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With the right evening routine, you can set the day high and lay a good foundation for the next day. Here are 11 things you should do before bed.
1. Journal to clear your mind
Falling asleep and having a restful night is much easier when your mind is not processing thoughts at 200 km/h.
Journaling is a great way to systematically work through the things you experienced during the day and the contemplations you didn’t have time to sort out yet.
You don’t even have to work through everything on your mind.
Often it’s already helpful to tackle your biggest thought for a couple of minutes before calling it a day.
However, if you want to do a more in-depth journaling session, you can use Pinterest to find helpful prompts or develop your own routine over time.
Also, keep in mind that you don’t have to journal to the same extent every day.
Some days you might only be in the mood for a hand full of sentences, and other days you might sit a full hour with your journal flipping page after page.
The important part is consistency.
2. Plan the next day
Again, this doesn’t have to be done in a great way.
You can go through all the effort to block out specific times for specific tasks in your Google calendar, or you write a (short!) to-do list down somewhere you will see it.
Currently, I am reducing my nightly planning to simply listing tomorrow’s tasks in my mind.
It barely takes a few minutes, but it helps me feel prepared for the following day and go to bed feeling calm and settled.
3. Do a quick cleanup of your room
Clutter is disrupting the aesthetic of your room; more importantly, it also translates into a cluttered mindpsace.
Your focus and calmness are suffering if you are in the midst of chaos.
You don’t even need to be able to see the clutter, simply knowing you have left all this stuff lying around is often enough to be unsettling.
If you want to have a productive day straight from the get-go, waking up to a mess is not ideal.
So take a couple of minutes in the evening to do a quick sweep through your room/apartment.
If everything has its designated place, it’s easy to restore it to that state.
4. Wear blue light blocking glasses
If you are anything like most people nowadays, you spend much of your waking time in front of screens.
And most likely, you spend your evening watching Netflix or scrolling through social media.
Unfortunately, our technology’s screens emit blue light, which negatively impacts our production of the sleep hormone melatonin.
In other words: You will be able to fall asleep quicker and therefore get more deep sleep every night if you avoid blue light exposure an hour or two before bed.
Should you not be willing to ditch your screen time in the evening, you can wear blue-light-blocking glasses instead.
Nowadays, you can buy them on many websites that sell regular glasses.
5. Listen to binaural beats
Binaural beats can change your brain waves by sending sounds of different frequencies to your ears through headphones.
Your brain tries to even these different frequencies by adapting its wavelengths.
For example: Left ear (200hz tone) + right ear (205hz tone) = binaural beat (5hz – theta waves)
Theta and delta waves are usually found while you are asleep, the latter in a deep sleep.
Bringing your brain waves closer to their sleep state will help you fall asleep faster.
6. Air out your bedroom
You will be stuck in the same room for 7-9 hours while sleeping. You wouldn’t like to be stuck in a room with stale air if you were awake for such a long time. So why should you while asleep?
Furthermore, different studies have found that people who sleep in a room with low carbon dioxide levels wake up less at night, report being more well-rested in the morning, and have more concentration the next day.
Try it out for yourself!
And if the weather is neither too hot nor too cold, you can benefit even more from leaving the window partially open overnight. (As long as your living circumstances allow you to do so safely.)
7. Do your skincare routine and brush your teeth
Skincare is important because most of us want to avoid wrinkles and eyebags for as long as possible.
But also because we live in a world full of toxins:
- Especially in cities, the air quality is bad,
- sometimes we have to wear medical masks for hours,
- many of us also use makeup with pore-clogging ingredients,
- and we eat tons of food with inflammatory ingredients.
These things can all negatively impact your skin, so you should take care of it daily.
8. Plan in a small study session
After a whole exhausting day of studying or working, learning even more before bed is probably the last thing you want to do.
However, multiple studies have proven that studying right before bed is more effective than studying in the morning.
After all, sleep is a crucial part of cementing information into long-term memory.
So it would make sense for it to work even better if the information is still very strong in your short-term memory when you go to sleep.
When you try this out for yourself, do not sacrifice sleep for extra studying. That’s only going to backlash since cutting down on the amount of sleep you get will negatively impact your memorization skills.
Also, many high-achieving athletes sleep more than the average person because it aids their performance.
9. Block out all light sources, no matter how small
You know those little red standby lights many devices have? Believe it or not, those tiny lights can impact the quality of your sleep.
So imagine what street lights or a flickering television will do.
Since sleep is so important to our health and our performance in every area of life, we should take the necessary measures to optimize it as much as we can.
Blocking out any light source in the room before you go to sleep is a small step that can significantly impact your life.
Do you have any other habits you like to do before bed?
Which of the habits above do you plan to incorporate into your evening routine?
As always, we’d love to hear from you!
Also, we are always grateful for any content suggestions you might have for us.
Until next time, Felicity Seeker!
