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Rule 1: Give Yourself a Bedtime
Going to bed earlier is how grown-ups sleep in.
Somewhere, on the blurry edge of memory, I picture a scene. I am in my little brother's childhood room. He and I are creating elaborate plot lines for our Playmobil figures. By day, they run a school, a hotel, a tap dancing ensemble. Then fictional evening descends. We put the children to bed. The adults? We announce, with knowing smiles, that they are going to stay up all night.
I laugh at this now, this idea that staying up all night would be a privilege of adulthood. Come actual adulthood, I feel like I spend much of my energy some days convincing the younger people in my house to go to bed so I can go to bed. There is always something else that has to happen. The toddler wants to be rocked again. Someone else's homework must go in the backpack. Someone has forgotten to tell me something very important, some story that takes meandering minutes to come to its conclusion.
I love sleep. I'd like to think sleep loves me back. But sleep and I have had to work hard to maintain our relationship during these years with babies and-my own particular middle-aged dilemma-early-rising little kids and night-owl teenagers. I have become an acute observer of sleep's quirks. Some fantastical dream suddenly introduces the plot twist of a crying child-and then, in a few minutes, the dream itself has disappeared and I am in my room with an actual sleepless kid. During the infant phases when I was waking and falling back asleep multiple times per day, I learned to recognize when, exactly, sleep was starting to visit. My mind would drift somewhere related to my life and then, as a familiar weight settled, I would see some scene that could not really be happening. I dreamed lucidly at times, particularly during the naps my poorly sleeping babies necessitated. I was aware, but thinking things I normally would not.
I know the bleary resignation of facing down a day without enough sleep. I know the particular despair of doing it multiple nights in a row. And yet I have seen a curious paradox with this-one that affects a great many people during the busy years of raising a family and building a career, and that has important ramifications for how we can best manage our schedules.
I track my time on weekly spreadsheets. All of my time. Since April of 2015, I have recorded how I have spent every half hour of my life. There's no reason for anyone who doesn't study time professionally to do more than a few weeks of this, but the upside of my long-running data gathering is that I know exactly how much I sleep and when I sleep. My data set contains thousands of days. These recorded years include the babyhoods of my two youngest children, including all those middle-of-the-night wake-ups and miserably early weekend mornings.
There have been rough stretches. Yet, one way or another, I hit my sleep set point: 7.3-7.4 hours/day averaged over any given eight weeks or so. That's squarely in the range (seven to nine hours a day) that sleep literature suggests most adults need.
The most rigorous time-diary studies have found that most people do get enough sleep from a quantitative perspective. The American Time Use Survey, which has thousands of people talk through how they spent the previous 4 a.m. to 4 a.m. day, usually covering all 365 days of the year, found that in 2020, the average person slept 9.01 hours in a twenty-four-hour period (up from 8.84 hours in 2019). In 2019, employed parents with kids under age six averaged 8.32 hours (8.26 for men; 8.39 for women). No one ever believes me when I mention this statistic, but my own time-diary studies of people with jobs and kids, which have had people record how they spent the previous day, hour by hour, have found averages that are fairly close to eight hours too. For instance, when I had women who held intense professional jobs, and who had children at home, track their time for a week for my book I Know How She Does It, I found that they averaged 7.7 hours of sleep per day.
This raises the obvious question: Why, exactly, do we feel so tired?
Because there is no doubt that many of us do. It is an important question, because sleep is foundational for all other good habits. Fatigue makes it harder to think strategically about the future, or to make good choices with time. Being adequately rested boosts performance on cognitively difficult tasks. We are less distracted. It is simply easier to be productive when you've gotten enough sleep.
I've studied thousands of time logs over the years in an attempt to reconcile how people can, when their time is tracked, seem to be sleeping enough, and yet still claim, in many polls, to sleep low amounts on a "typical" night, or to talk of sleep, as sociologist Arlie Hochschild once wrote, "the way a hungry person talks about food."
I have come away convinced that the culprit is disorderly sleep. A reasonable average hides that people are often undershooting and then overshooting in a way that leads to fatigue on some days and an inability to maintain good routines on the others. This reality is obvious enough for people with babies, or those who do shift work, but is surprisingly widespread. For instance, in one of my time-diary studies, I found that 22 percent of people slept at least 90 minutes more, or less, on Tuesday than they did on Wednesday. That is a big gap.
Asked about a typical night, someone might report sleeping from midnight to 6 a.m. A time log shows that this did, indeed, happen twice in the past week. But two other nights, this person crashed on the couch in front of the TV at 10 p.m., or fell asleep for an hour while putting a child to bed, or hit snooze three times on Thursday, with weekends looking completely different. The mental picture is six hours. The average might be 7.5, but each day is undershooting or overshooting in a way that wreaks havoc on someone's ability to function. If people are always undershooting or overshooting, that would explain why the National Sleep Foundation's annual Sleep in America poll found that, in 2020, people reported feeling sleepy, on average, three days per week. Overshot days don't feel particularly great either, when people sleep through their alarms, or however else their bodies force them to substitute sleep for other activities. Far better to hit the ideal each day.
We can't always control when we sleep. But given how important sleep is for flourishing, when it is possible to steer clear of that drop-tower carnival ride of skimping and then catching up, life can feel more calm. Since most adults need to wake at set times for work or family responsibilities, the only variable that can move is the time we go to sleep the night before.
In other words, despite what I fantasized about with my Playmobil characters, even adults need a bedtime. They need to go to bed on time, at a set time. And so that is Tranquility by Tuesday Rule 1: Give yourself a bedtime.
If you would like to experience the additional energy and optimism that comes from being well rested, choose a time that you would like to go to sleep more nights than not. Then, commit to getting in bed by that time unless you have a compelling reason not to.
How to put yourself to bed
Figuring out and implementing a bedtime is a simple, four-step process.
1. Decide when you plan to wake up most weekdays
Be honest. While it might be fun to fantasize about waking up at 4 a.m. to run ten miles and meditate for thirty minutes before making yourself a kale smoothie, if you have not done any of those things in the past week, you are not going to start now. What wake-up time makes the most sense for your life as it actually is? If you tend to be woken by your young children, track your time for a few weeks to establish a bell curve of when they are up for good. You can set a waking time at the point where most of the wake-ups occur after that.
2. Decide how much sleep you need
Let's be honest here too. Most working-age adults need between seven and nine hours per day, with the majority of those landing between seven and eight. Few people need less than six and a half hours per day, aside from a handful of genetic short sleepers who sleep short hours on weekends and vacations too. If you aren't sure, aim for seven and a half hours and see how it goes. If you're still crashing on weekends, you need more. If you wake up consistently before your alarm clock, you might need less.
3. Calculate what time you need to be in bed in order to get this amount of sleep
This is a math problem. If you need to wake up at 6 a.m. on most weekday mornings, and you need seven and a half hours of sleep, then count back seven and a half hours. This gives you a 10:30 p.m. bedtime. If you need to wake up at 8 a.m., then you can go to bed at 12:30 a.m. Giving yourself a bedtime doesn't mean you have to go to bed at the same time you did when you were ten years old. If you are a night owl who doesn't have to be up before 10 a.m., feel free to choose a bedtime that reflects that.
The important thing is to be consistent. If your life allows leeway on weekends, then you can shift by an hour or so, but any more will make Monday morning more painful than necessary. And if you've got young children who don't understand the concept of weekends, then you're best off sticking with the same bedtime nightly, and building your evenings with this bedtime in mind.
4. Set an alarm for fifteen to thirty minutes before the official bedtime so you can ease into bed
This last step is key. If you don't start winding down until your actual bedtime, you will go to bed later than you intend to. So start the process at least fifteen minutes before. If you want to read for more than a few minutes, or have some couple time, set your bedtime alarm earlier. Turn off the lights when the moment arrives. Try this for a week and see how it goes. Since most adults can't really "sleep in," at least during the week, then going to bed on time is the best way to recreate this sense of on-vacation-with-no-kids luxury.
Participant perspectives: Identifying obstacles
After introducing the "Give yourself a bedtime" rule, I asked the Tranquility by Tuesday project participants to go through the four-step process of figuring out their own bedtimes.
They set desired wake-up times between an eye-opening 3:30 a.m. and 8:30 a.m. They reported needing between six to nine hours of sleep, with a mean of 7.71 hours. They needed, on average, thirty minutes to wind down. For someone with a desired wake-up time of 6 a.m., needing 7.75 hours of sleep, this suggests a 10:15 p.m. bedtime, with the bedtime alarm going off around 9:45 p.m. to allow for thirty minutes of winding down. For someone with a desired wake-up time of 7 a.m., needing seven hours of sleep and an hour before that to read and relax, this
suggests a midnight bedtime, with the bedtime alarm going off around 11 p.m.
People were relatively open-minded about trying this rule, even if they had struggled with consistent sleep in the past. Just a handful of respondents flagged this rule as not being right for them. That said, those who were game to try it could identify numerous challenges to implementing this seemingly simple practice.
Some, like me, had babies or toddlers. A little voice yelling "Dada!" or "Mama!" from a crib at 10:30 p.m. will definitely derail a 10:30 p.m. bedtime.
A number of people mentioned work as a challenge. Sometimes this was a side gig, such as translating papers after the kids went to bed, or answering questions from Etsy customers long into the night. More often, though, it was a quick email check at 10 p.m. that turned into an hour-long back-and-forth conversation.
Some people with older children mentioned the difficulty of getting them into bed on time, which then delayed parental bedtimes.
Some people scurried around getting the household ready for the next day-packing lunches and bags and setting out outfits or cleaning the kitchen. This practice is common, but it's also a Catch-22, because staying up too late to make the next morning go smoothly almost guarantees that the next morning will be dreadful.
A number of people mentioned the difficulty of mustering the energy to begin the bedtime process; one person wrote of being "too tired to get ready (stupid as that sounds)." But silly as it seems, the struggle is real; some research has suggested that we become less disciplined as the day goes on. Turning off the TV and going upstairs to brush teeth takes energy at a time when most people are depleted. It is easier to push the decision later, and then crash on the couch.
Some people's partners observed different hours, which meant that a personally realistic bedtime would shift a family's rhythms. This is never easy to do.
The most poignant problem, though, had nothing to do with work, or housework, or family members; rather, it had to do with their absence. People noted that going to bed means deciding that the day is over. You are making that decision when the house is quiet, the chores are done, and you can finally spend your time as you wish. As one respondent put it, "That's the only truly free time I have." Who wants to cut that short?
This realization came up again and again. One respondent put off sleep because she was "feeling like I didn't have enough leisure time yet." Another reported that "Dad gets distracted with video games or other projects." Couple time and screen time often merged together. "My partner and I usually watch one episode of a TV show on the couch while eating dinner at the end of the day . . . and then just kind of stay on the couch," one person wrote. It wasn't exactly a gourmet meal by candlelight, but for an average Tuesday, it felt pleasant enough.
