A story that still makes my family laugh took place when I was about ten. My younger brother (Derek) and I shared a room at that time, and this night, in particular, we were giggling and goofing around when we were supposed to be sleeping.
Three or four times our parents hollered from the living room to quiet down and go to sleep before one of them—I don’t remember which—finally marched down the hallway, flipped on the bedroom lights, and sternly warned us that we were both going to be in big trouble if they heard one more peep out of us.
As the lights flicked off and footsteps faded back down the hallway, Derek and I looked at each other in the dark and loudly proclaimed “peeeeep” in our high-pitched, adolescent voices.
I don’t remember specific details about that night other than those from the story’s continual re-telling, but I do know two things:
- Our parents must’ve laughed because the trouble that one of them had promised never materialized.
- The extra energy that caused the giggling and goofing around was an uncommon occurrence even though we were regularly in bed by 8 PM.
I’m grateful to my parents for a lot of things. And as simple as it may seem, that fairly strict 8 PM bedtime schedule—which was pushed back a whole hour during our teenage years—is one of them.
Over the 25+ years that I’ve set my own schedule, my bedtime has generally fluctuated between only 8–10 PM while also staying fairly consistent—within 30 minutes from day to day—during any specific stage of my life (e.g. college, first career, TNT years). There have certainly been times when I’ve stayed awake until the wee hours of the morning, but those times have been infrequent. I’m sure the consistency my parents enforced when I was young greatly influenced that habit as I’ve grown older.
And that brings me to the point of today’s tip.
Based on personal experience, working with others, and details from a few books and courses that I’ve recently been reading and studying, the very first step we should take when trying to improve our sleep should be setting and adhering to a consistent bedtime.
In upcoming weeks I’ll briefly discuss the benefits of getting enough high-quality sleep (there are a lot), the drawbacks of getting too little sleep (they’re highly detrimental to our long-term health), and some specific strategies to help you improve your sleep. Those strategies will arguably be more effective at improving the quality of your sleep, but they also seem to work even better when we climb into bed at roughly the same time each day.
Putting it into practice
If you’re a shift worker or regularly travel across time zones, adhering to a consistent bedtime will certainly be more challenging for you. Still, sticking with as consistent a schedule as possible can provide tremendous benefits (and in upcoming weeks I’ll offer a few tips about what to do when external factors prevent you from doing so).
In any case, spend some time this week answering the following questions, doing some reverse engineering, and implementing what you come up with:
Do you actually know precisely when you go to bed? I don’t mean 10:03 PM vs 10:05 PM, but rather thinking you go to bed at 10 PM but not actually turning out the lights and trying to sleep until 11. Track this, and see what you come up with!
If you do know when you go to bed, do you have a consistent bedtime? If not, why not? Are the factors preventing you from a consistent schedule actually outside of your control, or is that just a plausible excuse to do what you want in the moment?
Do you know when you need to go to bed in order to get the sleep you need? If not, figure out when you need to wake up based on your personal responsibilities. Then subtract 7–9 hours. (← If you’re aged 18–65 and think you need less, there’s a 99.9917% chance you’re wrong. If you’re older than 65, you’re looking at 7–8 hours. More on this in upcoming weeks.) Now that you do know, when are you going to bed tonight?!?