There’s a specific kind of lying awake where nothing’s actually wrong, but the mind won’t stop running through tomorrow’s list — the email you haven’t sent, the appointment you nearly forgot, the thing you meant to say to someone. It feels like the opposite of what you’d expect, but writing that list down before bed, rather than avoiding it, turns out to help. A 2018 Baylor University study found that participants who wrote a to-do list for upcoming tasks fell asleep an average of nine minutes faster than those who wrote about tasks they’d already completed. That’s a genuinely

You know the moment. Lights off, head on the pillow, and somehow the phone’s back in your hand for “just five minutes.” Twenty minutes later you’re still scrolling, wide awake, and slightly annoyed with yourself. It’s such a common pattern that it barely registers as a decision anymore — but the two things people usually swap between at that point, a phone and a book, do genuinely different things to the body. According to sleep and circadian rhythm specialist Dr Katharina Lederle, looking at a phone or laptop screen at night is a bit like putting a mini-sun in

There’s a particular kind of restlessness that turns up around ten at night — not tired enough to drop off, not awake enough to do anything useful. Most people reach for the television or scroll a bit longer, which tends to make the problem worse rather than better. Music is a quieter option, and the mechanism behind it is more specific than “relaxing sounds help you relax.” Listening to music lowers cortisol, the hormone that keeps the body in a state of alertness, which shifts the nervous system out of the mode that’s keeping you awake in the first

There’s a particular kind of tired that isn’t really tiredness — lying there at half eleven, mind still turning things over, body not quite ready to switch off even though the day was long enough. For years I put that down to age, or a busy mind, or just the way things are once you’re past sixty. It took me longer than it should have to notice the connection to what I’d been drinking that afternoon. The science behind it is fairly clear. Caffeine works by blocking adenosine, the chemical that quietly builds up through the day to tell