Wind-down routine

Give yourself 30–60 minutes of dim, quiet, low-effort time before bed. A few parts are tested; most of it is sensible rather than proven.

• Evidence: Weak
• Low effort
• Free
• Works: 1–2 weeks

Why it matters

Your body can’t go from a work email or an argument straight to sleep. Most people who lie awake aren’t short of sleep pressure; their mind is still busy. A wind-down period, which CBT-I programs sometimes call a buffer zone, is a fixed stretch of time where nothing demanding happens.

Two parts have direct evidence:

• Worry. Bedtime worry, including worry about unfinished tasks, makes it harder to fall asleep. Getting it out of your head and onto paper helps a little in small trials [3][4].
• Bright screens. In a lab study of 12 young adults, reading on a light-emitting tablet for about 4 hours each evening, for 5 evenings, meant taking nearly 10 minutes longer to fall asleep and getting about 12 minutes less REM sleep than reading a printed book [5]. See screens and blue light.

The rest (dim lights, a warm shower, reading, stretching) comes from sleep hygiene and relaxation advice. Its individual parts are linked to better sleep, but whether the whole package helps people in general is “largely untested” [2].

How to do it

1. Set a start time. Pick a time 30–60 minutes before your target bedtime and set a phone alarm for it. When it goes off, the day is over.
2. Write tomorrow’s to-do list (5 minutes). Be specific. In a trial of 57 healthy young adults, those who wrote a to-do list for 5 minutes before bed fell asleep about 9 minutes faster than those who wrote about tasks they had already done. The more specific the list, the faster they fell asleep [3].
3. For bigger worries, do “constructive worry” earlier in the evening. Write each worry down, then the next step you could take for it. In 33 students with insomnia, 5 nights of this lowered pre-sleep mental arousal compared with just writing the worries down [4]. Do it well before bed, then put the notebook away.
4. Dim the lights. Use lamps instead of ceiling lights. Lower screen brightness, or swap the screen for a printed book [5].
5. Do something calm that you like. Reading, light stretching, a warm shower or bath, music, a podcast with the screen off. Nothing with a deadline or a score.
6. Keep it roughly the same each night. Doing the same few things in the same order makes the routine easy to repeat.

If you have long-term insomnia, a routine like this isn’t enough. The AASM recommends CBT-I with a trained clinician, and advises against using sleep hygiene alone as the treatment [1]. See when to see a doctor.

Common mistakes

• Making the routine a chore. A 12-step checklist you feel bad about missing adds stress. Two or three steps are enough.
• “Winding down” with work or the news. Answering one more message restarts the thinking you’re trying to stop.
• Journaling about your day instead of planning tomorrow. In the to-do list trial, writing about completed tasks was the slower option [3].
• Lying in bed to wind down. Do it on the sofa or in a chair, then go to bed when you’re sleepy.
• Expecting it to fix a sleep disorder. Sleep hygiene on its own isn’t recommended as a treatment for chronic insomnia [1].

Effect on your sleep score

• Time to fall asleep: the one metric with direct data. A 5-minute to-do list cut it by about 9 minutes in one lab study [3], and reading a printed book instead of a tablet cut it by nearly 10 [5]. Both were single small studies in healthy young adults.
• REM: about 12 minutes more after evenings with a printed book than with a tablet, in the same small study [5].
• Timing: a fixed start time makes a regular bedtime easier to keep. We found no study measuring this directly.
• HRV, resting heart rate, deep sleep: we found no study measuring the effect of a wind-down routine on these in healthy adults with wearables.

How confident: low. Expect small changes at most.

Evidence

Rated Weak. The to-do list study was a randomized trial, but in 57 healthy adults aged 18–30, on a single night in a sleep lab [3]. The constructive worry trial had 33 students and measured mental arousal, not sleep [4]. The tablet study had 12 people [5]. A review of sleep hygiene found that individual habits are linked to sleep, but the advice as a package is mostly untested outside clinics [2]. In people with chronic insomnia, sleep hygiene alone doesn’t work well enough to be recommended as treatment [1].

None of this says winding down is useless. It’s cheap, it can’t hurt, and parts of it have some support. Just don’t expect big numbers.

General information for healthy adults, not medical advice. If you have a sleep problem that lasts, read when to see a doctor. Sources checked 4 October 2026. Spot a mistake? Tell us.