My new bedtime is 10:15pm.
This is an update to the bedtime I’ve now held for several years of 10:10pm. What an indulgence. Five extra minutes, every night. An extra hour of wakefulness every twelve days. Think of all I can accomplish.
Why? Let’s think step by step.
I’m not consistently hitting my 10:10pm bedtime recently. I still think about it. 10:10 rolls around and I acknowledge that it’s bedtime, but at that point I frequently find something else to do in favor of sleeping. Changing my bedtime and noting it publicly (to the extent that this is public) brings the bedtime more into the forefront of my attention. Changing it makes it a conscious choice once more – a choice made by modern me rather than me of four years ago (or whoever it was that picked out the 10:10pm bedtime initially.) So, I’d summarize reason one as to reaffirm my selection of the bedtime and to take ownership of this decision. Making it a new time rather than keeping it the same helps me gain that sense of ownership, and makes it feel more real than keeping it the same where my diminished attentiveness or respect for bedtime already holds.
Why make it later rather than earlier? I considered moving the bedtime to 10:05pm rather than 10:15pm. After all, my intention is to go to bed earlier in the future than I do today. So moving the bedtime earlier would be a natural choice. But 10:05pm feels too early. It’s a time I’d like to be asleep at occasionally – tonight, for example, I’d like to go to bed even earlier than that – but it’s not a time I want to sustainably use as my bedtime. It’s important to me to make my bedtime something I can take seriously. And when I say that, bear in mind I love taking silly things seriously. Taking the bedtime seriously doesn’t mean successfully hitting that bedtime everyday. Rather, it means treating it with meaningful attention, and giving it proper respect and consideration each evening. It means setting myself up to succeed. It means taking the time to appreciate the thought and the reasoning behind the bedtime. 10:15pm is a bedtime I can take seriously.
I feel so much better when I go to bed at 10:10pm compared with 11pm or 11:30pm (or midnight, or one). I think it will be challenging to do justice to the difference it makes in how I feel. If I go to bed at the earlier time, I wake up feeling alert, alive, clearheaded. If I go to bed at one of the later times, I start to notice congestion even before I fall asleep. I can wake up with muddied cognition. I want to wake up feeling alert. I’ve come to really appreciate that the minutes matter. A difference of 10 minutes is definitely significant to me – something I didn’t appreciate perhaps a decade ago. So while on one level a change from 10:10pm to 10:15pm may seem quite small, it feels large enough to be perceivable. In psychology researchers measure the Just Noticeable Difference in stimuli, e.g. they might study how far apart two sounds need to be before an observer can distinguish them. I suspect that, even in the absence of variation from the difficulties in hitting a bedtime successfully, a five minute change in bedtime is a just noticeable difference for me, or maybe slightly less than one, meaning that it may have a noticeable impact on how well rested and recharged I feel the following day, but only barely.
Another silly effect I anticipate from changing my bedtime to 10:15pm is diminished or redirected surprisal at my bedtime. When my bedtime was 10:10pm, it commonly elicited a “why?” response. People were curious jointly at it’s precision and it being as early as it is. 10:15 is a single step down in precision from 10:10. A less precise bedtime will likely elicit less precision curiosity when I mention my bedtime to people. It’s still more precise than 10 or 10:30, and so I’m curious whether it will continue eliciting any precision curiosity the way 10:10 used to. I’ve generally enjoyed people’s interest in the bedtime, and this is mainly a silly consideration, but not ultimately an important factor in the decision to adjust. The initial reason for that level of precision was to help me take my choice of bedtime more seriously. I think writing this thousand-plus word piece on my bedtime will have a similar effect.
Part of what made the 10:10 bedtime effective for me was that people knew about it. It was a boundary I set for myself, that I held, not firmly, but gently to, against an opposition from my environment. By telling people by bedtime, whether proactively, or merely through the process of holding the boundary, I got the benefit of social accountability. By adjusting my bedtime, I get an excuse to reaffirm by bedtime to other people, not just to myself. For as long as the bedtime holds steady, there would be a higher cost to reminding someone who already knows my bedtime about my bedtime again. Telling someone new information, on the other hand, is more acceptable; the act of sharing doesn’t presume they’ve forgotten. This last point is somewhat abstract though, so bare with me. There aren’t people whom I’ve wanted to reaffirm my bedtime to. Rather, changing my bedtime gives me an excuse to (re)affirm my bedtime to other people. And this in turn reaffirms it to myself, and establishes some amount of social accountability helpful for, as always, taking my bedtime seriously.
This brings us to the final effect I see in this bedtime change; I’m going to have five extra minutes everyday. That’s about a 0.5% increase to the length of my wakeful day, assuming I keep my wakeup time fixed. I have two perspectives on this, both quite positive. The first is that a carefully placed five minutes – i.e. a five minutes that genuinely feels extra – can be tremendously valuable. And through the nature of how I’m adjusting my bedtime, accompanied by this writing and all, I suspect I can, at least for a handful of days, make those five minutes really feel like a bonus. Will I use them to meditate, write, do yoga, play piano? I have a list somewhere with dozens of options, and am excited to explore. The second perspective is that the change in my wakefulness that comes from taking my bedtime more seriously far outweighs the effect of an extra five minute interval. And ultimately, looking back over this piece, I see clearly that’s the perspective that dominates. The gift I’m giving myself with these extra five minutes every night is five minutes every night, but it’s also an opportunity to take sleep more seriously, and to wake more rested in the days to come.