Do you keep your phone or tablet by the bed? Are pesky notifications, texts messages and other unnecessary things waking you up in the night? Stop! Here is how to get a good night’s sleep.

You know you are addicted to technology and the latest gadgets when you can’t bear to be parted from them, even when you are sleeping. But placing them next to the bed is a really bad idea, especially when you forget to silence your phone before you fall asleep.

Notifications are a brilliant idea and the chime or other sound that announced the next text message, email, Facebook or Twitter post lifts your mood and you are excited by the prospect of reading about the latest gossip or event. Except when it happens at night.

It can be very irritating when your insomniac friends text, email or tweet at 3 AM in the morning. Of course, they could be working a night shift and are bored, or live in a different time zone. With the internet you can have friends on the other side of the planet and it may be daytime where they are. Whatever the reason for notifications, you don’t want them at night, unless it is an emergency of course.

Mute all sounds

To avoid being woken at night by notifications, you could flip the Ring/Silent button on the left side of the iPhone to mute the sound. There are problems with this though and one is that you may still be woken by the buzz of a vibration when the iPhone silently rings or shows a notification. It’s very useful to have the phone vibrate for notifications and rings when it is in your pocket during meetings, movies and so on, but not when it is next to your bed and you are trying to sleep.

Another problem is that you will not hear emergency phone calls from friends or relatives. They are unlikely, but you wouldn't want to miss them if they do occur. You might also forget to flip the switch before you fall asleep and then sounds will be on all night.

Use the iOS Control Center

There are three controls here and Flight Mode turns off mobile and Wi-Fi and so no-one can call you or send you messages. This means you will not be woken by rings, dings and other things. Alternatively, the volume can be turned down to silence the iPhone.

The moon icon enables Do Not Disturb. This is the best feature, but the manual on/off button in Control Center requires you to remember to turn it on or off when you go to bed or wake up. You may forget, so it is better to schedule this to automatically happen.

Schedule Do Not Disturb on iOS

The best solution is to use scheduled Do Not Disturb, a feature that is on both the Apple iPhone and the iPad. An email could chime on both at the same time, making it doubly irritating if both are by the bed. Both therefore need to be configured.

Do Not Disturb enables iOS devices to be silenced on a schedule, such as from your normal bedtime to when you normally get up in a morning. It silences most things, but not everything and it can be configured to suit you.

The best way to get a good night’s sleep is to set a schedule that blocks unwanted notifications between certain hours of the day. Go to Settings on the iPhone or iPad and select Do Not Disturb. Ignore the manual on/off button at the top and turn on the Scheduled switch. Then tap the From and To times to set them as you prefer, such as 23:00 to 8:00 the next day.

You may not want to exclude emergency calls from friends and relatives, so tap Allow Calls From and select Favorites, Family or some other group. Repeated calls can be allowed, so if someone really needs you and calls twice the iPhone will ring on the second attempt.

Enable Bedtime on the iPhone

Even though the iPhone and iPad are now silent at night, notifications light up the screen and can still disturb you when you are trying to get to sleep. Just knowing there is a notification on the iPhone makes you want to grab it and see. Bedtime dims the lock screen brightness and prevents notifications from lighting up the screen and disturbing you. Notifications are recorded and stored, and can be accessed in the usual way with a swipe, but you won't see them on the lock screen.

Turn on Bedtime in Do Not Disturb and then tap the link to open Bedtime. It can also be accessed from the Clock app.

Sweet dreams!