Sleep experts reveal the pre-bedtime rituals they follow (and a few things they would never do)
A wind-down routine spent worrying about admin or doomscrolling is hardly conducive to a good night's sleep, so setting yourself some better guidelines pre-bedtime could help to boost that all important slumber.
We spoke to sleep experts about how they prepare themselves for bed each evening – here three sleep gurus talk through their nightly routines, revealing some practical (and actually enjoyable ways) to get yourself ready for a good night's sleep.
Dr Allie Hare, consultant in sleep medicine and co-founder of Grace Sleep
I avoid 'sleepmaxxing' like the plague
'I don't do anything complex immediately before bed. I do see a lot of people who have a long list of all the things they feel they 'need' to do before bed in order to 'optimise' their sleep. The 'sleepmaxxing' trend [popular on social media, where people adopt elaborate routines to maximise sleep] horrifies me! A simple winding down routine to enable me to put the day to bed before I go to bed is all I focus on. For me, this includes switching off from work mode by closing down emails and stopping any work projects at least 30 and ideally 60 minutes before bed, and doing something relaxing. I like to read a couple of chapters of a book: I alternate fiction and non-fiction, or listen to a podcast.'
I use Be Present to control my screentime
'Although the impact of blue light on sleep is perhaps less clear-cut than we initially thought, I still try to avoid using my phone just before sleep. This is because it is so difficult to stop scrolling – even sleep experts struggle with the magic of the algorithm sucking them in! I recently downloaded an app called Be Present which turns off my social media after a predetermined number of hours usage in the day and turns off my phone almost entirely (save alarms and urgent calls) between 10pm and 7.30am. This also means my mornings are much more productive.'
I target my daytime towards a good nighttime
'Instead of a complicated evening routine, I manage my day to day life to ensure good sleep quality. I focus on morning bright light exposure (my walk for my commute) and caffeine (a great alerting agent and also good for cardiovascular and microbiome health, but I don't drink it after lunchtime), regular exercise (I focus on weight training over cardio; this has been shown to improve sleep quality and I really notice I sleep better after I have exercised), and a healthy balanced diet focused on feeding my microbiome (also increasingly recognised as key to good sleep and, of course, overall health). I also have a regular bed and wake time, as it is important for training your circadian rhythm. I avoid alcohol in the week.
'Complicated bedtime routines can lead to people thinking they need to do all of these things in order to be able to sleep well. This can increase anxiety and pressure around sleep: if I can't follow my routine exactly, I won't sleep. This can become a self-fulfilling prophecy. Sleep does not tend to respond well to efforts to 'control' it. Much better to focus on your daytime health habits and simple steps to relax before bedtime.'
James Wilson, aka The Sleep Geek
I watch MAFS and other lighthearted TV
'Before my youngest child goes to bed, we will watch something light on TV. At the moment Stacey Solomon is a big favourite and is the right mix of light heartedness and repetitiveness. Later, with my older kids and wife, we'll watch more television. At the moment it is Married At First Sight Australia, as it is trashy, allows my brain to switch off and makes me feel better about myself (because no matter how bad my day might have been, at least I am not on national TV admitting I can't pull in the outside world.)'
I have a 'falling asleep' window, rather than a strict bedtime
'My sleep type is slightly more early type, so I target to fall asleep between 9.30pm and 11pm. However, I only go to bed when I actually feel sleepy, and that is really important to sleeping well. If I have been working late, watching a football game or had a late meal I will go to bed later.'
I don't put off chores until last thing before bed
'By 9pm I will make sure I am ready for bed: PJs on, check all the doors, put stuff in the dishwasher, kids' lunches done and teeth brushed. This means if I feel sleepy before my targeted sleep time, say 9.30pm rather than 10.30pm, then I can go straight to bed. There's no having to sort the dishwasher out, lock the doors or brush my teeth, which will have the effect of waking me up. This is the one thing most people get wrong about their ritual.'
Dr Lindsay Browning is a sleep expert at TroubleSleeping.co.uk
I time my exercise carefully
'I try to exercise regularly. I love my Peloton. If I haven't managed to do a workout in the morning before I start work, then I might do one in the early evening before dinner. However, I try to make sure that I don't do any vigorous exercise within 90 minutes of bedtime, to avoid the raise in body temperature from the workout negatively affecting my sleep.'
I don't lean into my owlish tendencies
'I make sure that I stop working at least an hour before bed – ideally two hours before. I am naturally an evening person (an owl chronotype) so this takes some consistent planning and willpower. Working too close to bedtime, can mean you are still too stressed to sleep easily.'
I leave the right length window between eating and bedtime
'I will eat my main meal at around 7pm, which means I will have finished eating my dinner around two to three hours before my planned bedtime. Eating a large meal too close to bedtime can disrupt sleep by causing indigestion. I rarely drink alcohol, but if I did have a glass of wine with dinner, I probably wouldn't sleep as well, as alcohol disrupts REM sleep.'
I purposefully make my devices less appealing
'At 7pm, my phone and iPad auto-enable night mode, which reduces the brightness of my screens and helps shift the light from the blue frequency spectrum to the soft warmer tones, helping minimise any disruption to my melatonin production at bedtime.'
I have a consistent routine (including tea!)
'Thirty minutes before my planned bedtime, I will make a hot cup of Clipper Sleep Time tea, which I take upstairs, get into my pyjamas, wash my face and teeth and get into bed half an hour before my planned bedtime to read a book or do a Peloton meditation in bed. This consistent pre-bedtime routine helps my brain and body know that sleep is coming. When it's time for sleep (around 10/10:30pm) I will spray my pillow with a lavender pillow spray, make sure that my alarm is set for the morning, and put my phone on do not disturb next to the bed.'
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Telegraph
31 minutes ago
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What sharing a bottle of wine with your spouse every night really means for your health
Since they first met in 2009, Sarah Wellband and her partner James have settled into a nightly routine which involves, at the minimum, sharing the best part of a bottle of wine together. 'We have a gin and tonic, followed by two or three glasses of wine with dinner and watching TV,' says Wellband, a 62-year-old remedial hypnotherapist. Such a routine, seven nights a week, would probably amount to somewhere between 46 and 62 units of alcohol per week, depending on whether that third glass of wine was consumed – far more than the NHS recommended guidelines of 14 units. However, Wellband says that the drinking habits of her and her 70-year-old partner are far from an issue. Instead, she insists that they form an important part of their general wellbeing. '7pm is news and a drink time,' she says. 'It signals the end of the day and time to wind down and catch up with each other. The routine is more important than the alcohol, but it helps. We are well aware of our limits and will leave a glass rather than finish it for the sake of it, but we just find it a nice way to end the day.' Recently however, the potentially long-term harm from excessive daily drinking has been brought once more to the spotlight. Earlier this year, a study found that consuming more than eight alcoholic drinks a week increases your risk of incurring the brain degeneration commonly linked with dementia, while former TV executive Martin Frizell recently gave an interview about his wife Fiona Phillips's battle with early-onset Alzheimer's, and openly mused as to whether their habit of drinking a bottle of wine a night in their younger years had been a contributing factor. Yet the link between alcohol and chronic diseases is a little more nuanced than often portrayed. While excessive drinking has been identified as a direct cause of at least seven types of cancer and a known risk factor for dementia, the exact risk varies considerably from person to person. As Debbie Shawcross, professor of hepatology and chronic liver failure at King's College London, explains, women have far lower levels of the enzyme that breaks down alcohol compared with men, which makes them more susceptible, and studies have even shown that women are more likely to display signs of 'leaky gut' – a term which characterises greater intestinal permeability, meaning that toxins are more likely to leak out into the bloodstream – following a binge than men. An alcohol 'binge' is characterised as more than six units (a standard-sized glass of wine contains 2.1 units) in a single session for women and eight units for men. Some people do also carry gene variants that improve alcohol metabolism, allowing them to knock back the booze with no apparent ill effects – and Wellband says that she and her partner never get drunk on their nightly routine – while your diet can also be a contributing factor. 'Environmental, social and lifestyle factors also play a role,' says Shawcross. 'For example, being overweight or having an unhealthy diet rich in ultra-processed foods can increase the risk of alcohol harm on the body.' On average though, sharing a bottle of wine every night with your spouse isn't the greatest thing for your long-term health. Here's the very latest on how this amount of daily booze can affect your body, and what some of the UK's leading experts advise in terms of how to still enjoy alcohol in a safer way. What are the effects on the brain? As Anya Topiwala, a senior clinical researcher at the University of Oxford, points out, half a bottle of wine a night works out at a minimum of 35 units per week for white wine and 42 units if you're only drinking red wine, which generally contains more alcohol per volume. 'If sustained, I would say there is a high likelihood of this negatively impacting your brain and memory,' she says. This comes from studies she's conducted which have found that people drinking more than 14 units per week, or seven medium-sized glasses of wine, have small total brain volumes, greater age-related shrinkage of the hippocampus – the brain's memory hub and one of the areas particularly impacted by Alzheimer's – and faster cognitive decline. 'Alcohol is a neurotoxin,' says Topiwala. 'Put simply, it kills brain cells. Additionally, heavy drinking often leads to a deficiency in vitamin B1 which can also damage the brain.' But it's not all doom and gloom. By reducing the amount you drink, even by a glass or two per week, it's possible to mitigate and even reverse some of these issues, something which Topiwala has witnessed first-hand in her practice as an old-age psychiatrist, with various patients seeing their short-term memory and recall improving after reducing their alcohol intake. 'I can think of many patients who have experienced a cognitive benefit from cutting down,' she says. What are the effects on the liver? Between 90 and 98 per cent of the alcohol you consume is broken down by your liver, making it one of the organs most acutely impacted by booze. Based on her own clinical and research knowledge, Shawcross says that people consuming half a bottle of wine per night will be particularly at risk of developing fatty liver – a condition where the liver becomes progressively clogged up with harmful visceral fat. Over time, this makes you more prone to cirrhosis or scarring and liver cancer. But she says that cutting down, even slightly, would undoubtedly help. 'There is no safe level of drinking, but if you didn't drink at all for two to three nights per week, there would be even more benefits,' says Shawcross. 'For example, you'd see a reduction in the amount of liver fat, as measured on a scan.' Shawcross is keen to point out that if you are not getting drunk, as noted by Wellband and her partner, it is not necessarily a sign that you have a protective gene variant which allows you to metabolise alcohol more quickly, limiting its damaging effects on the body. She explains that people can develop a tolerance to higher amounts of alcohol because the liver has a different group of enzymes which kick into action when there are consistently large amounts of alcohol in the bloodstream. This isn't a good thing, as harmful fat and other forms of damage will still be accruing, but it makes you less aware of alcohol's effects. 'When this different set of enzymes is consistently activated, it means you need to drink more alcohol to feel its effects,' she says. What is the effect on the heart? Consuming more than 7.5 units of alcohol a day – or most of a bottle of wine by yourself – is thought to increase risk of hypertension, where the pressure on your blood vessels is too high. Over time, this may lead to other issues such as arrhythmia or abnormal heart rhythms. 'Alcohol increases blood pressure and if this is untreated, it puts strain on the heart,' says Shawcross. Studies have indicated that hypertension risk seems to increase proportionally with the amount you drink. So a glass of wine per day will still make you more susceptible than not drinking at all, but is certainly less problematic than two or three glasses. What are the effects on the muscles and bones? As John Kiely, a researcher at the University of Limerick, puts it, alcohol accelerates many of the ravages of ageing, from loss of muscle to reduced coordination and increased vulnerability to twinges, strains and other injuries. In particular, if you've consumed half a bottle of wine one night, it probably isn't a wise idea to hit the gym or do some vigorous gardening the next day as the alcohol will impair your immune system's ability to reach and repair any damaged muscles or tendons, leaving you feeling all the more tender and sore. If you are drinking half a bottle of wine on a regular basis, Kiely suggests that you will be much more likely to get injured. There's also the matter of the progressive muscle and bone loss which most of us experience as part of ageing. Studies have long shown that regular, heavy drinking in middle age accelerates bone weakness and interrupts normal cycles of muscle repair, making it harder to hold onto the strength we have, as we age. 'An otherwise healthy diet and lifestyle will reduce these risks but persistent heavy drinking drives progressively accumulating issues that a healthy lifestyle alone can't fully counteract,' says Kiely. 'For example, alcohol lowers levels of key hormones [for muscle growth] like testosterone and growth hormone, while cortisol, a key stress hormone that drives muscle breakdown, rises. And because alcohol also reduces the absorption of calcium and suppresses the activity of bone-building cells, you're likely to have a faster decline in bone density, making your bones more fragile.' The good news is that such effects do not seem to be as pronounced with moderate drinking. 'A single glass of wine a night for women, or two for men, is unlikely to cause measurable harm to muscle health and little risk for bone health,' says Kiely. 'This is particularly the case for people who stay active and eat well.' What is the effect on how quickly you age? Drinking too much has long been associated with faster signs of visible ageing, such as more wrinkles, saggy skin and a duller complexion, but we now know that consuming half a bottle of wine each night actually ages you at the DNA level. In 2022, Topiwala carried out a study showing that consuming more than 17 units of alcohol per week – or around eight standard glasses of wine – causes damage to the tips of chromosomes, known as telomeres, which play an important role in keeping your DNA stable. 'Alcohol directly damages DNA, causing breaks and mutations,' says Topiwala. 'This is thought to explain why alcohol increases cancer risk.' What you can do to limit the risks While all of this may seem like something of a downer, all these risks are most apparent when it comes to heavy drinking. Research has also repeatedly shown that we can still enjoy alcohol throughout mid and later life and minimise the negative impacts on our health through having a few non-drinking days each week, eating well and exercising, and, particularly, consuming alcohol with a meal wherever possible. For example, one study of more than 300,000 people in the UK found that people who predominantly drank alcohol with meals had a 12 per cent lower risk of premature death from cardiovascular diseases and cancer, compared with those who mainly consumed their alcohol on its own. But for Wellband, like many others, the idea of changing the nightly drinking routine is not something that she and her partner are willing to contemplate, at least for now. 'We have no intention of changing our ways,' she says. 'Although I was adopted I have since discovered my birth mother is 82 and still drinks two or three glasses of wine every night so I'm following her lead. 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My husband, Michael Göpfert, who has died of cancer aged 77, was a consultant psychotherapist and child psychiatrist in Merseyside. In 1985 he set up a new psychotherapy service at the Royal Liverpool hospital, with integration at its heart, ensuring that therapists from different disciplines each had some training in another therapeutic method. Michael saw that separating adult and child services when a parent had a severe mental illness meant that the effect on the children was often missed. He was an early proponent of this neglected area and edited the book Parental Psychiatric Disorder (1996). He worked closely with Barnardo's Young Carers and its Keeping the Family in Mind service in Liverpool, now well established but innovative when it began. Michael also trained medical students in communication skills, supervised many psychiatric trainees and brought cognitive analytic therapy training to Merseyside. He was always prepared to take on difficult issues that others avoided. Michael was born in Munich in the postwar years, the youngest of the four sons of Herbert Göpfert, a publisher, and his wife, Hildegard (nee Klaiber). As a teenager, he lived in the Bavarian Alps where he felt at home, climbing, walking, swimming, and playing the piano and the harpsichord. He wanted to be a pianist, but when he was 20, his mother died suddenly and he lost direction. He went on to study nursing, then medicine, and became part of the political youth movement confronting the legacy of nazism. Alienated by the oppressive culture in Germany and attracted by the NHS and new developments in community psychiatry, in 1978 he moved to London for training. He completed child psychiatry training in Toronto, where he also discovered the Canadian wilderness, kayaking and First Nations culture. He found that most adult psychiatrists did not even know if their patients had children, a finding repeated when he returned to the UK, and this sparked his interest in parental mental illness. He took up the post in Liverpool and made Merseyside his home, while also studying for a master's in family therapy at the Tavistock Institute in London. Michael had grown up not knowing anyone Jewish and with the Holocaust never talked about. He lived with the huge guilt that many young Germans felt at that time. At the Tavistock he met me, a child of German Jewish political refugees. We both came to understand more the position of the 'other' and how victim and perpetrator roles could alternate. We married in 1989, and I moved to Merseyside to work as a child psychiatrist. There our three children were born. Michael loved music, cycling, foraging and baking – after retirement in 2010 he set up a community bakery. He restored and developed all our family homes. In recent years we lived between Liverpool and north Wales; in Wales, Michael rediscovered some of what he had missed from Bavaria, and there, as a legacy project, he planted a field of truffle trees. Michael is survived by his children, Anya, Max and Leo, his grandchildren, Aria and Luca, his brothers Dieter and Christian, and me.
The Guardian
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