"I can't sleep straight after anyway"

Here's a belief that turns the overrun into a kind of hygiene. If you stop at quarter past ten, you're not going to fall asleep at quarter past ten. You'll lie there. So you might as well watch another one and go up when you're actually tired.

Exelmans's finding from chapter 7 is the answer, and it points the other way. The mechanism that linked heavy viewing to poor sleep was arousal before bed, a mind still running. The third episode doesn't make you tired. It makes you more aroused, and more aroused is why you'll lie there, and lying there is then used as the reason for the third episode. The belief describes the problem the overrun causes and offers the overrun as the cure.

What winding down needs isn't more episode. It's less input. An earlier book in this series on staying up late has the evidence on screens and the body clock, and chapter 11 here has Chang's finding that a bright screen in the evening delays sleep and dulls the morning. The stretch between the last credits and the pillow is where the arousal comes down, and it comes down in twenty minutes of something that isn't a screen, a kettle, ten pages, the kitchen tidied, a conversation about the brother. That's what chapter 22's end of the evening is for, and it's the thing the third episode replaces.

There's a version of this that's about routine. You've never gone to bed at half past ten and it feels absurd. I'd only say that the feeling of absurdity is the second wind talking, and that most people who try the credits at quarter past ten and twenty minutes of something else find they're asleep by eleven within a week, and that the "I can't sleep straight after" turns out to have been "I can't sleep straight after three episodes", which is true and is a fact about three episodes.

And if it's true that you lie awake whatever you do, that's not autoplay and chapter 24 says so. The NHS insomnia pages say when to see a GP, and the method here won't fix insomnia, and shouldn't be asked to. It fixes the third episode, and the third episode is, for most people reading this, why they're lying there.