When You’re Finally Ready to Sleep

For the point in the evening when staying awake stops being appealing

Eventually, something changes.

The programme you were quite happily watching twenty minutes ago becomes harder to follow. You realise you have read the same paragraph twice; the podcast is still playing but you have stopped taking in what anybody is saying, and whatever you were doing suddenly seems to require more enthusiasm than you have left.

You could stay awake. You just no longer particularly want to.

That is the point I find interesting, because it feels different from reaching the evening tired. You can be tired for hours and still want television, another chapter, something to eat, one more ridiculous historical rabbit hole or simply a bit more time that belongs to you. Then, somewhere along the way, the balance changes and being awake itself begins to lose its appeal.

The rest of the evening has been leading here without needing to hurry towards it.

SOMETIMES THE SECOND WIND IS REAL

One of the more irritating features of an evening is that feeling exhausted does not guarantee you will continue becoming steadily sleepier until bedtime.

I have had plenty of nights where six o'clock felt like the end of civilisation, only to discover an unexpected amount of enthusiasm at half past eight. Apparently, I am too tired to contemplate dinner but perfectly capable of reorganising photographs, looking at houses I cannot afford or becoming interested in something that happened in 1742.

Sleep researchers have a perfectly reasonable explanation for at least some of this. Our tendency towards sleep is influenced by two broad systems working together: the pressure for sleep that builds while we are awake, and our circadian rhythm, which changes our level of alertness across the day. Those two processes do not simply rise and fall together, which means there can be a period in the evening when the circadian system is still providing a strong signal for wakefulness despite the fact that we have already been awake for hours.

Researchers sometimes call this the wake maintenance zone, it also means that the evening second wind is not necessarily evidence that you imagined being tired earlier. You probably were tired. Your body simply has more than one thing influencing whether sleep feels possible at any given moment.

Eventually that alerting effect eases, the accumulated pressure for sleep is still there, and another shift begins. That is often when bed stops sounding like something you ought to do and starts sounding genuinely appealing.

THE CLOCK IS NOT THE ONLY THING THAT KNOWS

Most of us have a rough idea of when bedtime is supposed to happen, and there is nothing wrong with that. Work, school, alarms and the general requirement to participate in society mean that completely ignoring the clock is not especially practical.

The clock does have its limitations, though.

It can tell you that it is eleven o'clock. It cannot tell you whether the book has suddenly become difficult to hold, whether you have yawned six times in ten minutes or whether closing your eyes now sounds considerably better than finding another episode.

Those small changes are easy to miss when we are used to treating bedtime as a decision made according to time rather than something we gradually become ready for.

This is not an argument for watching yourself obsessively for signs of sleepiness either. The last thing anybody needs at ten thirty is a new monitoring system involving the precise weight of their eyelids.

It is simply worth noticing that there can be a difference between thinking, I should probably go to bed, and realising, I would quite like to now.

The second one feels much less like an instruction.

SLEEP IS AN ODD THING TO TRY HARD AT

Sleep becomes remarkably complicated the moment you notice yourself attempting to do it. You get into bed feeling perfectly normal and, somewhere in the darkness, become the project manager of your own unconsciousness. Is the pillow right? Am I relaxed enough? How long have I been lying here? Was I nearly asleep a minute ago? If I fall asleep now, how many hours will I get before the alarm?

Nothing makes the night pass more pleasantly than arithmetic at 1.17 a.m.

There is a reason established behavioural approaches to insomnia pay attention to the relationship between bed, wakefulness and trying to force sleep. Stimulus control, one component used within cognitive behavioural therapy for insomnia, is based partly around rebuilding a strong association between bed and sleep rather than allowing bed to become somewhere associated with long periods of wakefulness and frustration.

That is clinical treatment for people experiencing insomnia, not a set of rules I think everybody needs to start following after one bad night. What I like about the principle is much simpler: sleep is not particularly responsive to determination.

You can create the circumstances for it, but you cannot perform the final part through effort. Anybody who has ever desperately tried to fall asleep because they need to be asleep has probably discovered this already.

YOU HAVE NOT MISSED YOUR CHANCE

Learning that sleepiness changes through the evening creates another obvious opportunity for us to make life difficult for ourselves. Was that the moment? Should I have gone ten minutes ago? Have I stayed awake too long? Have I somehow missed the sleep window and ruined everything?

The systems regulating sleep continue changing throughout the evening and night, and although sleep science gives us useful models for understanding what is happening, those models are not minute-by-minute instruction manuals for ordinary people sitting in their living rooms.

Your sleepiness is not a train that arrives at 10.43 p.m., waits for thirty seconds and then leaves you stranded on the platform until tomorrow. Some nights the transition will be obvious. Other nights it will be gradual enough that you barely notice it. You may go to bed and discover you are still more awake than you thought or stay downstairs longer than intended because you became interested in something.

That is life rather than a failure to manage sleep correctly. The evening does not need to be handled with that much precision.

THIS IS WHAT THE REST OF THE EVENING WAS FOR

When I look at this whole shelf together, this is the point it has been moving towards. Not a perfect bedtime, and certainly not an evening designed solely to prepare you for sleep.

Quite the opposite.

You finished with the day before you were finished with being awake, so there was still time left. Perhaps you read something strange, listened to somebody else's voice for a while, watched something completely undemanding, did very little or allowed the night to develop without much of a plan.

Maybe you disappeared into The Midnight Archive because you wanted to know why somebody hid a shoe inside a wall, what a night watchman saw while everybody else slept or whether you would survive an encounter with a kelpie.

That time was not a waiting room for bed.

It was still your evening.

Eventually, though, you may notice that the thing which held your attention half an hour ago no longer does. The book starts slipping downwards, the programme continues without you and even the strange historical question that absolutely had to be answered can apparently wait until tomorrow.

You have not run out of things to do. You have simply reached the point where you no longer want another thing to do.

WHEN YOU ARE READY, COME THIS WAY

This is where The Ideal Evening meets The Western Sleep Co.

The Midnight Archive was never meant to push anybody towards bed. It belongs to the hours when you are still awake and want somewhere interesting to go, whether that means a long story, ten minutes of folklore or one peculiar fact to annoy somebody with tomorrow.

Western Sleep Co. begins a little later, when you have had enough of being awake.

I started making the sleep audios because that part of the night can feel surprisingly lonely. You are finished with conversation and entertainment, the house has gone still and there is nothing else you particularly want to do, but sleep does not always arrive the instant your head touches the pillow.

I never wanted the answer to be another person telling you to relax properly.

The audios are not there to promise that you will fall asleep within a certain number of minutes, because nobody can sensibly promise that. They are there because sometimes it is nice to have a voice in the room while you wait, with rain, a fire, or another familiar sound behind it, and nothing you need to remember or achieve.

You do not need to breathe at exactly the right speed, clear your mind or become exceptionally talented at relaxation. You can listen properly, barely listen at all or drift in and out as you become sleepier.

If you fall asleep halfway through, excellent. You will never know how it ended.

If you hear the whole thing, it was still there with you for a while.

I think that is the point where the whole idea of The Ideal Evening finally joins together. There is somewhere to go when you are not ready for bed, something to keep you company when you do not want silence, things to read when your concentration is fading and, eventually, somewhere to follow when being awake has lost its appeal.

There is no need to rush from one to the other. Stay with the evening for as long as you want it.

Then, when you are finally ready to sleep, come this way.