A Phone-Free Bedroom in Every Home: Our Mission to Beat the Sleep Epidemic

We have a big goal at Habity, and we're not shy about it: we want to make every bedroom a phone-free room.

On the surface, it sounds modest; a single device, a single room. But we believe it's one of the most powerful changes a person can make for their health, and that it could help turn back one of the quietest crises of our time. The world isn't sleeping well, and the glowing screen on the nightstand is a bigger part of that story than most of us want to admit.

Here's why we've set ourselves this mission, and why we think the bedroom is exactly where the fight for better sleep begins.

The world is running on empty

Poor sleep has quietly become a global epidemic. Around one in three adults doesn't get enough sleep, according to public health data, and the problem stretches far beyond any one country.

A 2025 systematic review estimated that more than 850 million adults worldwide meet the criteria for insomnia — roughly one in six people on the planet. ResMed's global sleep survey, which polled more than 30,000 people across 13 markets, found that people are losing the equivalent of nearly three nights of restorative sleep every single week.

The consequences aren't just grogginess. Chronic poor sleep is linked to heart disease, diabetes, weakened immunity, anxiety, and depression. It dulls focus, frays relationships, and quietly erodes quality of life. It even carries an economic toll: researchers at Harvard estimated that insomnia alone costs the U.S. workforce tens of billions of dollars a year in lost productivity.

This is what we mean by a sleep epidemic. It's widespread, it's worsening, and most people have simply learned to live with it.

The phone on the nightstand

So what changed? Human beings slept for millennia without much trouble. Why now?

There's no single villain, but one factor is impossible to ignore: the phone made its way into bed with us, and it never left. 

Just look at the latest iPhone, and the one new feature that is being highlighted: "Alarm clock mode" a guaranteed way to always have your phone screen right next to your face at all times.

The numbers are striking. The American Academy of Sleep Medicine has found that around 87% of Americans regularly sleep with their phone in the bedroom. Surveys suggest the vast majority of people use a device in the hour before sleep, often scrolling for over half an hour before finally putting it down. And the AASM has found that late-night "doomscrolling" through stressful news makes sleep noticeably worse for more than a third of adults — hitting young people hardest of all.

It makes sense when you think about what a phone actually is. It's a bright light source in a room that should be dark. It's an endless feed engineered to keep you awake and engaged. It's a stream of other people's demands, arriving at the exact moment your mind should be powering down. And it's usually the first thing you see in the morning, flooding a half-awake brain before you've had a single calm moment.

The bedroom used to be a sanctuary. For most of us, it's quietly become a command center.

What we're building, and why

This is where Habity comes in. We designed our bedside clock to do everything the phone was doing at night — and nothing it shouldn't.

It's a gentle alarm and a calm, blue-light-free e-paper clock. It plays soothing sleep sounds without Wi-Fi, a feed, or anything designed to keep you scrolling. It's a soft, quiet presence on the nightstand that gives you back the one thing the phone took: a reason to leave the phone in another room.

We're a small team in Copenhagen, and we care deeply about how our products look and feel. But the design was always in service of something bigger. Every clock we ship is one more phone that gets to spend the night in the kitchen, one more bedroom that becomes a place for rest again.

That's the mission, one room at a time.

Join us

Making every bedroom phone-free is an ambitious goal. We know that. But global change is really just millions of small, personal changes stacked together — and this one starts tonight, in your own home.

Move your charger to another room. Give your phone a curfew. Let your bedroom become a place for sleep, not scrolling. Whether or not a Habity clock ever sits on your nightstand, we'd count that as a win.

The world is tired. We think the way out begins in the one room built for rest.

Less scrolling, more dreaming. For everyone.