The nap and the early night

The third part of the method is where the extra sleep goes, because you still need it. The short week is still short. The lie-in was putting sleep at the wrong end of the night. The early night puts it at the right end.

Friday night. You're tired from the week, more tired than you've been letting yourself feel. Go to bed early. Not at nine like a child, though there's nothing wrong with nine. An hour before your weekday bedtime, in the dark, with the phone elsewhere. You'll sleep, because you've been awake sixteen hours and your clock says night and you're short. That's an hour of catch-up that moves nothing, because the clock's evening signal is light, and you gave it darkness at a time it was already expecting some.

Saturday night. The temptation is the late one, because Sunday is free. The late night is the other half of the lie-in and it does the same thing to the clock, as chapter 8 said. If you go to bed at one on Saturday and get up at half past seven on Sunday, you've held the window and you'll be very tired, and by the following Saturday you'll have decided the window doesn't work. The window works if the bedtime comes with it. Saturday bedtime within an hour of your weekday bedtime, and earlier if you're tired, and you'll wake inside the window on Sunday without effort.

If there's a night out, have it. Chapter 20 is about the big Friday. One late night a month or so doesn't undo anything, if the wake time holds the next morning and the light arrives. It's the weekly late night paired with the weekly lie-in that makes the drift.

The nap. If Saturday afternoon finds you flagging, a short sleep before three o'clock, twenty to thirty minutes, is a fair way to pay a little of the debt without touching the clock. Set an alarm, because a two-hour nap at four is a lie-in by another route and you won't sleep that night. And if you're someone with genuine insomnia, the NHS says not to nap at all, and it's right, because a nap takes pressure off the night that you need to keep.

What you'll notice within a month, if you do all three, is that the early nights stop being needed. The week that follows a level weekend isn't as short, because it doesn't spend two days correcting, and by the third or fourth weekend most people find they're going to bed at the usual time on Friday and Saturday and waking inside the window rested. The early night is scaffolding. Use it while the debt's being paid down and let it go when it isn't needed.