How do I get used to not sleeping with my phone next to the bed?

Give the phone a night place outside the bedroom, set up before you need it. The New Top 10% suggests a chair just for the phone, because most of us already say the phone belongs away from the bed. The change is closing the gap between what we say and what we do.

The gap the book starts from

The New Top 10% begins with a simple street question: where should we put our phone when we go to sleep? For most people the question drew attention for a moment, and the answers were similar: away from us. Some made a sharp hand gesture, pushing the device away from the body.

Then came the second question: and where do you actually put it? That is where the story changed. The answers were: I fall asleep with it in my hand, under my pillow, under the bed, on the nightstand, in the other room. An embarrassed smile often came with the answer, and sometimes a tangled explanation for the distance between what should be and what is.

So the problem is rarely that people do not know where the phone belongs. It is that the place they believe in and the place they use are different. Getting used to a new habit is the work of closing that gap.

Why the bedroom is worth the effort

Move IX gathers several figures about bedtime and phones. It cites a 2019 Common Sense Media survey in which 68% of US teens took their phone to bed, 29% actually slept with it, and more than a third woke during the night to check it. It also cites studies from 2016 covering about 125,000 children and teenagers: simply having access to a device in the bedroom at bedtime, even without using it, was linked to sleeping less, lower sleep quality and too much sleepiness during the day.

These are the book's citations. They describe young people and an association, not a verdict on every adult. They do support the idea that the bedroom is a good first place to change.

The book's own instruction

Move IX ends with a clear choice: leave your phone outside your bedroom at night, on a chair you set up just for it, or keep living by the defaults others set for you. The detail matters. It is a chair set up just for the phone, which means the place is prepared in advance and has a purpose.

The book also says that any fixed object at the entrance, even a simple chair, can serve as a docking station, and that the station works as an environmental cue: nothing is forbidden, and the invitation sits in the object.

Getting used to it, step by step

The book gives the destination. The steps below are our application of it.

Prepare the place before the first night. A chair or shelf outside the bedroom, with the charger already there. If the place is not ready at 11 p.m., you will not build it at 11 p.m.
Make the alarm an exception you solve once. If the phone is your alarm, decide on one replacement or one rule and do not decide again every night.
Start with the part you control. Dock the phone at the moment you come home, not at bedtime. The book places the choice at the doorway, in the narrow gap between outside and inside, where you shift into neutral for a moment and choose.
Expect the first nights to be strange. Reaching for something that is not there is part of getting used to it.
Count two numbers. The book suggests writing down how many times you docked the phone and how long it stayed, and comparing week to week. ZUZA, the doorway dock Beeri Tzori developed, counts docking and does not lock the phone or block anything.

If you share the bed or the house

The preface says the street interviews turned very different when the question was about children. Asked where kids should keep their phone at night, people did not disagree at all: away from the kid, and most of them said outside the room. If you have children, that makes a shared place at the entrance an easy conversation: it holds the parents' phones and the children's phones, and nobody is singled out.

What this does not promise

The book does not promise that sleep will improve, and neither does this post. It points to research that links bedroom devices with worse sleep in young people, and it argues for a design: a prepared place, a conscious choice at the door, nothing forbidden. On some nights the phone will be with you for a good reason, and the book is relaxed about that, as long as it came in by decision.

The preface and the first two chapters of The New Top 10%, by Dr. Yaacov Tzori and Beeri Tzori, are free to read: read the first chapters.

This post draws on the preface and Move IX, "Nudge", of The New Top 10% (the free first chapters). Figures are the book's citations and were not checked independently here. Steps marked as ours are applications.