Night routine: the hour that decides your morning

A good night routine is a short sequence you repeat every night for about an hour before bed: set up tomorrow, put the phone somewhere that isn't your pillow, dim the lights, do something calm, and turn the light off at the same time every night. Four or five steps you'll actually do beat a fifteen-step routine with candles that survives two evenings. The whole point is to fall asleep on time, so tomorrow's alarm doesn't feel like an ambush.

Your morning gets decided the night before

Most people try to fix their mornings in the morning, which is like trying to fix a flat tire at the finish line. The alarm can only work with the sleep you gave it. Adults need seven or more hours a night, according to the CDC, so the math runs backward: an alarm at 6:30 means lights out by 11:00 at the latest, which means the routine starts around 10:00.

That last part is the one people skip, and it has a name. In 2014, Floor Kroese and colleagues described bedtime procrastination as "failing to go to bed at the intended time, while no external circumstances prevent a person from doing so." In their survey of 177 people, the ones who put off bedtime more were more likely to report not getting enough sleep. Nobody is stopping you from going to bed. That's exactly what makes it so annoying.

Your mom had a point about bedtime, it turns out. And if your mornings are the real battle, the night is where you win it: a morning routine gets much shorter when half of it already happened the night before.

The routine, counted back from lights out

Set a bedtime alarm for 60 minutes before lights out. That alarm, not your mood, starts the routine.

1. 60 minutes before: set up tomorrow. Clothes out, bag packed, keys where they belong, a look at tomorrow's calendar. Five minutes tonight saves fifteen frantic ones at 7:40 a.m.
2. 45 minutes before: the phone goes to its charger, outside the bedroom. Set the alarm first.
3. 40 minutes before: a warm shower, if you like them (why it helps is below).
4. 30 minutes before: dim the lights and write tomorrow's to-do list.
5. 20 minutes before: something calm and analog. A paper book, light stretching, music with the screen off.
6. Lights out at the same time every night, weekends included.

Move the times to fit your life, but keep the order. The repetition does the work: after a couple of weeks, the first step starts to feel like the beginning of sleep.

The phone sleeps in the kitchen

The CDC recommends turning off electronic devices at least 30 minutes before bed, and the NHS says not to use smartphones right before going to bed. One reason why: in a 2015 study by Anne-Marie Chang, Charles Czeisler and colleagues, 12 healthy young adults spent about four hours before bed reading on an iPad at full brightness, five evenings in a row, and another stretch of evenings reading printed books. After the iPad evenings, they took about ten minutes longer to fall asleep, felt less sleepy at night, produced less melatonin, had their body clock pushed later and were less alert the next morning.

Four hours on a bright screen is a bigger dose than your twenty minutes in bed, sure. But scrolling has a second problem: it never ends. A book has chapters. A feed has another video, and another, and a group chat that picked tonight to get interesting.

What works is distance, not willpower. Charge the phone outside the bedroom, or at least across the room. If it's your alarm, it can ring from there, and having to walk to it is half the work of getting up. More on breaking the habit in how to stop scrolling.

Five minutes of writing that helps you fall asleep

If your head starts listing tomorrow's tasks the moment it touches the pillow, write them down before you get there. In a 2018 sleep-lab study, Michael Scullin and colleagues had 57 healthy adults aged 18 to 30 write for five minutes before bed. Half wrote a to-do list for the next few days; half wrote about tasks they had already finished. The to-do list group fell asleep significantly faster, and the more specific their lists, the faster they fell asleep.

So be specific. "Work stuff" doesn't count. "Send Ana the budget before 10" does. Use paper: the phone is already in the kitchen, and it should stay there.

Dark, quiet, cool and a little boring

The CDC's advice for the bedroom is short: quiet, relaxing, and at a cool temperature. Add dark. Blackout curtains or a sleep mask cost less than a bad night.

A few more things worth knowing:

• A warm shower helps, in a counterintuitive way. A 2019 meta-analysis led by Shahab Haghayegh found that a warm shower or bath (40 to 42.5 °C, about 104 to 108 °F) one to two hours before bed, even for ten minutes, helped people fall asleep faster. The likely reason: warm water sends blood to your hands and feet, which helps your body shed heat, and a dropping core temperature is part of falling asleep.
• Caffeine lasts longer than you think. In a 2013 study led by Christopher Drake, 400 mg of caffeine (the FDA puts that at about two to three 12-ounce cups of coffee) disrupted sleep even when taken six hours before bed. The authors recommend skipping substantial caffeine for at least six hours before bedtime.
• Big dinners and alcohol right before bed are on the CDC's list of things to avoid.
• Keep the bed for sleeping. If you have trouble falling asleep, do the reading in a chair. Work, TV and long scrolls in bed teach your brain that bed means awake.

When bedtime keeps slipping

• You're not sleepy at bedtime. Then your schedule is probably running late. Keep your wake-up time fixed and move bedtime earlier gradually, 15 to 30 minutes at a time; how to fix your sleep schedule has the full plan. Do the routine anyway: dim lights and a book are the best waiting room for sleep.
• It's the only free time you get. That one is real, and it deserves a real answer. Protect an hour for yourself earlier in the evening, with a start and an end. Time stolen from sleep gets paid back tomorrow, with interest.
• One episode keeps turning into three. Decide the number before you press play, and turn off autoplay. The show will still be there tomorrow, which is more than anyone can say for your patience at 7 a.m.
• The weekend undoes the week. Sleeping until noon on Saturday makes Monday's alarm feel like jet lag. Same times every day is the CDC's advice for a reason.

When the routine isn't the problem

Everything above is for ordinary nights. If you've had trouble falling or staying asleep for weeks, a better routine probably won't fix it, and that isn't a discipline problem. It's worth talking to a doctor, especially if it's been going on for months or it's making your days hard to get through: that's when the NHS recommends seeing one.

The good news is that there's a treatment that works. The American Academy of Sleep Medicine's 2021 guideline strongly recommends cognitive behavioral therapy for insomnia (CBT-I) for chronic insomnia, and suggests not relying on sleep hygiene alone. One piece of CBT-I you can use tonight is called stimulus control: go to bed only when you're sleepy, and if you can't sleep, get up, do something calm somewhere else and come back when sleep returns.

If worry or a low mood is what keeps you awake, please talk to someone. You'll find helplines on our support page.

Tonight, change one thing

Don't install the whole routine tonight. Pick one step: the phone charging outside the bedroom, or a bedtime alarm an hour before lights out. Do it for a week, then add the next one. And when you're ready to work on the other end of the night, how to wake up early picks up where this article leaves off.