Today Google expanded its Bedtime Mode feature beyond Pixel phones and we’re here to tell you how to set it up and configure it to your liking.
If you’ve not had the pleasure of experiencing this feature before, then you’re in for an bit of an eye opener. I’ve personally been using it for the past couple of days and it really does help me get a better night’s sleep.
Mainly because it curbs my phone use after a certain time. Something which I have been notoriously horrible about for a while now. Needless to say, digital wellness can be just as important as physical and mental wellness. And the interesting thing is Bedtime Mode kind of plays into both of those by letting you disconnect and destress.
Less stress can lead to better mental health, and more rest can lead to better physical health. It’s a win/win. Here’s how to set up Bedtime Mode if you’re new to the feature.
How to turn on Bedtime Mode
Enabling Bedtime Mode is pretty quick and easy, and there are a couple of methods for doing so.
All of it really depends on whether you want to set it up to turn on automatically for you at designated times or not. Because you can set a time and it will enable itself at the same time every night. You can also turn it on yourself manually if you want more control over it.
Setting Bedtime Mode to enable itself automatically
To do this, head into your settings on the phone and then scroll to the bottom and find Digital Wellbeing. Tap on this and then scroll to find the Bedtime Mode option.
In that sub-menu You can set it to turn on based on a schedule, while your phone is charging at bedtime (you still select what time “bedtime” is here), or you can set it to off. The easiest option and the most hands-off approach is to set the schedule.
Tap that, and then select your start and end times. If you set it to only while charging you’ll do the same thing with the time selection.
Enabling Bedtime Mode manually
If you want more control over things, you can turn Bedtime Mode on manually as well.
Naturally, Google set up a pretty easy way to do this too. As there’s a quick setting tile that can be added to your quick settings panel. And as you may have guessed tapping that will turn on Bedtime Mode and it’ll stay on until you turn it off.
This won’t initially be a quick settings tile you have access to. So to change that, drag down your quick settings panel and then tap on the pencil button to edit your tiles. This will be in the bottom left corner of the panel. Find the Bedtime Mode tile and then drag it to the panel with the rest of the ones that are already there.
Going forward you can easily enable Bedtime Mode from the panel.
Configure things to be more personal
Bedtime Mode is better when you have things set up to be more personal. Meaning you’ve adjusted the options for this feature to your own personal tastes.
A couple of examples on what you can configure include choosing your alarm sound for Bedtime Mode as well as selecting sleep sounds. If you want sleep sounds in the first place.
They’re definitely nice and I recommend giving them a try if you don’t sleep with a partner who may be impacted by the sounds playing. Not everyone will care to use these though.
With sleep sounds, you can select from a handful of options that are baked into the system. These are nice enough and they seem to do the job Google intended. If you want to branch out and have a wider selection, you can also choose sounds from streaming services like Spotify and YouTube Music.
Presumably it’ll let you select from Pandora and other streaming music services too if you have them installed. When you tap one, you should see a curated list of albums or songs that can help to whisk you off to dreamland.
You can also search for specifics like I’ve done here with the Japanese Tea Garden Zen Music album.
There are a few remaining options to personalize the experience here. One is that you can set reminders to be notified when the feature is about to be turned on if you have it set to automatic.
Another is that you can toggle on things like grayscale and do not disturb mode. Though having those on is kind of the point of bedtime mode in the first place. Otherwise you’re basically just using a regular old alarm.
Lastly, you can set a toggle to use the Sunrise Alarm setting. Which slowly makes the screen brighter as the alarm is about to play. This is to sort of mimic the sun coming up.