Nobody gets into bed intending to lose an hour. The decision that actually gets made is much smaller — check one thing, watch one more — and it gets made in a place with no natural end to it. That is the whole problem, and it is why "just put the phone down" has never worked for anybody.

Why it is so much harder in bed than anywhere else

Three things happen at once, and they compound.

Nothing ends. A feed has no last page. Every other evening activity has a shape — the episode finishes, the chapter closes, the plate is empty — and a feed has removed the shape on purpose.
You are lying down. The physical cost of continuing is zero, and the physical cost of stopping is getting up, putting something somewhere, and turning off a light.
You are tired, which is when you decide worst. The part of you that would have said "this is enough" clocked off an hour ago. What is left is running on autopilot, and autopilot scrolls.

So the strategies that work are the ones that change the situation. The ones that fail are the ones that ask you, at midnight, tired, horizontal, to want something different than you want.

Give the evening an end it can actually have

Not a rule about screens — an event. Something that finishes.

A show you watch to the end of an episode, a chapter of a book, a shower, tidying one room. It does not matter what it is; what matters is that it is over when it is over, and that it happens somewhere that is not the bed. Once you have something that ends, "go to bed" is a step you take after something rather than a thing you have to interrupt yourself to do.

Charge the phone in another room

The oldest advice here and still the best, because it is the only one that removes the object rather than asking you to resist it. The two objections are both solvable: buy a cheap alarm clock, and put the phone somewhere you can hear it if somebody genuinely needs you at 3am.

If that is a step too far, the weaker version still helps: across the room rather than the nightstand. The arm-and-a-half of distance is enough that continuing costs something.

Shield the specific apps, at a specific time

Both phones can do this and almost nobody turns it on. On an iPhone it is Screen Time; on Android, Digital Wellbeing. Pick the three or four apps that are actually the problem — you know which ones — and have them close at a fixed time every night.

The reason this works better than a blanket "downtime" is that it does not interfere with anything you might legitimately need at night, so you never disable it in frustration. A shield you keep on beats a stricter one you switch off in week two.

Whatever you use, set it to lift in the morning rather than at a clock time. A block that ends at 7am is a block that has stopped mattering by the time you are awake.

Make the room worse for it, not better

Dim earlier than feels necessary. Not for the melatonin argument, which is contested — for the simpler reason that a bright room feels like a place where things are still happening.
No charger by the bed. A cable within reach is an invitation with a two-second cost.
Something else to reach for. A book on the nightstand is not a moral improvement, it is a competing option that is physically closer than the phone if the phone is across the room.

Fix the morning and the night follows

This is the one people skip, and it is the one that does the most work. A night has no hard edge, but a morning does — something is happening at a fixed time whether you are ready or not. If getting up is genuinely non-negotiable, the evening starts organising itself around it within about a week, because staying up has an actual cost again.

That is what Roosta is for. The alarm does not stop when you press something, it stops when you finish the mission you chose the night before — push-ups counted by the camera, a photo of the bed you just made, sums read out loud. It also shields the apps that keep you up, from your bedtime until the morning is claimed, which closes both ends of this at once.

If the mornings have stopped working entirely, start with how to wake up early when you have already tried everything. If you want the case against the snooze button specifically, it is here.

How to stop scrolling in bed