QuietlyIn short
Set the block to start 30 to 60 minutes before you get into bed rather than at the time you mean to sleep. Charge the phone in another room if you can, and buy an alarm clock so that is possible. Keep one narrow route through for genuine emergencies, otherwise you will remove the whole arrangement on the first night it is inconvenient.
Why this hour is the hardest one
Three things stack up at once, and each of them would be manageable alone.
There is no natural end point. Every other scroll in the day gets interrupted by something: a meeting, a train, a person, food going cold. At 23:00 nothing is due next, so the only thing that ends the session is you deciding to end it, which is precisely the mechanism that is least available.
You are tired. Interrupting an automatic sequence takes effort, and the effort is not there. This is the same reason the biscuit gets eaten at 22:00 and not at 10:00.
And the room has nothing else in it. The phone is the brightest thing in a dark room with no competition, which is not a fair fight.
The hour you least want to lose is the hour you are least equipped to protect.
Start the block before bed, not at bed
Most people set a bedtime block for the time they want to be asleep. That is too late, and it is the single most common reason these setups fail.
By the time you are in bed with the phone, the sequence has already started. A block arriving then has to interrupt something in progress, which is the hard version of the task. A block that started while you were still in the kitchen has to prevent something from starting, which is much easier and barely feels like anything.
Set it 30 to 60 minutes before you actually get into bed. Not before you intend to. Before you actually do, which for most people is a different number and worth being honest about.
Charge the phone somewhere else
This is the most effective single change available and everyone knows it, so the interesting part is the obstacle rather than the advice.
The obstacle is almost always the alarm. The phone is the alarm clock, so the phone has to be within reach, so the phone is on the bedside table at 23:40. A separate alarm clock costs very little and removes the entire argument, and it is genuinely the single most useful thing on this page.
The second obstacle is being reachable in an emergency. That one is real and worth solving properly rather than dismissing. Most phones can be set to let calls from specific people through while everything else stays silent, which covers the case that actually worries you.
Worth knowing
The blue light argument is the one everyone reaches for, and it is the least important part of this. What keeps you awake is far more likely to be the content: something mildly upsetting, mildly exciting, or unfinished. Night Shift and warm screen filters do not touch any of that, which is why they never seem to help as much as you were told they would.
Which apps to block, and which to leave
Block the feeds. Anything with an infinite scroll and no end state belongs in the list, because the absence of an ending is the whole problem at this hour.
Leave messaging open, or at least leave the person you would actually need at 02:00 able to reach you. A block that makes you unreachable is a block you turn off, usually within a week, and then you have nothing.
The ambiguous ones are reading apps, podcasts and anything with a defined ending. These are mostly fine, and they are also the obvious replacements. If you have a Kindle app or a podcast queue, that is a better thing for the reflex to land on than nothing at all, because "put the phone down and lie in the dark" is a harder instruction than it sounds.
Leave a way through, deliberately
A bedtime block with no exceptions will be removed on the first night it is genuinely wrong: the night something is actually happening and you need to look. That night comes eventually, and when it does you will not delicately adjust the settings. You will turn the whole thing off, and it will not come back on.
So build the exception in on purpose, and make it narrow. One way through, short, and slightly awkward to use. Awkward enough that a reflex does not bother, easy enough that a real need is not blocked. The goal is not a perfect night. It is a block that survives a hundred nights.
How Quietly handles the night
Quietly is a screen time app for iPhone with a Night routine built for exactly this. You choose the apps and the hours, and during that window those apps do not open on the first tap. A friction step arrives first, usually ten seconds of guided breathing, which at 23:40 is often enough on its own.
Night routines can be stricter than daytime ones. Fewer passes, or a single pass, or none. That asymmetry is the point: the hours are not equally hard, and a setting that is right at 11:00 is far too loose at 23:00.
Nothing is deleted, and there is no report waiting for you in the morning. Quietly counts the nights the routine held, which turns out to be the only number worth having.
Quietly is on the App Store
Pick your apps, set one routine, and see how many opens were never really decisions.
A setup you can do tonight
Pick the time you actually got into bed last night and subtract 45 minutes. That is your start time. Pick the three apps you most often end up in after that hour. Block those three, from that time until you wake up.
Then leave it alone for a week without adjusting anything, and pay attention to which nights it failed rather than how many. One failure on a Friday is a different problem from failing every night at the same time, and only the second one means you chose the wrong hour.