"I can't face getting ready for bed"

This is the least dignified reason for staying up, and perhaps the most common. You're on the sofa, warm and heavy. Between you and sleep there's a list of chores. The lights need turning off, the doors want locking, and the dishwasher has to go on. After that there are the stairs, your teeth and your face, clothes to come off, and an alarm to set. It's ten minutes of chores at the moment in the day when you have the least energy for chores. Staying put needs nothing at all. The television will even start the next episode for you without being asked.

So there's a small irony. You're too tired to go to bed.

Researchers have tried to pin this down, and I'll report the muddle honestly. One study asked 218 people how many temptations they'd had to resist during the day and how late they'd gone to bed against their intention. The people who'd resisted more went to bed later, which suggests that a draining day leaves less in the tank for getting yourself upstairs. But the German diary study I mentioned in chapter 7 measured people's reserves of self-control on the evening itself and found the opposite. On evenings when people felt more drained, they put off bed less. So the evidence on willpower and bedtime is mixed, and I wouldn't build anything on it.

What I'd build on is simpler and doesn't need a theory. An action gets done more often when it's easy and less often when it's hard. At the moment, staying up is as easy as an action can be, and going to bed is a ten-minute obstacle course. You don't need more willpower at ten o'clock. You need going to bed to be less work at ten o'clock.

That can be arranged, because almost none of those chores has to be done at bedtime. They're done then out of custom. Try moving them. At nine, or whenever the children are down, do the closing-up jobs. Lock up, set the dishwasher going, put out tomorrow's clothes, brush your teeth, get into whatever you sleep in. Then sit down. When the tired point comes, going to bed is a matter of turning off one lamp and walking upstairs. You've taken the obstacle course out of the weakest moment of your day and put it somewhere you can manage it.

You may object that sitting on the sofa in pyjamas at nine with your teeth brushed will feel like being a child. It might, for a few evenings. It also does something useful. It tells your body that the day is closing, some time before you need it to believe that. And it removes the snack and the glass of wine that tend to happen at eleven, because you've brushed your teeth.

The other half of this is the ending. The easiest moment to stop watching is before you start. Decide when you sit down what you're watching and how much of it. Turn off the setting that plays the next episode without asking. It's in the account settings of every service, and it takes a minute to find. Left on, it turns stopping into a thing you have to do and carrying on into a thing that just happens.