A wind-down routine for people who work at screens

If you work at a screen all day, the hour before bed is often just more of the same: the laptop still open, one last look at messages, a show on the same screen, then lights off and a mind that is still running. A wind-down routine gives that hour a different shape, so your head and body get the message that the day is over.

A routine that works for most people goes in this order: stop work first, then dim the screen and the room, spend a few minutes writing tomorrow's list, and give the last stretch to something that isn't a screen. Do it in the same order most nights and the routine itself becomes the cue.

Why the hour before bed matters

Two things are going on in that hour, and screen workers tend to get both wrong.

The first is light. As evening light fades, the body releases more melatonin, a hormone that helps signal that it is night. Research suggests that bright light in the evening can push that later, which is one reason sleep advice so often says to keep the last hours of the day dim.

The second, and for most people the bigger one, is what is on the screen. Work email, a group chat or an endless feed keeps your mind switched on in a way that a warm screen tint can't fix, and it eats time you meant to spend getting to bed. Screens before bed goes into what the research does and doesn't show.

A routine handles both at once. It takes the light down step by step, and it puts a clear end on the stuff that keeps you awake. Sleep specialists commonly recommend a regular, relaxing routine before bed for exactly this reason: doing the same calm things in the same order becomes a signal in itself.

The routine, step by step

Here is a version that fits into about an hour. Treat the times as rough.

Stop work first

Everything else depends on this. If work is still open, the rest of the routine is just a dimmer version of working late. Write down where you got to, quit Mail and your work chat, and close the lid on the work laptop if you have one. If stopping is the hard part, how to stop working late on your Mac covers setting a stop time and making it stick.

Dim the screen

If you are still using the Mac for something relaxed, take the brightness down a long way, with the brightness keys or the Display slider in Control Center. A few settings make this automatic:

• Night Shift. In System Settings > Displays, click Night Shift and set a schedule (Sunset to Sunrise, or custom times) to shift the screen to warmer colors in the evening. The evidence that warmer colors alone improve sleep is mixed, so think of it as a comfort, not a cure. Night Shift on Mac has the details.
• Dark Mode on Auto. In System Settings > Appearance, choose Auto so the Mac switches to dark at night.
• Lower brightness than you think. In a dim room, a screen at a fraction of its daytime brightness is plenty.

Write tomorrow's list

Spend a few minutes writing down what you need to do tomorrow, ideally on paper. It gets the open loops out of your head so they stop circling when you lie down. One small sleep-lab study found that people who wrote a to-do list for the next few days before bed fell asleep faster than people who wrote about tasks they had already finished. A single study proves little, but it fits what many people find, and it takes five minutes to try.

Keep it short. A list of three things for the morning is better than a full plan for the week.

Lower the lights in the room

Swap the overhead light for a lamp, ideally a warm, low one. If you can, brush your teeth and get ready for bed in low light too, rather than under a bright bathroom bulb. The goal is a gradual slope down to dark, not a sudden switch.

Do something that isn't a screen

The last part of the hour is for something calm and offline. A few ideas:

• Read a paper book or a magazine.
• Take a warm shower or bath.
• Do some gentle stretching, nothing that gets your heart going.
• Listen to music, a podcast or an audiobook with the phone face down, across the room.
• Tidy the kitchen, lay out tomorrow's clothes, water the plants.
• Talk to whoever you live with.

Charge your phone outside the bedroom, or at least out of reach of the bed. It removes the last-minute scroll, and it means the alarm makes you get up to turn it off.

Making it stick

A routine you don't keep doesn't help. A few ways to make this one last:

• Start with one step. If the whole hour feels like too much, begin with stopping work on time and dimming the screen. Add the rest once that is normal.
• Prepare in advance. Book on the pillow, lamp already on a timer, phone charger in the hallway. The fewer decisions, the better.
• Keep a short version. On late nights, do a fifteen-minute version: stop, dim, list, bed. The order matters more than the length.
• Keep bedtime roughly the same. A routine works best when it starts at about the same time each night, weekends included where you can.
• If you can't sleep, get up. A common piece of advice from sleep specialists is that if you have been lying awake for a while, get up and do something calm in dim light, then go back when you feel sleepy.

If you regularly struggle to fall asleep or stay asleep, or you are tired during the day however long you sleep, talk to a doctor. A routine helps with ordinary restlessness; a real sleep problem deserves proper care.

How Notchpals' Wind down moment helps

The hardest part of any wind-down routine is starting it. At ten at night, absorbed in something, you rarely notice that the hour has begun. This is what the Sleep characters in Notchpals are for.

Pick Sleep as one of your areas and one of the four joins your crew. It works from the bedtime you give Blip during setup (it starts at 11 PM, and you can move it in Settings). In the hour before that time, your Sleep character comes by once, while you are at the Mac, to say the routine can begin. Boo, a shy little ghost, puts it like this:

BooUm... bedtime is coming soon. Maybe start wrapping up? Only if it's okay.

Done earns a quiet thank-you, and makes a good cue to quit work apps and start on the list above. Later leaves you about 20 minutes to finish what you are doing before Boo asks once more. If you have already stopped and stepped away from the Mac, it doesn't come at all. If you are still there after your bedtime, there is one more visit, and a separate one if you are at the Mac in the small hours, between 1 and 4:30 AM.

Blip helps with the dimming step. Every crew starts with Blip for Eyes, and on an evening you are at the Mac it makes one Dim the screen visit, some time from 9 PM to midnight, as a reminder to take the brightness down.

One thing to know: Notchpals doesn't read macOS Focus modes, so if you also use a Sleep Focus, its schedule and your Notchpals bedtime are set separately. Set them to match.

The short version

1. About an hour before bed, stop work and quit work apps.
2. Dim the screen and the room.
3. Write a short list for tomorrow, on paper if you can.
4. Spend the last stretch away from screens.
5. Keep it roughly the same time each night.