The phone after ten

This section is about a specific hour, not about sleep hygiene in general. There is a great deal of writing about screens and sleep and most of it is correct and almost none of it is useful at 11:47pm, because it tells you what to have done rather than what to do now.

There are two different bad nights and they are constantly confused with each other. One is the night that never ended. The other is the night you woke up in the middle of. They wear the same clothes and they answer to completely different fixes, which is where most people go wrong before they start.

Where to start

Work out which of the two nights you actually have, find yourself in the four types, then take the hour before it rather than the hour after.

1. You are not still awake. You are awake again. The difference between the two, and why only one of them can be fixed with a rule.
2. The Early Reacher, the Desk Drifter, the Sofa Sinker, the Midnight Scroller Four honest self-diagnoses and the one rule that fits each. Find yourself in about ninety seconds.
3. Revenge bedtime procrastination, minus the lecture: what to do at 10:30 Not why it happens. What to physically do in the twenty minutes before it happens.
4. How to make your phone boring after ten (six settings, none of them an app) Six things built into iOS, ranked by how much they actually change the hour.

The rest of it