Five Night Routine Mistakes A Neuroscientist Would Never Make

We’ve written before at HuffPost UK about the sleep rules a neurologist follows for healthy ageing.

And now, that same expert – Dr Matthew Walker, Neuroscientist and Professor of Neuroscience and Bioengineering at the University of Texas at Dallas – has shared the evening routine mistakes he’d never make.

Speaking to HuffPost UK, he said: “The mistake most people make at night is assuming sleep is like a light switch – flick it off and you’re out.

“Sleep is far more like landing a plane. It takes time to gradually descend onto the runway of good sleep,” he continued.

He added, “A few things that keep the plane circling” are:

1) Going to bed too hot

“Our body has to drop its core temperature by about one degree Celsius to fall asleep and stay asleep, which is why a cool bedroom – around 18°C – beats a warm one,” the expert said. 

Interestingly, though, “A hot bath [or shower] an hour before bed works by a delightful paradox: it brings blood to the surface, and you offload heat afterward, dropping your core temperature.”

2) Having a boozy “nightcap” 

“Alcohol is a sedative, and sedation is not sleep. It fragments your night and blocks dream sleep, so you wake feeling unrestored even after a ‘full’ night” of kip, he explained. 

Alcohol can also worsen sleep apnoea, which makes you tired in the daytime.Some experts recommend we stop drinking alcohol three to four house before bed.

3) Having caffeine too late in the day 

“Caffeine has a half-life of around five to six hours, meaning a quarter of that 2pm coffee is still circulating at bedtime,” Dr Walker continued. 

Researchers think that drinking coffee between 7 and 8am might help us access more of its benefits.

4) Bright lights and using your phone less than an hour before bedtime

“Evening light tells your brain it’s still daytime and suppresses melatonin. Dim the house [and] treat the last hour [of your day] as a wind-down,” the neuroscientist advised. 

Putting your phone away an hour before bedtime has previously been suggested as good sleep hygiene by multiple other experts.

5) Lying in bed awake, frustrated

“If you can’t sleep after about twenty-five minutes, get up and do something quiet and dim until sleepiness returns,” Dr Walker said.

“Your brain is brilliant at forming associations, and you don’t want it learning that bed is the place where you lie awake. Said another way, you’d never sit at the dinner table waiting to get hungry. So why would you lie in bed waiting to get sleepy?” 

We’ve written before about how staying in bed for too long is the worst thing you can do after waking up at 3am.