What's a good wind-down routine before bed?

A good wind-down is 20 minutes or more of the same calm things every night, done somewhere comfortable that isn't your bed, like the sofa or an armchair. Put work and the news away before you start, and go to bed once you feel sleepy.

We think what goes into it matters less than doing it most nights, though nobody has tested that directly. Quiet music, slow breathing, gentle stretches, tomorrow's to-do list on paper. Choose a few you like and stick with them. We use 20 minutes in the app because it's short enough to keep up on busy evenings, and longer is fine.

Why does a wind-down help?

A wind-down gives your mind time to come off the day before you ask it to sleep. Plenty of people with insomnia lie down with their thoughts still going, replaying the day, planning tomorrow or wondering whether sleep will come. Psychologist Allison Harvey's 2002 model of insomnia describes how worry, especially about sleep itself, keeps the body keyed up and makes sleep harder to reach.

A stretch of quiet before bed gives that thinking a chance to slow down. Repeating the same few steps each evening may also turn them into a cue that the day is over, though that part is a hypothesis. We couldn't find a trial of whole bedtime routines for adults with insomnia. Some of the pieces that go into one have been studied, and we cover them below.

Where should you wind down?

Wind down on the sofa, in a chair, anywhere but bed. Stimulus control, the set of instructions behind getting up when you can't sleep, keeps the bed for sleep and sex and nothing else. For people with insomnia, the idea is that half an hour of reading or watching something in bed, night after night, teaches your brain that bed is where you lie awake. The American Academy of Sleep Medicine (AASM) included stimulus control in its 2021 guideline as worth using on its own for long-term insomnia.

When your 20 minutes are up and your eyes are getting heavy, go to bed. Not sleepy yet? Stay put a while longer with something quiet.

In a studio, or a shared room where the bed is the only comfortable seat, sit on top of the covers with a lamp on, and get under them when you're sleepy.

What to put in a wind-down

Pick things you can drop halfway without minding. A few have some research behind them.

Start with a to-do list. In a lab study of 57 healthy adults aged 18 to 30, people who spent five minutes writing a to-do list before bed fell asleep about nine minutes faster than people who wrote about tasks they'd already finished (16 minutes against 25). The more specific the list, the faster they fell asleep. It was one night, with young people who already slept well, so don't read much into it.

Relaxation exercises take a little practice. Slow belly breathing, tensing and releasing one muscle group at a time (progressive muscle relaxation), and guided imagery all count. The AASM guideline suggests clinicians can use relaxation training on its own for chronic insomnia, mostly taught in person or in groups, and it rates the evidence as low quality. In six small trials, people fell asleep about seven minutes sooner by their own diaries, less than the guideline's bar for a clearly meaningful change. Keep whichever one actually calms you down.

For music, the evidence is a bit stronger. A 2022 Cochrane review of 13 trials with 1,007 adults who had trouble sleeping found, with moderate certainty, that listening to music for 25 to 60 minutes a day improved how well people felt they slept. In the three trials that recorded sleep with equipment, music didn't clearly change how long people took to fall asleep or how long they slept.

A warm bath or shower belongs earlier in the evening. A 2019 review of 17 studies found that one taken one to two hours before bed helped people fall asleep sooner, even when it lasted only 10 minutes, though the authors say the research is still thin. They think it works by sending blood to the hands and feet, which helps the body shed heat as it cools down for sleep. Check with your doctor before taking hot baths if you're pregnant, have a heart condition or low blood pressure, or get dizzy in hot water.

The rest can be ordinary. A novel you've read before, a crossword, laying out tomorrow's clothes, brushing your teeth, herbal tea.

What to leave out

Leave out anything that drags you back into the day. Work email, the news, bills, a tense conversation, a show that ends on a cliffhanger. Switch off the overhead lights and use a lamp. Caffeine should have worn off long before now, and the caffeine guide has the timing.

Phones are the hardest part, because work, news and every group chat live on the same screen. Ideally, put yours on the charger in another room when the wind-down starts. Using it for music or a breathing track? Start it, then turn it face down.

When work runs late

Work that runs until bedtime needs a hard stop. Pick a time at least 20 minutes before bed and set an alarm for it. When it goes off, jot down where you left off and the first thing for tomorrow, then close the laptop and put it out of sight, so tomorrow's work is on paper instead of in your head.

Some nights a deadline will win anyway. Do whatever part of the wind-down you can, and still get up at your normal time the next day. If you're drowsy, don't drive.

When will you notice a difference?

We'd give a new routine two weeks before deciding whether it helps. Early on, those 20 minutes may feel like time you've taken from something else. A wind-down can't make you sleep on any particular night, and some nights you'll still lie awake for a while.

How Goodmorrow coaches it

People who say on day one that they're still working at bedtime often get the wind-down habit first. It's called "20-minute wind-down before bed." To time its nudge we need a rough bedtime, so if your ring or watch hasn't given us one, we ask once. A watch's bedtime is when you tend to fall asleep, so the nudge can come late if you lie awake a while first. Each evening of the first week, about 25 minutes before bed, you'll get something like "Twenty minutes to bed. Time for your wind-down." You'll also get a short lesson early on, "A wind-down works best somewhere other than bed."

Each morning we ask how the evening went, and you tick the day off. Two weeks in, we check whether your evenings have changed anything. Wearing a ring? Then we also look at its rough estimate of the minutes it took you to fall asleep. A watch can't time that without knowing when you got into bed, so if you wear one, we go by your notes and how the nights felt.

Goodmorrow coaches habits and doesn't treat insomnia. See a doctor if sleep has been hard three or more nights a week for three months, if worry fills most of your days too, if you doze off during the day without meaning to, or if someone has heard you snore loudly or stop breathing in your sleep. With bipolar disorder or epilepsy, talk to your doctor before changes that could shorten your sleep. If you're having thoughts of suicide or harming yourself, call or text 988 in the US, or your local emergency number.