Welcome to the Phone-Free Bedroom Challenge.

For the next five nights, we’re going to create a little more space between you and your phone at the two most important edges of your day: the 30 minutes before bed and the 30 minutes after waking. Here’s how to set yourself up for tonight.

Step 1: Choose your RX

For all three levels, the goal is the same: spend the last 30 minutes before sleep and the first 30 minutes after waking without your phone. The only question is how much distance you want to create.

Beginner RX
Charge your phone across the room, away from your bed.

Not on your nightstand. Not within arm’s reach. Close enough that you know it’s there, but far enough that reaching for it is no longer automatic.

Intermediate RX
Charge your phone outside the bedroom.

Kitchen, hallway, bathroom, office — wherever makes sense in your home. The point is simple: your bedroom becomes a phone-free room.

Pro RX
Make your bedroom entirely phone-free, and put your phone away earlier in the evening.

Not just the final 30 minutes. Give yourself a real off-ramp before bed — 8:30, 9:00, or whatever time feels realistic.

Choose the version that feels doable enough that you will actually do it.

Step 2: Decide where your phone will live

Don’t wait until bedtime to figure this out.

Pick the spot now: the kitchen counter, the entry table, your desk, the bathroom, the hallway outlet. Your phone needs a home that is not your nightstand.

Step 3: Choose your wind-down

When you remove your phone, you need something to take its place.

Tonight, that might be:

• Reading

• Journaling

• Meditating

• Stretching

• Talking to your partner

• Petting your dog

• Doing your skincare slowly

• Sitting in the quiet for a few minutes and doing absolutely nothing

It does not need to be impressive. It just needs to be screen-free.

Step 4: Make a morning plan

This is the part people forget. You wake up. You reach for your phone. Your brain is already trained to do it. So decide now how you’re going to interrupt the habit tomorrow morning.

• Put a Post-it on your phone

• Put a note on your coffee machine.

• Leave a book where your phone usually sits.

• Use an app blocker or Brick if you have one.

• Tell your partner what you’re doing.

• Put your phone somewhere slightly annoying to reach.

The goal is not perfection. The goal is a little more space.

Step 5: Notice how you feel

This is the most important part. Tomorrow morning, before you check your phone, pause for a second and notice:

• How did you sleep?

• How does your mind feel?

• Do you feel calmer, clearer, more anxious, more restless?

• What do you reach for first?

You do not need to judge it or make it mean anything. Just notice. Changing your relationship with your phone starts by paying attention to how it is actually affecting you.

Tonight’s challenge:

• Keep your phone out of your bed.

• Protect the 30 minutes before sleep.

• Protect the 30 minutes after waking.

• Notice how you feel.

You got this. We begin tonight.

Emily
Founder, Rise Centered

Over the next five nights, we’re going to shift how you sleep, how you feel in the morning, and your relationship with your phone with our Phone-Free Bedroom Challenge.

Arthur Brooks, Harvard professor and happiness researcher, has a simple way of thinking about healthier phone use: create clear boundaries.

Tech-free times.
Tech-free zones.
Device-free breaks.

Our challenge is built around the first two.

The tech-free times are the 30 minutes before bed and the 30 minutes after waking — the two moments when your mind is most vulnerable to what your phone feeds it.

The tech-free zone is your bedroom.

For the next five nights, leave your phone outside the bedroom, protect those first and last 30 minutes of your day, and see how you feel. It might surprise you how much changes when one room is no longer connected to everything.

Join us, for our free challenge. We start tomorrow, Monday, June 8.

Emily

Founder, Rise Centered

P.S. The third boundary — a real device-free break — isn’t part of these five nights. But it’s the one I’m most looking forward to this summer: a few days camping outside Jackson with my phone left in the car. There’s a specific kind of quiet that only shows up when your phone genuinely can’t reach you.

Monday, June 8, we’re going to do something that now feels oddly radical:

Leave our phones out of the bedroom for the night.

If I had asked you in 2010 to leave your phone charging in the kitchen and go to bed without it, would that have felt hard? Only 16 years ago, a blink of an eye in the span of human history. Back then my BlackBerry was fairly forgettable. It didn’t have internet access or social media or music or even driving directions and therefore was not glued to me in the way my current iPhone is.

Smartphones quickly became our alarm clock, book, camera, TV, inbox, group chat, calendar, baby monitor, news source, shopping mall, and little dopamine machine. And because they did so many things well, we mostly looked at their potential — what else could they do?! — and stopped asking what was actually best for us, the humans using them.

It can be your inbox, so it should be your inbox.
It can be your moodboard, so it should be your moodboard.
It can be your alarm clock, so it should be your alarm clock.

But should it?

Your bedroom used to be one of the few places where the world could not reach you. Now it’s where we bring the entire internet for one last scroll before sleep, and it’s the first thing our impressionable brain sees before we have even had a thought of our own in the morning.

And I don’t think that’s a moral failing. I don’t think we all just need to be more disciplined. I think we need better physical boundaries. We need to center what’s best for us, instead of letting tech companies decide what’s best for us.

So whether you are already a pro at throwing your phone in a drawer and forgetting about it, or the thought of being more than a few feet away from it makes your nervous system twitch, we have a version of this challenge for you.

The 5-day Phone-Free Bedroom Challenge

For five nights, starting Monday, June 8:

Before bed:

Leave your phone somewhere that is not your nightstand.

Spend the last 30 minutes before sleep without your phone.

Use a real alarm clock so your phone doesn’t have to be your excuse.

In the morning:

Wait 30 minutes before checking your phone.

Notice how you feel.

That’s it. Five nights of giving yourself a little more space.

Choose your level

Beginner RX

• For the person who panics at the thought of their phone leaving the room.

• Charge your phone across the bedroom: not on your nightstand, not within arm’s reach.

• It’s not a full phone-free bedroom, but it is a real boundary.

Intermediate RX

• For the person who wants the full reset.

• Charge your phone in the kitchen, hallway, bathroom, office, etc.

• The bedroom becomes a phone-free room.

Pro RX

• For the “I’m already doing this” person.

• No phone in the bedroom after 8:30 or 9 p.m.

• Not just the final 30 minutes. Give your nervous system a real off-ramp. Let the room get quiet before you do.

Sound like something you’d like to try? Join us.

We’ll be posting daily prompts on our Substack, The Calm Edit (make sure to subscribe!) during the challenge, and we’ll have a chat going for accountability so we can all be a little less alone in the weirdness of realizing how hard this very simple thing can feel.

The goal is to remember that your phone is allowed to be useful without being allowed everywhere. Especially not the room where you sleep.

Join us before we start Monday, June 8.

Emily
Founder, Rise Centered

I never set out to start a company, I just wanted to leave my phone out of my bedroom at night.

I noticed when I left my phone in the kitchen, and didn’t immediately flood my awareness with notifications, I felt less of a draw to my phone throughout the day. I felt calmer and more clearheaded. I felt like I got to drink my coffee and think for myself for a minute instead of immediately consuming.

We all know our phones are designed by some of the smartest people on earth to keep us tethered. Now there is a growing body of research showing the benefits of not using your phone even for just 30 minutes before bed and after waking:

• Reducing phone use before bed can improve sleep quality, help people fall asleep faster, and even improve next-day focus.

• Reaching for your phone first thing in the morning increases cognitive load before your brain has fully woken up.

• When we use our beds for scrolling, emails, or entertainment, our brains begin associating bed with wakefulness instead of sleep.

So starting June 8th, we’re doing something simple together: a 5-day Phone-Free Bedroom Challenge.

Over five days, we’ll work together to create a small habit change that can have a surprisingly large impact on how we feel each day. Spend a little less time on your phone, and a little more time in your own life.

Join the challenge

Can’t wait to to take back our attention together.

Emily

Founder, Rise Centered

Maybe I’m projecting here, as a new mom and a founder trying very hard to grow this business, but it seems like we are all carrying too much. Like we are all one sickness, one bad night of sleep, or one tough week away from burnout. Am I wrong?

So much of the world we engage with every day does not seem designed for peace or personal connection. It seems designed to grab and hold our attention. A lot of consumer technology feels that way too. Built around what’s possible, not what actually feels good to live with.

In Sapiens, Yuval Noah Harari writes about email as one of those inventions that was supposed to make life easier because it made communication faster. And it did. But now most of us are reachable by hundreds of people and companies every day. Is anyone else’s personal inbox 90% junk?

It sometimes feels less like technology was designed to make our lives easier and more like it was designed to make us easier to sell to.

When I was designing Rise Centered, the engineers kept wanting to add more. More light colors. More functions. More button combinations. More ways to customize it. But after buying and testing three sunrise alarm clocks already on the market, I knew that more was not the answer. They already felt like too much work to set up and use.

So I kept pulling the product back to the original question: does this actually make someone’s life easier? Do their mornings feel better? Adding more can look like a benefit, but often it is just outsourcing the real work to you, the consumer. It becomes another tax on your mental load, dressed up as a feature.

With Mother’s Day coming up, I keep thinking about how much mothers carry. But really, all of us carry. The visible things. The invisible things. The lists, the logistics, the remembering, the constant deciding.

So this month, my small invitation is this: look at one part of your life and ask, “Is this actually making my life easier, or is it just giving me more to manage?”

You don’t need to try harder. You need fewer things working against you.

Wishing you a little bit of ease,

Emily
Founder, Rise Centered

We talk a lot about the desire for analog, but I think what many of us are really craving is something deeper: a return to ourselves, a return to self-trust. A way of living I like to refer to as centered.

Something that feels distinctly American is our tendency to strip ideas down to their black-and-white value: what can be measured and proven. If your phone didn’t track your steps, did they count? If a thought isn’t researched, googled or run through AI, can we even trust it? We’ve become so conditioned to intellectually validate our choices that many of us have lost touch with what simply feels right.

As I navigate postpartum, I keep thinking about the times I felt best in my body. It wasn’t when I was counting calories or training for a marathon. It was when my meditation practice was strongest. I was less in my head, less fixated on the numbers, and more connected to my own rhythms.

To me, that’s what living centered really is. Not rejecting logic or information, but no longer treating them as the only valid forms of knowing. Trusting myself. Remembering that the body knows things. The senses know things. And that ritual, quiet, and presence can reveal what constant analysis cannot.

Centered is not a synonym for calm, but a way of describing a more integrated way of living. One that makes room for the body, the senses, and the quieter parts of ourselves that modern life so often drowns out.

A few ways we can practice a more centered life:

1. Stop outsourcing your self-trust

Notice when you’re looking for approval, data, or consensus before checking in with yourself.

2. Let your body have a say

Stretch, walk, cook, breathe, sit in the sun — anything that gets you out of your head and back into sensation

3. Leave something unfilled.

Put the phone down. Don’t immediately fill every quiet moment with input.

4. Keep one ritual that can’t be optimized

Tea in the morning. Lighting a candle. Watering plants. A few minutes outside. Something small that exists only to bring you back to yourself.

5. Make something without trying to be good at it

Doodle. Arrange flowers. Cook without a recipe. Rearrange a shelf. Do something creative without turning it into performance, productivity, or content.

Living more centered isn’t about doing everything perfectly. It’s about making a little more room for the parts of ourselves that don’t shout, prove, or perform but quietly know.

Wishing you a slow morning tomorrow,

Emily
Founder, Rise Centered

Lately I’ve been thinking about a Taoist quote I can’t seem to shake:

To gain knowledge, add something every day.
To gain wisdom, remove something every day.

Today, knowledge has become a commodity. With social media and AI, you can learn almost anything instantly.

In these early months of motherhood, I’ve found myself constantly searching for more knowledge. More articles. More advice. More things I “should” be doing, in an effort to be the “perfect” mom.

It’s surprisingly easy to slip into a kind of hypervigilance. I suspect most of us have our own version of it.

The challenge today isn’t learning more. It’s discernment: knowing what to ignore. In many ways, that’s what wisdom really is.

And wisdom rarely comes from consuming more. More often it comes from removing what isn’t essential, quieting the noise long enough to hear your own judgment again.

Here are a few ways I’m trying to tap into that wisdom:

1. Simplify. Simplify. Simplify.

As the quote says, continue to remove, curate. Unsubscribe to the email. Ditch that extra vase you will definitely never use. Close that extra browser tab. Finally recycle most of those paper bags cluttering up your kitchen.

2. Clarify your values.

When you know what you want to prioritize in your life, the question of whether something is a yes or a no becomes much easier. These days mine are (1) Family, (2) Health, (3) Rise Centered, (4) Community — in that order. What are yours? And yes they feed on each other but they also need an order.

3. Notice what already works.

I find that sometimes I forget to learn from effort I’ve already put in. There was a conditioner that worked great for my hair two years ago, why did I stop using it again? I felt my best when I was regularly eating a certain way, why not start that up again?

4. Pause consumption and create.

Our bodies were never meant to metabolize this much content. Whether you think of yourself as creative or not, we are meant to create. My baseline is journaling even just one page a day to get the junk out and start to metabolize what’s bouncing around in my brain. A free ranging conversation with a loved one counts. Doodle. Capture a beautiful moment (yes on your phone is fine).

5. Create intentional moments of boredom.

Drive in silence. Don’t bring your phone or podcast on a walk. Lay in bed for an extra 10 minutes. Sit on your couch with the TV off. Give your brain space to breathe and to put the pieces of the day together.

This weekend we’ll lose an hour as daylight savings begins. Mornings will be darker and afternoons a little longer. With this seasonal shift, I encourage you to create the space to hear yourself again.

Because in a world full of knowledge, the real power lies in wisdom.

Wishing you a slow morning tomorrow,

Emily
Founder, Rise Centered

I closed out 2025 with two big milestones: our first full year of Rise Centered as a direct-to-consumer brand, and I welcomed my daughter, Evelyn Dene, into the world on November 4th.

The last three months have been an amazing blur: family time, learning so much as a very clueless first-time mom, love from our community, a lot of sleepless nights… and, honestly, a lot of screen time. There were so many in-between moments: late-night feeding, a napping baby stuck on my chest, where I found myself endlessly scrolling Instagram or shopping online to fit my new body.

This phase of life has made the impermanence of everything feel very real, and I hated how often my attention was pulled away from moments I’ll never get back. I vowed to lower my screen time in the easiest way possible.

I don’t believe in relying on self-discipline, it’s the quickest way to burn yourself out. I believe in setting things up so the right choice is the easy one. Here’s what’s been working for me:

1. Brick the noise
A physical device you tap your phone to (like tap-to-pay) that blocks the apps you choose. To unblock them, you have to physically go back to it. That physical barrier has been huge for me. I’ve bricked Instagram, TikTok, Pinterest, Google, Safari, Amazon, even ChatGPT. I also set it to automatically brick everything at 5:30pm so my evenings and my sleep are actually uninterrupted.

2. Screen time widget on my home screen
I added the Screen Time widget to my home screen so I actually have to look at it. My very unrealistic goal is two hours a day. I don’t usually hit that (I’m closer to three and a half hours) and that includes some work, but that’s the goal. I’ll let you know if I ever get there.

3. Books vs scrolling
I’ve replaced scrolling in those weird in-between moments with reading. Physical books during the day, my Kindle at night while breastfeeding. Right now I’m loving The Tao of Pooh and I Cheerfully Refuse, exactly what my brain has been craving.

4. Meditation
I added Insight Timer to my home screen. Even though it’s technically still screen time, it reminds me to do something mindful and reminds me if I haven’t meditated yet that day. Lately it’s mostly yoga nidra to fall asleep.

5. Journal out my thoughts
Every night after Evelyn goes down, I try to write three pages in my journal, very Artist’s Way style, just to get everything out of my head. It’s been grounding while I navigate motherhood, easing back into work, and getting to know myself in this new body.

6. An Instax camera to capture the moment
Over Thanksgiving, I didn’t want my phone out constantly but I didn’t want to miss these tiny moments with Evelyn and her grandparents, aunts, and uncles. Now the camera lives on our coffee table. I can capture moments without reaching for my phone, and I can actually display the photos instantly (or mail them to grandma).

7. Our sunrise alarm clock
This one feels obvious, but it’s been genuinely vital during this baby journey. I use it every night while putting Evelyn to bed on the dimmest setting, and again during middle-of-the-night feeds. We have a pink clock in the nursery, and it’s been so grounding in those quiet, half-awake hours.

For me, encouraging more analog time is about clarity, being present for what actually matters, and making that choice as easy as possible.

Wishing you an easeful 2026,

Emily

Founder, Rise Centered

I’ve always found the holiday season to be one of the most stressful times of the year. Work is trying to maximize year end, I’m trying to find the perfect gifts without blowing my budget, oh and there’s travel, family time, sugary Christmas treats, and holiday drinks. All of it adds up to a perfect recipe for anxiety.

It’s easy to think the answer is in purchasing more stuff, buying our way to calm. But here’s the thing: no amount of Black Friday deals or holiday must-haves can actually soothe stress.

What helps me? These small, grounding practices bring me back to myself. Here’s what’s in my personal holiday survival kit.

1. Bath time resets
   When my regular meditation practice slips (which nearly always happens when I travel or have family time), I take a bath. Lavender Epsom salt, a candle and myself. It’s my low-lift way to regulate my nervous system and actually exhale.
   

2. Phone-free movement
   A walk outside without my phone (why I love my Oura ring!) or a yoga class where my phone can’t join me for an hour. Moving my body always brings me back to center.
   

3. Easy fiction
   I’m talking romance or fantasy, something immersive enough to lose track of time and let my brain decompress (the perfect break for your nervous system and from your family).
   

4. Good sleep hygiene
   Protecting my sleep is a non-negotiable. For me, solid sleep is the backbone to everything else in my life and a phone-free bedroom with our sunrise alarm clock makes it easier to wind down and actually rest.

This holiday season let me deinfluence you from buying more and instead give these practices a try. You don’t need to buy more to feel more grounded. You just need a few small rituals to keep you centered.

Wishing you an easeful holiday season,

Emily

Founder, Rise Centered