Good news. You don’t just get my number one bed time hack, you get my additional top seven favorites one, too.
Who doesn’t love a two for one?
I am an 8 hour a night girl. This quality has never been an issue, well, until, can you guess?
Yup. Until I had kids. Life is an evolution. We humans are good adaptors so let’s find a way to create new habits in a life with less control.
7 Ways Get to Bed Early
Before I launch into my favorite get to bed on time tip, here are a few more well known tips that are basically stating the obvious but who doesn’t like a helpful reminder, right?
- Make a commitment to go to bed a specific time
- Get ready for bed at least an hour before your specific bedtime
- Don’t drink alcohol at night (duh.)
- Set a specific time to shut down the devices
- Read for pleasure before bed
- Journal your day and your intentions for the next day
- Drink water
I love this quote from Ernest Hemingway: “I love sleep. My life has the tendency to fall apart when I’m awake, you know?”
Now, at the risk of sounding too dramatic, look at it from a different angle. If you don’t see enough, your waking hours are truly more challenging for many reasons.
Now, you must be ready for my hack by now?
As I mentioned, being a parent with less control over my days, I have found that my self control also diminishes faster and earlier in the evening.
So, I’ve had to trading myself to create new habits around sleep.
My hack is the result of the training. This particular trick we’ve been using for our children for seven years so it occurred to me that it might just work for me as a queue to my body that it is indeed time to rest.
Are you ready?
60 minutes before my chosen bedtime, I set the alarm on our white noise app. The noise I play is the Tibetan Singing Bowl. It plays for 5 minutes. This “alarm” is my signal to go get myself ready for bed, not to go to bed, but to get ready for bed. Then 15 minutes before bedtime, the alarm goes off again with my lovely Tibetan Singing Bowl. Then I know it is truly time to get my body into my bed. The night has come to an end.
Do you feel totally enlightened now? :-) Happy sleeping, friends.
Marnie