Five night habits that are ruining your sleep
Sleep is the part of studying that nobody puts on the timetable. You can plan every revision session for the week, but if you are going to bed tired and waking up tired, those sessions will not give you much. A rested brain learns faster, remembers more and makes fewer careless mistakes.
The good news is that better sleep usually does not need anything dramatic. Most of it comes down to what you do in the last few hours before bed. Here are five common evening habits that quietly ruin your sleep, and what to do instead.
1. Going to bed at different times every night
This does not mean you have to go to bed early. People have different chronotypes, a natural leaning towards sleeping at a particular time. Some people are happiest going to bed early and waking early; others prefer to sleep later and wake later. Either is fine, as long as it fits your schedule and you get enough sleep.
What matters is consistency. When your bedtime jumps around, 10 p.m. one night and past midnight the next, your body never knows when to start winding down. So when you do lie down, you are not sleepy yet, and you spend a long time staring at the ceiling.
Keep a regular bedtime and your body adjusts to it. After a while you start to feel sleepy around the same time each night, you fall asleep faster, and the sleep you get is better.
Try this: choose a bedtime you can keep on school nights, and aim to be in bed within half an hour of it every night this week, weekends included.
2. Doing important work right before bed
Keeping a consistent bedtime sounds simple, until you are halfway through an assignment at 10:30 and bedtime arrives. “Just another 30 minutes,” you tell yourself. Or: “This is important. I’ll catch up on sleep tomorrow.”
The trouble is that tomorrow night there is something else important too. Bedtime keeps getting pushed back, you rarely get enough sleep, and the tiredness makes the next day’s work slower, which pushes the next bedtime back again. It is a cycle that is hard to break once it starts.
The same goes for the evening activities that are easy to lose track of time in, like video games or one more episode of a series. They are fine in themselves; they are just hard to stop.
Try this:
- Work out how much sleep you need, then count back from the time you have to wake up. That is your bedtime.
- Plan a 30-minute wind-down before it. When wind-down starts, stop whatever you are doing, even if it is not finished. Brush your teeth, get your bag ready for tomorrow, then do something calm: read a book, listen to music, play an instrument.
- Pick wind-down activities that are easy to put down. A novel you can close at the end of a chapter works. A game with “one more level” does not.
If work keeps running into your wind-down, that is a sign it needs to start earlier in the day, not end later at night. Our weekly planner (made for P6, works for anyone) puts sleep in first and fits study around it, which helps with exactly this.
3. Drinking caffeine in the evening
This one sounds obvious, but it applies to the late afternoon too, not just the hour before bed. Caffeine stays in your body for hours after you drink it, and research has found that caffeine taken as much as six hours before bedtime can still make it harder to fall asleep.
Coffee is the obvious culprit, but plenty of other drinks contain caffeine: many teas, milk tea, cola and other soft drinks, and energy drinks. A drink with dinner, or even an afternoon pick-me-up after school, can be the reason you are still wide awake at 11.
Try this: set yourself a caffeine cut-off in the mid-afternoon. After that, stick to plain water, which is the healthiest choice, or a caffeine-free herbal tea if you want something warm.
4. Exercising right before bed
Exercise is good for you, and it generally helps you sleep better too. But the timing matters. A hard workout releases chemicals in your brain that leave you feeling energised and alert, which is great in the morning and not what you want when you are trying to fall asleep.
If you exercise late in the evening, you may find it takes longer to drift off and that your sleep is lighter.
Try this: move your workout earlier. Straight after school works well for many people. Or, if you want to try something new, exercise in the morning instead. It can take a little getting used to, but a morning workout is a good way to wake up properly and feel more energetic through the day. Our note on how to wake up early and actually be productive has more on building a morning routine around it.
5. Using your phone in bed
This is the hardest habit to break, and probably the most important one.
Phone and tablet screens give off bright, blue-toned light that is similar to daylight. Look at it late at night and it can trick your brain into thinking it is still daytime, so your body keeps you alert instead of getting you ready for sleep.
There is a second problem too. If you regularly use your phone in bed, your brain starts to link lying in bed with scrolling, messaging and watching videos, rather than with sleep. Then, even after you put the phone down, your mind keeps going: the conversation you were in, the video you just saw, whatever you were reading.
Try this: make your bed a phone-free zone. Charge your phone outside your bedroom, or at least across the room, out of arm’s reach. If you use it as an alarm, a cheap alarm clock does the job and cannot tempt you to check one more notification.
Start with one
You do not need to fix all five tonight. Pick the one that affects you most (for many students it is the phone, or the “just 30 more minutes” of work) and change that one thing for a week.
Good sleep is not time taken away from studying. It is what makes the studying stick. And a good night starts with a good morning, too: our note on five morning habits that cost you the whole day covers the other end of the routine.