Friday, September 25

Go to bed on time

Most of your worst days start the night before.

Justified27 Sleep2 Discipline2

Key takeaways

Pick a specific shutdown time and treat it as fixed
Put your phone in another room fifteen minutes before that time
Go to bed when the hour arrives even if it feels early

TL;DR

Most of your worst days start the night before. You stayed up for nothing and paid for it with everything.

Pick the shutdown hour

Nobody tells a grown man to go to bed. That is the trouble. The rest of your life has guardrails and this one thing has none, so it quietly eats the front end of every morning you meant to do better.

Name what you're waiting for

You are not up because you are busy. You are up because the day never gave you anything that felt like yours, so you are on the couch at eleven forty, scrolling, taking it back in the only currency you have left. That hour is not rest and it is not fun. It is a man collecting a debt from himself with interest.

This went on for years and had a name for itself: winding down. Ask what you are actually waiting for. Usually it is nothing. Usually you are waiting to feel finished, and that feeling is not coming tonight.

living room couch at night lit only by a television

Photo by Tolu Akinyemi 🇳🇬 on Unsplash

Set the hour and obey it

Pick a time. Not a goal, a time. Then work backward fifteen minutes and put the phone in the kitchen, on the counter, plugged in, out of reach.

You will feel like a child sent upstairs. Feel that and go anyway. The first three nights are the worst because your body wants its stolen hour back. By the fourth you wake up and there is a stranger in your chest who is not tired and not angry, and he is easier for your family to live with.

Today

Set your shutdown time tonight, put the phone in another room fifteen minutes before it, and go.

Go deeper

Here is the part that took you too long. You are not behind because you slept. God gives sleep as a gift and not as a wage, and the person grinding past midnight to feel worthy is trying to earn something already handed to them. It is in vain that you rise up early and go late to rest, eating the bread of anxious toil, for he gives to his beloved sleep. Psalm 127:2 Beloved comes first. The work comes after, and it goes better. Lying down on time is a small act of trust that the world holds together without you watching it.