This short guide will help you set up a simple bedtime routine that accomplishes three things:
- Provides reflection on your day
- Prepares you for tomorrow, and
- Helps you fall asleep.
Let’s jump right into it.
To start, you’ll want to give yourself 30-45 minutes to complete this routine. It doesn’t actually take that long to complete the steps, but you’ll likely need that much time for your body to prepare itself for sleep.
To figure out when to start your bedtime routine, look at your morning routine and calculate how much sleep you want to get. With that, you’ll know your “fall asleep time.” Simply subtract 30-45 minutes from that time, and that’s when you want to begin your bedtime routine.
Mark this time with a daily alarm so you’re automatically notified when it’s time to take action. One of the biggest problems most busy people face with falling asleep is keeping themselves overstimulated until too far into the night.
In addition to the things you normally do to prepare for bed like brushing your teeth and turning out all the lights, do these additional steps, preferably in this order:
Step 1: Take a dose of melatonin.
Melatonin is a naturally occurring substance in your body, and taking a small dose of it for a brief period of time can help you overcome sleep issues.
General advice is to take somewhere between 0.3 and 10 mg per dose to help you become tired and fall asleep. That is, admittedly, a big range so you’ll want to start with a small dose and work your way up to see what works for you.
This step is a kind of training wheel. You don’t want to do it forever. Perhaps for just a few months until you’ve established your bedtime routine and naturally get tired when you want to.
This step comes first because it takes a little while to take effect, and you can complete the other steps while you wait for it to kick in.
Step 2: Dim the lights.
Most homes are overly bright, especially when they’re fully lit at night. If you have a dimmer switch for your main living space, use it. Crank the light down. If you don’t have one, consider installing one or using a low-light lamp instead of overhead lights.
When you dim your main space, turn off the other lights in your house.
Step 3: Put devices in night mode.
In a perfect world, you’d power down your electronic devices about 30 minutes or so before bed and not use them at all. But we don’t live in a perfect world, so at least make sure any device you use within 30 minutes of bedtime is in “night mode” where the brightness is dimmed and blue light from the screen is subdued.
Important: Stop working at least 30 minutes before bed. If, for some reason, you can’t stop right on time, always give yourself 30 minutes after stopping work before getting into bed.
Step 4: Quickly reflect on the day.
Quickly replay the important events of the day. Don’t do too much judgment here; just take a moment to think through everything that happened. To end the day on a positive note, try to think of the best thing that happened that day, even if it wasn’t very significant.
Ending on a high note at night makes it easier to start on a high note in the morning.
Step 5: Prepare yourself for tomorrow.
Think of a problem you’d like to solve tomorrow. Don’t try to solve it right now! Just ask yourself, “What is something I’d like to accomplish tomorrow?”
There’s something magical about the effect a good night’s sleep has on your ability to solve problems. I like to go to bed with a question in my head because I find that, when I wake up, I’m ready to answer it.
Step 6: Go to bed once you feel sleepy.
There are two problems you will run into with this step, but you must keep trying until you get it right.
The first problem is that you’ll get into bed before you actually feel tired. The problem with this is that you can’t fall asleep, so you do something else to pass the time and accidentally train your body to believe the bed is not for sleeping.
The second problem is that you start to feel tired, but you want to feel more tired before getting into bed. This is also a mistake because what is more likely to happen is that your body will interpret you avoiding bed to mean that it needs to wake back up and prepare for more action.
This is the “second wind” you might find yourself getting when you stay up later than your normal bed time.
The solution is to pay close attention to your body during those 30 minutes before you plan to go to sleep and put yourself to bed right when you first feel tiredness coming on.
That gives you the best chance to fall asleep very quickly.
If your planned bedtime arrives and you don’t feel tired at all, don’t get into bed yet. Instead, wait for that first feeling of tiredness to arrive, take note, and then get into bed. Make adjustments going forward depending on what you find your natural rhythm to be.
If you find yourself awake in bed and not feeling tired, get up. Don’t stay there. Get out of bed and do something quiet to occupy yourself until you feel tired again.
The end goal is to train yourself to recognize as soon as you feel tired and to force your body to associate your bed with sleeping so that, when you get in, it immediately makes you tired.