Vanessa Hill

I think it's important that we don't communicate shame and guilt around using screens because using screens in the evening can be a way to wind down.

People use them as a sleep aid.

But at the same time, many people want to minimize their screen use at night.

They want to reduce that.

They want to get to bed at a different time.

But much of the sleep advice emphasizes self-control, right?

So, oh, you need more discipline.

You just need to do this.

You need to do that.

You need to turn your phone off.

You need to put it in another room.

You need to just stop using it at 11 p.m.

But the sleep advice asks people to be at their best at the exact moment when we're least resourced, when we're exhausted.

And when we're exhausted at the end of a long day, self-control is one of the first things to go.

So that's why it can be really hard to close that intention behavior gap, to act more in line with our intentions and to change our behavior in the evening.

So I ran a clinical trial where we tried a behavior change technique called behavioral substitution to help people reduce their bedtime procrastination for people who wanted to reduce their bedtime procrastination where this was their goal.

And what we did was we took people through a habits coaching program.

We helped them understand why they were delaying their bedtime and to find basically an alternate activity that they could do that would still give them some kind of reward that was similar to their screen time.

Now, when you do studies, it's sometimes more black and white.

We were trying to get people to do something that wasn't on their phone, but I think for the people listening here, if you change to a different phone-based activity, I think that's fine.