Banished from the bedroom

{ The homemade pizza that fueled the change  |  10 March 2013 }

I've finally deemed all smartphones permanently verboten from entering our bedroom—something that should have been forbidden a long, long time ago—but, it took three things to finally prompt their exile now: my attempt to self-diagnose my (supposed) thyroid issue + common sense finally sinking in + my lil' ol' manifest project.

I always knew it wasn't a good idea to sleep with my phone so close. It just makes sense, right? A close phone means:

+ A constant source of radiation pulsing less than a foot from my head for 7'ish hours straight a night.

+ Saying "let me just check this one last thing" becomes entirely too easy. And, the more I check my phone, the more I see its harsh blue screen, which confuses our brains into thinking it's not nighty-night time, and that, plus frequent checks, means my bedtime is suddenly pushed back 30 minutes to an hour.

Knowing that, it still took reading that the electro magnetic frequency shooting out of our phones can affect my thyroid to get me to shift my habits around and wean myself off.

After gathering my strength from a delicious homemade pizza night, I got to poking around behind our TV stand to figure out the wire situation and make room for another surge protector that I could turn on at night to charge our phones. Fighting with the cables to make sure they all worked and nothing was visible from the other side (I loathe visible cables) was the easy part. The hard part turned out to be trusting I'd be able to wake up from an alarm clock in another room—the first night I tried this I woke up every hour or so to make sure I hadn't overslept!

One week later, know what I've realized?

+ I actually DO feel like I'm sleeping better with two less blinkety-blinking lights in our bedroom and no phone screen glare attacking my eyeballs in the minutes before bedtime.

+ Having to get out of bed to turn my alarm off is an effective balm to my snooze-ing habits.

+ I've now gotten into the routine of plugging my phone in on its little shelf when I get home and then not looking at it again until just before bedtime to check messages and set my alarm (which was a February intention, under the "Energy" category, oddly enough). It's so nice to not be staring at another screen after 8 hours of staring at one at work, not to mention completely freeing to not feel the need to "check-in" every few minutes (something I learned recently). Plus: more time for other more enjoyable things!

+ Speaking of: minimizing digital distractions in the bedroom maximizes a whole lot of other things.

It's too early to know if this will have any thyroid benefits, but the other four are reason enough for me to be glad I finally booted those bad boys out of our bedroom!