Your Perfect Bedtime Routine Barely Helps You Sleep

Host Mike Carruthers asked sleep physiologist Stephanie Romiszewski a familiar question, whether a very dark, cool, and quiet bedroom is critical to a good night of sleep. She pushed back, and argued that people overfocus on that checklist.

Her estimate was that sleep hygiene, the bedroom and habit checklist, would probably give you an under 10 percent improvement in how well you sleep. She called it nothing significant, and nothing that would take away the real problem when sleep goes wrong.

What she meant, she explained, is that most of sleep hygiene does little to touch the two mechanisms that actually run sleep. Those are sleep drive, the mounting need for sleep that builds while you are awake, and circadian timing, the body clock that sets when you feel sleepy, and she argued that trouble usually starts when one of those slips. Her example was trying for a 10 p.m. bedtime after a couple-hour lie in that morning, when she said the body is not going to be tired until much later.

Carruthers pressed her on quality, raising his own experience of spending all night in bed but waking often to noise and rising unrefreshed. She conceded that point, but only as an exception. If something has changed, she said, then fixing it can help.

Her examples were concrete. As Romiszewski put it, "I've moved to a new neighborhood, and perhaps I don't realize how noisy that neighborhood has become at night to me," so you try earplugs. You moved and your curtains are not dark enough, so you fix the light. She would rather people "use sleep hygiene as a toolkit to see has anything actually changed in my life recently" than as a perfect routine to maintain every night.

That perfectionism is where she sees harm. If people are told they must do all those things for good sleep, she said, they start to fear what happens if they skip one. That fear, she argued, creates sleep anxiety, and sleep anxiety leads to chronic insomnia.