Most people ask this hoping one of the two gets a pass. Here is the honest version: neither is good for sleep, the phone is usually the worse habit, and the reason has more to do with how each one is used than with the screen itself.
One caveat first. The research we draw on here measures screen time overall. It does not put a TV and a phone side by side, so nobody can give you a trustworthy number for "phone is X times worse." What follows is the evidence we do have, plus plain observation about the difference.
Does the type of screen matter, or just the screen?
The best evidence covers screens as a group.
A 2025 systematic review and meta-analysis in Frontiers in Psychiatry pooled 21 cohort studies covering 548,338 people. Each extra hour of daily screen time was associated with a bedtime about 13.2 minutes later, roughly 3 to 5 minutes less total sleep, and higher odds of difficulty falling asleep.
Those are associations, and the effect per hour is modest. They also bundle every kind of screen together, so they cannot tell you whether the TV hour or the phone hour did the damage.
Source: He et al. (2025), Frontiers in Psychiatry.
Why is the phone usually worse in practice?
Because of what the evening looks like once you pick it up. This part is observation, not a finding.
- A show ends. An episode has a credits screen, and a film has an ending. A feed has neither. The phone never offers you a natural moment to stop.
- It is in your hand. A TV sits across the room. A phone sits a foot from your face, usually in bed, and the same device is also your messages, your email and your worries.
- It invites the next thing. One look at the time becomes a check of a notification, which becomes ten minutes.
There is some support for the idea that phone use is mostly self-started. An observational study of real-life smartphone use found that about 89% of smartphone interactions were started by the user rather than prompted by a notification. That study is about smartphone use in general, not late-night use, so it is only a hint about what happens at bedtime.
Source: Heitmayer & Lahlou (2021), Computers in Human Behavior.
None of that makes TV harmless. A long binge at midnight can cost you as much sleep as a long scroll. But the phone makes the long version more likely, and it makes it harder to notice you are in it.
What about the light from the screen?
A 2025 perspective in Frontiers in Psychiatry on sleep in ADHD recommends morning light and limiting evening light, screens included. That paper is about people with ADHD, whose melatonin timing tends to run late, so it should not be stretched into a ranking of devices for everyone.
Source: Luu & Fabiano (2025), Frontiers in Psychiatry.
What we can say plainly is that a bright screen close to your face late at night is not helping. A TV across the room is at least further away. That is a difference in distance, not a proven difference in sleep outcomes.
Is it really about the screen, or about what you watch?
Probably both, and the content side is easy to overlook. Something calming you have seen before is a different evening from a tense series or an endless feed of new, unpredictable clips. We have no sleep-specific evidence to cite on this, so treat it as a rule of thumb: the more a thing keeps you wanting the next bit, the more it competes with going to sleep.
This is also why a phone feels harder to put down than a TV. A feed is built so that the next item is always one swipe away.
So can you keep the TV?
If TV is how you wind down, you do not need to give it up to sleep better. As plain advice, small changes may be enough:
- Pick an end point. Decide on one episode or one film before you start, not partway through.
- Turn it off, not just down. Autoplay is the TV's version of the scroll. Switch off the next-episode countdown if your service lets you.
- Leave the phone out of it. The common failure is TV plus phone at once, which is two screens and none of the stopping points.
- Charge the phone across the room. Not as a punishment, just so the last reach of the night is a step away instead of an arm's length.
- Give the last stretch to something with an edge. A shower, a page of a book, a few minutes of nothing. Anything finite.
If you notice the phone is the one you cannot put down, an app can sit in that gap with you. Boredom's Daily Reset is three guided minutes for the moment you would otherwise reach, but a charger across the room does a decent job too.
What is the evidence that cutting back helps?
The cleanest study we have is not about bedtime specifically. In a randomised trial of 467 participants, blocking mobile internet on smartphones for two weeks improved sustained attention, mental health and subjective well-being. Increased nightly sleep was one of the mechanisms behind those improvements. Calls and texts still worked, so people were not cut off.
That does not prove the phone beats the TV for sleep. It does suggest that giving up the phone's internet, which is where the endless part lives, improved attention, mental health and well-being within a fortnight, with more sleep at night as one of the routes.
Source: Castelo et al. (2025), PNAS Nexus.
The short version
Screen time overall is linked to later, shorter sleep, and the research we have does not compare the two devices. In real life the phone tends to lose, because it has no ending, sits close to your face and keeps offering one more thing.
If you only change one thing tonight, make the last screen of the day one that can finish. A single episode with the phone in another room is a much better evening than either screen left running.