Set a bedtime alarm

How to nudge yourself to get enough sleep

How do you know when it’s time to get ready for bed?

My guess is that you — as a responsible person — have set an alarm to wake yourself up in the morning since at least your early teen years. But my guess is that you don’t have any sort of alarm to tell you when to start winding down.

Instead, from studying time logs, my general sense is that people glance at the clock at some point in the evening and think “whoa, it’s getting late!” They then finish whatever chores they were doing, deal with some unexpected development (the dog needs to go out again?), shut the house, and quickly handle any personal care that needs to happen. But this all tends to feel rushed and people still wind up getting into bed later than they should, given when that morning alarm is going to go off.

So here’s another approach: Set a bedtime alarm faithfully and that morning alarm might become superfluous.

Give yourself a bedtime

Here’s how this works. We all need a certain amount of sleep. From tracking my time for the past 9 years, I’m pretty sure that my set point is approximately 7.3-7.4 hours. I need to wake up at 6:30 a.m. during the school year to get everyone going on time. This means that my bedtime is about 11 p.m., a number I obtained by counting back 7..3-7.4 hours from 6:30 a.m., and then adding a bit of margin (I fall asleep quite quickly, but your mileage may vary).

That’s straightforward, but if the only number I have in my head is “11:00 p.m.” that’s not useful for getting into bed on time. Getting into bed takes some non-zero amount of time, and many people like to have at least a little wind down time to read or hang out with their partners.

So if bedtime is 11 p.m., my moment of truth is 10:30 p.m. At that point I need to stop whatever I’m doing if I’m not already up in my bed reading. It’s time to check the doors, brush my teeth, wash my face, and put on my pajamas. This gives me a bit of down time before the lights have to be out.

Forcing a decision

I won’t always remember to stop what I’m doing at 10:30, but that’s where a bedtime alarm comes in. An alarm nudges a choice. You can decide not to go to bed (you are an adult!) but you’ll at least need to turn the alarm off. That can push you to evaluate what you’re doing and whether it’s worth being really tired in the morning just to stay up later.

The good news is that when you consistently get the exact amount of sleep you need, you’ll likely start to wake up pretty close to the time your alarm goes off. A bedtime alarm makes a morning alarm less necessary. You can still set it, but you can also give yourself a little gold star when you wake up, on your own, five minutes before it goes off. That’s a sign that you’re managing sleep like the responsible person that you are.