I have very clearly noticed that I sleep better when my iPhone is not displaying a clock face all night. (I do lower the brightness, I’m not daft. I’m not that daft. Okay, I’m not that daft about that one thing.) Even so, I carry right on doing exactly that and apparently so do you.

Okay, most people with smartphones keep their phones near them at night. Okay, 95% of people in a very specific study do:

I asked staff at BuzzFeed, in a survey, if they ever fall asleep with their phones in their beds. Of the 82 people who responded, 70% said they at least sometimes sleep with their phones in their beds, and 41% said they do it almost every night.
Single people were somewhat more likely to sometimes sleep with their phones in their bed — 78% of singles and 61% of people in relationships said they at least sometimes sleep with their phones in their bed. Roughly 95% said they sleep with their phones either in their beds, or on a nightstand or floor right next to it, and only four people said they leave their phones away from the bed, either in another room or on another side of the room.

We Can’t Stop Sleeping With Our Phones And We’re A Little Anxious About It – Hillary Reinsberg, Buzzed (25 August 2014)

I’m just not sure it’s a problem. I pop my iPhone onto its stand each night and I have this conversation with Siri:

Wake me at 4:59am
Wake me at 5:01am
Switch on Do Not Disturb
Open Awesome Clock

Awesome Clock is the curiously no longer available app that lets me have that clock face on my phone all night. (Gorgeously, you just swipe down and it dims, swipe up and it brightens. Love it.) And the bit with two alarms is that for some reason my iPhone will occasionally fail to make a sound if I ask for one. I set two and it works.

But the key thing there is probably that Do Not Disturb. The phone is on but unless you’re someone I’ve said is important enough to get to me, you don’t. Mind you, in case you’re reading this and thinking both that you thought you were important to me and yet I didn’t answer last night, your getting through my phone is no guarantee of your getting through to my skull. And I did dream about you last night, so you got to me on some entertaining if not very useful level. Hello again. What did you want to say?

Sorry? You want the link for the full Buzzfeed piece? It’s no trouble.