When did every quiet moment become something we needed to fill?
There is a moment most evenings when I close my computer and decide I am done.
Not because I am actually done, as a solo entrepreneur, I am never done. There is always another email I could answer, another page I could work on, another idea I could chase, another tiny thing that might move my business forward.
Closing the computer is less an indication that the work is finished and more a decision that I am finished with it for today.
I value that moment. Because everything that comes after it feels different.I might watch television. Play a video game. Do a puzzle. Craft something. Take a ridiculously long bubble bath. Work out. Sometimes I do absolutely nothing of consequence.
I call myself a Sleep Architect and talk constantly about the Wind-Down Hour, but mine is regularly closer to three. And honestly, I think that's the point.
The end of the day isn't necessarily an hour. It isn't a perfectly curated nighttime routine. It isn't a checklist beginning with magnesium and ending with eight hours of uninterrupted sleep.
It's a transition.
And I think we've forgotten how to have one.
When does your day actually end?
Think about it.
Not when do you finish work. Not when do you eat dinner. Not what time do you get into bed.
When does the day end?
For a lot of us, I'm not sure it does.
We move from work to dinner while checking our phones. From dinner to the couch. From the couch to another screen. There are messages coming in, shows waiting, news updating, people posting, things to buy, things to remember, things we forgot to do.There is almost always something available to occupy us.
And then, eventually, we look at the time. Shit. I should go to bed.
So we brush our teeth, plug in the phone, turn off the light and expect our brains to understand that participation in the day has officially ended.
No wonder the transition can feel abrupt.
We have become very good at going to bed.
I'm not sure we're as good at ending the day.
Someone used to do this for us
There is something strange about childhood bedtime when you look at it through adult eyes.
Someone put us to bed. And “putting us to bed” rarely meant picking us up and physically placing us under a duvet. It was a process.
Dinner was over. Maybe there was a bath. Pajamas went on. The house got quieter. Toys were put away. There might have been a story. Lights went down. The day became smaller and eventually, someone said goodnight.
Bedtime was something you arrived at, rather than something you crashed into.
Then we became adults. Nobody puts us to bed anymore.
Somewhere along the way, responsibility for creating that transition became ours and I'm not convinced we remember, or even value, the time in between.
But this is my time.
There is a popular idea called bedtime procrastination: going to bed later than you intended despite nothing actually preventing you from doing so.
It's easy to look at that behaviour and think we simply lack discipline. Put down the phone. Turn off Netflix. Go to bed. Except human behaviour is rarely that tidy.
Research into bedtime procrastination has found something much more relatable: some people deliberately delay bedtime because they feel they deserve time for themselves.
I understand that intimately. I am naturally drawn to nighttime. Around 10PM, the world starts leaving me alone. Everyone else seems to have clocked out.
And my brain goes: Perfect. Now we can think.
If the only hours that feel completely yours begin when everyone else stops needing you, of course going to bed can feel like giving something up.
Maybe sometimes we aren't resisting sleep.
Maybe we're resisting the end of the only part of the day that belonged to us.
The lost ending
I don't think we need another perfect bedtime routine. In fact, turning the end of the day into another performance might be part of the problem.
You don't need twelve steps. You don't need my three-hour version either.
Your ending might be twenty minutes.
It might be walking the dog around the block after dinner. Sitting on the couch with your partner. Folding laundry while listening to music. Reading three pages of a book or standing in the shower longer than necessary.
It doesn't have to look calm enough to photograph.
It just needs to feel different from the part of the day that came before it.
A boundary. A release. A point at which you decide: Nothing else needs to happen today.
The simple ability to let the day be over before we ask ourselves to sleep.
- DAWN MELODY
Sleep Architect + Founder, Sleep State of Mind
LIMINAL
THE SPACE BETWEEN AWAKE AND ASLEEP
