I stopped sleeping with my work phone under the pillow

Dear Delyara, I managed an emergency-response team and slept with my work phone beneath my pillow for seven years. Every vibration woke me before I knew whether it was urgent. Even on leave, my body waited for the sound. Burnout therapy forced me to confront how much of the availability was culture rather than necessity. We created an on-call rotation, escalation rules, and a separate emergency number. I began leaving the phone in the kitchen at night. At first, I got up repeatedly to check it. Today marks three months. Last night, I slept seven uninterrupted hours. When I checked the phone in the morning, there were nine messages. Eight could wait. One had already been handled by the person officially on call. Breaking the habit meant accepting a frightening idea: competence does not require being reachable every second, and a team that collapses whenever one person sleeps is not a strong team.