The decision

Everything so far has been about seeing the habit clearly. This chapter is about what to do, and it starts with a rule.

My own time comes first in the evening, and the evening ends when I'm tired.

The rule has two halves, and the order matters. The first half meets the need, and the second ends the method. If you only do the second half, you'll go to bed at ten feeling robbed, and within a week you'll be back on the sofa at midnight. I'd expect that, and it would be a reasonable response to having something taken away with nothing put in its place. So start with the first half, and don't move your bedtime until your own time has somewhere else to be.

Here's the method I'd suggest. It has six parts. Each rests on an earlier chapter. The combination is mine and hasn't been tested as a package.

Give your own time a start. Pick a time in the first half of the evening when your own time begins, and treat it as you'd treat an appointment with someone else. Eight o'clock, in the examples. Decide beforehand what you'll do with it, because a tired person with no plan ends up on the phone. It doesn't need to be improving. It needs to be something you'd give more than a four.

Close the kitchen. Set a time after which no more household jobs get done. Whatever is left waits for tomorrow. This is what stops the evening's work from expanding until bedtime.

Get ready for bed early. Do the closing-up jobs, and your teeth, about an hour before the tired point usually comes. Your notes from chapter 1 will tell you when that is. Then going to bed costs you one lamp and a flight of stairs.

Decide the ending before you begin. If you're going to watch something, decide what and how much before you sit down. Turn off automatic play. Say the ending aloud if someone's with you. "One episode, then I'm going up."

Keep the phone out of the bedroom. Buy a cheap alarm clock, and let the phone charge downstairs. Chapter 7 described how the late stretch moves upstairs, and this is the simplest way to stop it. If you need to be reachable at night, leave the ringer on and the door open.

Choose your late nights. Pick one or two nights a week, with no early alarm the next day, when you may stay up as long as you like. Put something good in them. The other nights, the evening ends at the tired point.

For the moment itself, there's one more tool. Two trials with university students tested a short mental exercise against going to bed late. In both, the students who did it cut the number of minutes by which they overran their bedtime, compared with students given other advice. The exercise has three steps. First, picture the best result of going to bed on time, as vividly as you can. Second, name the main obstacle inside you, such as "I feel I haven't had any time to myself". Third, make a plan in the form "when that obstacle comes up, then I will do this". The trials were short and the participants were students, so I wouldn't claim too much. But the exercise costs nothing and takes five minutes. It also matches what this book has argued, which is that the obstacle has to be named and answered and can't just be overpowered.

Three plans are worth writing out now, in your own words.

When I notice I'm tired, then I turn off the lamp and go up, because I've already had my hour.

When the episode ends, then I turn the television off before I look at my phone.

When I think "I've had no time to myself today", then I write down where tomorrow's hour is going to be.

The third is for bad days. There will be evenings when the hour at eight didn't happen. The boiler broke, or a child was sick. The old logic will come back in force. You've had nothing, so you're owed the late stretch. I'd suggest that what you're owed is tomorrow's hour, protected harder. Tonight's midnight would only make tomorrow worse.

Here's what to expect. The first week, the hour at eight will feel wrong, because the kitchen's a mess. Going up at ten will feel like a loss for several nights, until the mornings start to show a difference. I can't promise how large the difference will be, or how soon. Give it two weeks, then look at your notes from chapter 4 and ask whether your own time is scoring higher than it did. That's the measure to use. If you do get more sleep as well, count it as the side effect.