Winding Down When It's Still Light Outside

Late July evenings in Britain stay bright long after dinner, and your body reads that light as a reason to stay awake a while longer. Here is a gentle way to wind down when the sky has not caught up with your bedtime yet.

In December the signal is obvious. The light goes, the house gets darker, and somewhere in that dimming your body starts making melatonin, the hormone that tells you night has begun. In late July that signal arrives hours later, or barely arrives at all before you would like to be asleep.

The research on this is fairly blunt. Gooley and colleagues, writing in the Journal of Clinical Endocrinology and Metabolism in 2011, found that people who spent their evenings under ordinary room light rather than dim light produced melatonin for roughly 90 minutes less each night, and that its onset came later in almost every participant. Room light here means the sort of lighting most of us sit under without giving it a thought.

So a summer evening works against you twice over. The sun is still up, and then we turn the lamps on anyway.

What helps is less a rule than a sequence. About an hour before bed, start taking light out of the room instead of adding it. One lamp rather than the big light. Curtains closed even though it feels early. Screens dimmed and set down beside you rather than held up to your face.

Then give the room something to listen to. When the light cannot tell you it is night, sound can do some of that work instead. Rainfall over a forest, a slow stream, crickets in still air. It is not that the sound makes you sleepy. It is that a steady, unremarkable noise leaves your attention with nothing to catch on, and it covers the summer soundtrack outside: the garden two doors down, a car door, someone's music carrying further than they realise in warm air.

The open window makes this harder. You want the cool air, and the cool air arrives with the street attached. A low, continuous sound sitting underneath it all softens the edges, so a passing car becomes part of the background rather than the thing that wakes you at one in the morning.

None of this will fix a genuinely broken night, and if sleep has been difficult for a long stretch it is worth talking to a GP. But for the ordinary problem of a bright evening and a busy head, a darker room and one steady sound is a reasonable place to begin.

You can build the mix in the browser at Create Your Zen. Pick an environment, layer a couple of sounds, and leave it running while the light goes down at its own pace.