• This was the habit i focused on most for about 3 years. Here are my top tips, loosely ordered by importance.

Stop playing on your phone

• Move your phone charger away from your bed

  • Cheapest/easiest. Do before investing in the rest of this stuff.

• Buy an app blocker (Jomo.app for iPhone users)

  • Better than built in “screen time” settings (on iPhone). "At this time of day, block these apps" + lots of options for how strict it should be. When I’m on my phone at 10:40 it just locks the apps. It feels like a loving but firm parent who just takes the device out of your hand, and for 10 seconds a part rebels.. and then you go brush your teeth and go to bed.
  • Setup time: 15 mins
  • It's $30/yr. It helps me every day, but if it only helped once per month, well, what would you pay for 12 more days of good sleep / good energy this year? It's cheaper than a spa day or a better mattress.

• Make it less appealing with greyscale

  • Setup time: 10 mins
  • More than just “True Tone”, flux.app, etc. Go a step further, on iphone, with shortcuts.app > “automation”. Tell it to “enable color filters” and dim brightness drastically at 9pm, or triggered by sleep focus mode, for example. The little red badge is much less tempting when it isn't red. (And/or disable red badges entirely, or at certain times of day, using focus modes.)

  

Smart lights

• Warning: if you share your space with other people, this might not be worth it.

• having just one bulb, your bedside lamp, might be all you need.

  • morning: slowing fading to brightest bluest.
  • Night: dim to warmest candlelight, then off.
  • if you just want to experiment with a single light / simplest setup, iPhone users, look for any bulb that is Apple HomeKit compatible and set it up in Home app. Setup time: 15 mins

• For anything more complex: Phillips hue smart bulbs

  • Minimum Setup time: 45m
  • Look for Philips hue “white ambiance”. You don't need full-rainbow color, but you’ll want more than a white that is merely “dimmable”. Ambiance gives you all the whites, cool to warm. I find them on eBay for $10-$15 each.
  • My setup, using non-HomeKit bulbs, also requires a “hub” (Phillips Hue Bridge, maybe $20 on eBay). I’d recommend this route if you want to use multiple bulbs. Although there’s a newer tech called “Matter”, that might make this obsolete. I haven’t used it.

  

  I never adjust these sliders manually, just set up several “at this hour, slowly fade to this ‘scene’”

Other supporting habits

• When you wake up, go outside to get sunlight in your eyeballs, & move your body. See Andrew Huberman for the science
• Keep a log of bedtimes, wake times. Make a note of anything you think is interfering.
• people metabolize caffeine at very different rates. For some that means no caffeine after 12p. even if you can fall asleep right after a shot of coffee (or whiskey), both still interfere in sleep quality. A $200 DNA test can tell you how quickly you metabolize caffeine, and 100 other immutable things about your system.
• find the positive activity to replace screen usage in the hour before bed; Something you can do by candlelight. I play piano, listen to podcast while doing some light cleaning, organizing, a little meal prep for tomorrow. Sharpen the kitchen knives. Do some knitting, learn to tie a bowline with your eyes closed, practice a card trick. Do some stretching. Spend some time w massage gun. Sex stuff (without a screen!). Read a book ->
  • Kindle / e-ink readers are magic. If you've never tried one, its like no other electronic device. It doesn’t have a "screen" the same way your phone does. It controls little particles of physical “ink”, acting more like ink on paper. safe for bedtime use: Most can emit light, but they don’t have to, and they’re not designed for browsing the web, watching videos, etc. If you have a library card, you can download new books for free from your local library, or just get free books from Project Gutenberg. You can also add your favorite blogs, substacks, etc. It's all the good stuff we were promised by the information age, without the addictive content and burned-out eyeballs.
• “I need a podcast, background television, etc to quiet my thoughts, fall asleep.” If your thoughts are keeping you up, try listening to them more, not less. Take 15 mins before sleep to journal, parts work, etc (even if you return to podcast after). Try it for 10 days.
• Get a bedtime buddy on Focusmate.com . Free to use a few times/ week. Create a meeting for 10pm, your buddy shows up on screen, you say “my goal is to brush teeth and avoid device”, and then you both hit mute and do your thing. After 25 or 50m session you say bye.
• Read or find a youtube summary of When by Daniel Pink. My main takeaway: you're probably “a morning person”, even if you’ve never felt that way. Brain works best in morning, design your day accordingly.
• No fights at night. My previous housemate and i had a rule: “no difficult/emotional convo after 8pm”. Past that hour, we were just too tired to bring the Self energy needed. Similarly with tor-mentors you encounter online: schedule that for earlier in the day. Or skip it! There are so many people getting paid good money to do battle online. Send $10 to your favorite gladiator and rest easy knowing it’s in the hands of a professional.