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How to stop doomscrolling at night

It's 11pm and you meant to check one thing. Night is when scrolling is hardest to stop: you're tired, nothing else is asking for you, and the feed has no last page. These seven changes help, roughly in order of how much.

What the research found

We're app makers, not sleep scientists, so here are three studies and what each one measured.

• A 2025 study of 45,202 students in Norway found that each extra hour of screen use in bed went with 59% higher odds of insomnia symptoms and about 24 minutes less sleep. Source.
• A 2025 study of 122,058 adults in the US found that daily screen use before bed went with a 33% higher rate of poor sleep quality and about 50 minutes less sleep a week. Source.
• A laboratory experiment compared reading on a light-emitting e-reader before bed with reading a printed book. With the e-reader, people took longer to fall asleep, produced less melatonin and were less alert the next morning. Source.

The first two are surveys taken at one point in time. They show that screens in bed and worse sleep go together; they can't show which causes which. The third is an experiment, with a small group.

Seven things that help

1. Charge the phone somewhere else

This is the one change that removes the problem instead of managing it. If the phone is in the kitchen, scrolling in bed needs a walk. Buy an alarm clock if the alarm is your reason for keeping it close.

2. Decide in daylight

At 11pm you'll agree to anything. At 4pm, decide what tonight looks like: which app, how long, and what you'll do when it's over. Keeping a plan is easier than making a good decision when you're tired.

3. Use the bedtime settings your phone already has

iPhone: in the Health app, go to Browse › Sleep and set a schedule with a wind-down period. Sleep Focus starts when wind-down does, and quiets notifications. You can also find it in Settings › Focus › Sleep.

Android: Settings › Digital Wellbeing › Bedtime mode. Under the screen options, turn on Grayscale.

4. Turn the screen grey

Colour is part of what makes a feed appealing. A grey feed is noticeably duller, which is the idea. Android's Bedtime mode does it on a schedule. On iPhone, it's a colour filter in Settings › Accessibility › Display & Text Size.

5. Put the worst app behind a pause

You probably don't scroll everything at night. It's one or two apps. Put a pause on those and leave the rest alone.

This is what we make Kiri for. Give the app a small daily time. When it's gone, mist covers the screen. You wipe it away, take one slow breath, and choose whether to stop. Late at night, that breath can be the first moment you notice how tired you are. Kiri Pro also has rest hours, for mornings and nights.

If you'd rather be stopped than asked, use a blocker with a schedule and a strict mode. They're compared here.

6. Give the hour something else

Taking scrolling away leaves a gap, and gaps get filled with scrolling. Choose the replacement in advance and make it easy: a book already on the pillow, a podcast with a sleep timer, tomorrow's clothes laid out.

7. Don't punish the slips

You'll have a night where you scroll until one. Start again the next evening. A streak that resets to zero can make one bad night feel like starting over. That's why Kiri's pebbles are never taken away.

If the news is the reason

Doomscrolling began as a word for reading bad news compulsively. If that's your version, the feed isn't giving you information after the first ten minutes; it's giving you the same information again. Pick one time a day to read the news, from one source that has an end, and stop following news accounts on the apps you open in bed.