"I'm not tired"

At eleven, when the second one ends and the countdown starts, you're not tired. You were tired at ten. At eleven you're alert, and alert people don't go to bed, so you watch the third.

Anne-Marie Chang and colleagues, in 2015, had people read in the hours before bed, on some nights from a printed book and on others from a light-emitting device, and measured what happened. On the device nights, people took longer to fall asleep, felt less sleepy in the evening, produced less melatonin, had their body clocks shifted later, and were less alert the next morning. The study was of e-readers and not televisions, and the earlier book in this series on staying up late uses it with that caution, and so do I. But the direction is the point. A bright screen in the evening makes you feel less tired than you are and pushes the whole night later.

Add Exelmans's finding from chapter 7. Three cliffs in a row leave the mind running, and a running mind doesn't feel tired, it feels engaged, and engaged at eleven feels like proof that you had another episode in you. It isn't proof. It's the arousal, and the arousal is what the show is for, and it's what keeps you up and what's still running when you lie down.

So the tiredness at ten was true and the alertness at eleven was manufactured. The body had said, at ten, that it was ready, and the screen and the story overrode it, and the override felt like a second wind. The earlier book calls this the second wind and says not to trust it, and I'd say the same. "I'm not tired" at eleven is the least reliable sentence in the evening, because it's said by a person under a bright screen who's just watched a door open.

The method's answer is to have the credits at quarter past ten be the stop, when the tiredness is still audible, rather than at twenty to midnight, when it's been shouted down. Ten o'clock you was right. Eleven o'clock you was watching television.