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How to wind down before bed
What it does
Winding down before bed means giving your body an hour of lower light, less effort and nothing new to think about. That's what gives sleep a chance to start. The NHS suggests at least an hour; what you fill it with matters less than what you keep out of it.
- Set your lights-off time When the lamp goes off, not when you go upstairs.
- Tick the parts you will actually do Nobody does all of it every night. Pick two and keep them.
- Set one alarm, for the start of the hour Not an alarm to go to bed. An alarm to go up and begin.
What did you do in the last hour before bed last night? Not what you meant to do. The actual hour.
You close the laptop at 10.15 with an email half written. You brush your teeth with the phone in the other hand. In bed you set the alarm, and twenty minutes go somewhere you can't now account for.
The light goes off at 11.05. Your mind is still at 10.15. It's redrafting the email.
That isn't carelessness. It's how an ordinary evening is built now. Work ends in the kitchen and the news arrives in bed.
Nothing in between tells your body the day is over. The email goes at 8.40 the next morning, and it's worse than the version you had at 10.15.
What winding down actually does
Your body clock reads light through the eyes. A bright room at 10.30pm reads as afternoon, and the clock answers by holding off the hormone it releases as the light fades.
A 2015 study at a Boston sleep lab tested this on 12 adults. They read for five evenings on a backlit tablet and five on a printed book.
On the tablet evenings they took about ten minutes longer to fall asleep. Their evening melatonin dropped by more than half, and they were groggier the next morning.
Four hours a night on a bright screen is more than most of us manage. The direction is clear, though.
Temperature is the second signal. Your core cools in the hour before sleep, and the drop itself is part of what starts it. Warm skin speeds the cooling, which is why a shower helps more early in the hour than late.
The third is input. The brain doesn't have an off switch, only a dimmer. It turns up for anything that asks something of it, a message or a plot twist.
The hour is the gap you leave between the last thing that asks something of you and the pillow.
The best way to wind down before bed
- Decide when the hour starts, and set a reminder for it. The NHS advice is to relax for at least an hour before bed. An hour is easy to agree with and hard to notice, so give it an alarm. Set it for the start, not the end. The end takes care of itself.
- Close the day on paper. Write tomorrow's list, the more specific the better, then put the pen down. In a 2018 lab study of 57 adults, five minutes on a to-do list at bedtime got people to sleep faster. Those who spent the same five minutes writing about what they'd already done took longer. Once it's written down, the brain can stop rehearsing it.
- Have the shower or bath early in the hour. A 2019 review found 17 studies of warm baths and showers before bed and pooled the 13 with usable numbers. Water of 40 to 42.5 degrees, taken one to two hours before bed, cut the time to fall asleep by just under ten minutes on average. Ten minutes in the water was enough. Later than that and you're still warm when you lie down.
- Drop the light. Lamps on, the big light off. The phone goes on charge in another room. The NHS advice is no phones, tablets or computers for the hour before bed. If the phone has to stay, turn the brightness right down and hold it further away; both reduce the light reaching your eyes.
- Do something that ends. A paper book, a podcast on a timer, a slow stretch on the floor, a crossword. The NHS list of things to relax with is short on purpose: reading, breathing exercises, meditation, calming music, a podcast. In a 2021 online trial of 991 people, 42% of those who read in bed for a week felt their sleep had improved. Among those who didn't read, it was 28%.
- Get up if sleep doesn't come. If you're still awake after about 20 minutes, the NHS advice is to get up. Sit somewhere comfortable and do something quiet until you feel sleepy. Staying put trains the bed to mean awake. You'll find more on this in how to get back to sleep.
Done in that order, the hour runs downhill: list, shower, lamps, book, bed. If you'd rather build the whole evening around it, start with how to build an evening routine that sticks.
Where this won't help
The evidence behind the hour is thinner than the advice sounds. The screen study had 12 people, in a lab rather than a living room.
The reading trial lasted seven nights and relied on people rating their own sleep. It also lost more of its readers than its non-readers along the way. An hour is a sensible convention; nobody has tested whether 40 minutes or 90 would do.
It also helps most with getting off to sleep. If your night breaks at 3am instead, winding down makes less difference. The problem is usually somewhere else, and fall asleep fine but can't stay asleep covers why.
Give the hour seven nights before you decide anything, and judge it by the first half of the night, because that's the half it works on.
Read next
Staying asleep
How to get back to sleep after waking in the night
The evening
Evening routine: how to build one that sticks
Better sleep
Fall asleep fine but can't stay asleep? Why the two problems differ
Questions
What does a wind-down routine mean?
It's the stretch before bed, usually an hour, in which you stop adding things to your evening. Lower light, no screens, nothing that needs a decision. The routine part is doing it in the same order each night, so the sequence itself becomes a signal.
How do you wind down before bed with anxiety?
Give the paper step more time: the list first, then anything else that's circling, written down so it's on the page instead of in your head. Keep the rest of the hour physical rather than mental, a shower and a stretch rather than a podcast about the news. If the thoughts speed up the moment the light goes off, racing thoughts at night explains why that happens and what to do with them.
What should a wind-down routine for adults include?
Fewer things than you'd think: the NHS suggests a bath or a book. The trials above add a to-do list and a warm shower an hour or two before bed. Pick two and keep them in the same order, because the order is the part your body learns.
Sources
- Fall asleep faster and sleep better, NHS Every Mind Matters, 2026
- Insomnia, NHS, 2024
- Evening use of light-emitting eReaders negatively affects sleep, circadian timing, and next-morning alertness, Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, 2015
- Before-bedtime passive body heating by warm shower or bath to improve sleep: a systematic review and meta-analysis, Sleep Medicine Reviews, 2019
- The effects of bedtime writing on difficulty falling asleep: a polysomnographic study comparing to-do lists and completed activity lists, Journal of Experimental Psychology: General, 2018
- Does reading a book in bed make a difference to sleep in comparison to not reading a book in bed? The People's Trial, Trials, 2021
This article is general information, not medical advice. If sleep problems last more than a few weeks, speak to your GP.
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