Five Things We Stopped Doing Before Bed
Most sleep advice tells you to add something. We got further by removing things.
01 The ceiling light
The first and by some distance the most effective. A bright overhead fitting fills your entire field of view for hours and tells your body, unambiguously, that it is still daytime. Two lamps replaced it. Nothing else on this list comes close.
02 Charging the phone by the bed
Not for willpower reasons. Because a phone within arm's reach gets picked up at 2am when you half-wake, and a screen at 2am turns a five-minute wake into a forty-minute one.
It charges in the next room. We bought an alarm clock, which felt absurd in 2026 and solved the problem in one evening.
03 The last coffee
Caffeine has a half-life of roughly five to six hours, which means a 4pm coffee still has meaningful amounts circulating at bedtime. The insidious part is that it rarely stops you falling asleep — it quietly reduces the quality of the sleep you do get, so you wake feeling like you slept badly without knowing why.
Our cut-off is 2pm. It took about a week to stop noticing.
04 The nightcap
The hardest to give up and the one with the clearest evidence against it. Alcohol is sedating, so it genuinely helps you fall asleep faster — which is why almost everyone believes it works. But it fragments the second half of the night and suppresses REM, so you spend longer in bed getting less from it.
The 4am wake-up after a few glasses is not bad luck. It's the alcohol wearing off.
05 Checking the clock in the night
The most trivial-sounding and one of the most useful. Knowing it's 3:40 and that the alarm is at seven starts an arithmetic problem, and arithmetic problems keep you awake.
Now the clock faces away from the bed. If we wake, we don't know what time it is, and it turns out we don't need to.
What we added instead
Almost nothing. A lamp, a mask, an alarm clock that isn't a phone. The value was in what came out of the room, not what went into it — which is an odd thing for a shop to say, and we mean it.
If you want to try one, start with the ceiling light. It's free.
