What it does to Sunday night

Sunday night deserves its own chapter, because it's where the habit does its most visible damage and where people most often blame the wrong thing.

You go to bed at half past ten, or eleven, because it's a school night. You've slept until ten that morning, so you've been awake for twelve or thirteen hours instead of your weekday sixteen, and your clock has moved forty minutes later over the weekend. Both of those mean you aren't ready. Sleep needs two things, a long enough stretch of being awake and a clock that says it's night, and on Sunday you have neither. So you lie there.

Then the mind gets involved. Lying awake at eleven on a Sunday, the thing to think about is Monday, and Monday is a day of things you haven't done yet, and now the wait has a content. It feels like dread. Some of it may be dread. But a good deal of what gets called the Sunday scaries is a body that isn't sleepy and a mind that's been handed an empty hour and a subject. The subject is available every night of the week. The empty hour is a Sunday thing, and the lie-in made it.

Then comes the phone, because you're awake and it's there, and the light and the content push the clock later still and give the mind more to do. Then it's midnight, and you've done the arithmetic about six and a half hours, and then six, and eventually you sleep, and the alarm at half past six arrives after five and a half hours on a clock that thinks it's a quarter to six.

An earlier book in this series, Nothing gets solved at three in the morning, is about the night mind and what it's worth, which is very little, and its advice for the awake hour holds here. But this book's point is that on Sunday you can stop the awake hour from arriving at all. Hold the wake time on Saturday and Sunday and the clock doesn't move. Get up at seven on Sunday and by half past ten you've been awake for fifteen and a half hours and your clock says night and you sleep. The Sunday-night wait isn't a fact about Sundays. It's what a lie-in that morning ordered for you, and if you don't place the order it doesn't come.

I'd add that a lot of people who think they have a Sunday-night sleep problem have a Sunday-morning one, and have been treating the wrong end.