Get a good night’s rest
Use iOS’s Bedtime feature to ensure you get some quality shut-eye
You may think you know about every single way you can use the Clock app, but in iOS 10 it has gained a new feature, Bedtime, that’s well worth checking out. As its name suggests, it’s all about helping you get a good night’s rest, and it’ll also give you some insight into your sleep patterns.
Tap Bedtime’s icon in the app’s bottom bar and you’ll be asked a few questions, one at a time, such as how many hours sleep you need, when you want to be woken up, and how far in advance you want your device to prompt you to get ready for bed. The last of these can be set to occur up to an hour before bedtime, enabling you to attend to the day’s final tasks, or you could treat it as a prompt to set aside devices that may be keeping your mind active.
If you already make use of the Clock app’s Alarms feature, rest easy in the knowledge that instructions you give to Siri, such as “Delete all of my alarms” and “Turn off my alarms”, don’t affect Bedtime’s wake-up call. In contrast to alarms, Bedtime offers a more gentle selection of sounds to rouse you from your slumber – so gentle that until you’ve tried it out for at least a few days, to ensure your pick of sound effect and volume are effective, we recommend you keep a regular and more boistrous alarm set for shortly after Bedtime’s wake-up call to ensure you don’t end up being late for work.
Complementary features
Once you’ve set up your bedtime schedule, it’s worth complementing it with iOS’s Do Not Disturb and Night Shift features. The former ensures only essential communications get through to you between certain hours; go to Settings > Do Not Disturb to configure when it’s active, and optionally to allow a group of people you’ve set up in the Contacts app to get through to you anyway – useful for relatives or if your job requires you to be available on call, say.
Meanwhile, Night Shift reduces the amount of blue light output by your device’s screen so that it’s warmer, ostensibly to help you relax late in the day. To set it up, go to Settings > Display & Brightness. The effect will appear extreme when you enable it for the first time, but you’ll grow accustomed to it after a few days, after which disabling it (from Control Centre) will make the colder, blueish output appear harsher than you may remember late at night.