. An hour later, I came across this poem scribbled on the pages of an in-flight magazine — which I was only reading because I didn’t have my phone.
On a plane
Rows of drones on their phones
All the same
Traveling in one zone
Eyes glued to screens that don’t need to be sticky
Turns out these fly people aren’t too picky
I was probably one of a handful on the flight not “glued to screens” as I read this. Regardless of your critiques of this impromptu communal poem, I know many of us would love to continue taking back our attention and brain-space from our screens. In our series so far, we’ve featured the waiting game challenge, followed by the ‘other room’ strategy, capped off by making our devices less interesting.
This week, we combine optimal bedtime routines with getting distance from screens. Here’s the challenge:
Take your phone out of your bedroom or at least place it far from your bed.
For optimal sleep, set a goal to be off your device at least 1-2 hours before your desired bedtime, in addition to dimming the lights, making the room cool, and possibly wearing blue light-blocking glasses. This all helps boost your natural drive to sleep by ensuring timely production of melatonin and related functions.
If you’re up for it, when going off your phone: Place your device in ‘do not disturb’ or airplane modes, or even power it off.
When we physically move our charging stations to be far from our sleeping zones, we echo the principles behind placing our phones in another room when we’re concentrating. We unwind and relax quite differently when our phones are out of sight than in their presence — because when they are nearby, they siphon off cognitive resources even when we’re not actively using them.
Once the phone is gone from our immediate sleep zone, our next task is to: Find alternative ways to wind down to boost sleep quality. Maybe it’s reading a book, journaling, doing stretches, or mindful breathing — pick something soothing that you enjoy and can return to night after night — to powerfully cue your brain to switch into unwinding and getting sleepy. The key is that it doesn’t involve a screen waking your brain up and suppressing melatonin production.
For bonus points, rig up an old-school alarm clock (rather than one on your phone) so you’re not looking at your device first thing in the morning, either.
Share your journey with us: How did this go for you? What worked best?
Wishing you more screen-free bedtimes and better sleep,
Dr Devika Bhushan
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Let’s sleep better…
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