Step 1: Reduce light exposure before bed. Follow these steps (seriously, all of them) and you’ll be getting to bed earlier before you know it. What if there were a precise scientific way to get yourself to go to bed on time, that was also practical enough to implement? Good news! There is. So, what can we do to get past these obstacles, and get ourselves to actually go to bed on time?ĥ Steps To Get Yourself To Go To Bed Earlier Tonight We use each of these reasons as a license to delay. Without a good measure of how long we’re spending on these activities, it’s easy to get caught up in them and let the time slip away. You might say, “I’ll just watch this one episode,” or, “I’ll just check my email for a minute,” but you know that if you have more than a few emails waiting for you, it'll likely end up being longer than a minute. Now that we have DVRs and Netflix, and we can watch TV whenever we want, we no longer have that signal when an episode ends that it’s exactly 9:30pm. In the same way that we can spend money we don't have, we can also spend time we don't have (because we feel we deserve that time) by not going to bed.” You're lacking proper signals to keep you aware of the time. “It's like when we go to the mall and we feel we deserve a new pair of shoes, but we don't have the money for it. Joel Anderson draws a great analogy in his podcast on bedtime procrastination: If you feel that you deserve this time at the end of the day to do other things, maybe you do! But it may be leading you to prioritize poorly simply because this feeling of deserving more time is telling you not to go to bed until you’ve done something else. It seems that most people have some sense of entitlement to having a certain amount of time to do things (get more work done, watch TV, unwind) before bed. You feel entitled to having extra time at the end of your day. You might choose to cope with your expectations not having been met by saying, "I'll just tackle a few more items on my to-do list right now," instead of reprioritizing them for the following day. Some days, at the end of the evening, you recognize that your hopes for what you would have accomplished that day were not realized. Here are a few hurdles keeping you from getting to bed on time: You didn’t get everything done yet. What is it we’re avoiding by not going to bed? But when you think about bedtime procrastination, the context is very different. When we think about procrastination, we typically generalize to this notion of something we don’t want to do. But a lot of the time, it’s actually a behavioral issue that’s responsible for us getting less sleep. Much of the research around sleep-deficit related health problems is focused around insomnia, sleep apnea, and other medical conditions that might be solved with a pill. What’s Stopping You From Getting To Bed On Time
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