On "the impact of technology on sleep": I started gating my phone on actual sleep detection instead of a timer. Curious what this crowd thinks.
An American Academy of Sleep Medicine survey found about 38% of adults say using their phone before bed makes their sleep worse, and I was firmly in that group: 1 to 2 hours a night gone to reels and shorts, even when I didn't want to.
Sleep-hygiene basics helped but didn't fix it. Timers and screen-time limits failed because I'd just tap "ignore," and a timer doesn't know whether I actually slept, it just counts minutes. So I tried flipping it: make the distracting apps stay locked until my phone has reasonable evidence I actually went to sleep.
The detection is multi-signal fusion, no wearable: Google's Sleep API, accelerometer stillness, ambient light, and phone-unused time, combined past a confidence threshold and requiring 20+ continuous minutes before it counts. Full disclosure, I ended up building this into an app (HyperSleep), so I'm biased, but I'm genuinely more interested in the approach than plugging it.
Where I think it's honest to be skeptical: it confirms "you actually went to bed and stayed still in the dark," not sleep stages. It can be fooled (set the phone down and read a paper book and it may think you slept), and edge cases like naps or a restless partner are real. So it's a behavioral gate, not a sleep tracker.
For this crowd: do you think phone-only sensor fusion is good enough to gate behavior on, or does it need a wearable to be trustworthy? And what other tech-on-sleep tactics have actually worked for you? (Things that helped me even without the app: charging the phone in another room, grayscale after 10pm.)