Five minutes that could change how you sleep every night

We’ve all been there. When you’re not getting a solid eight hours (or even a comfortable five) it’s tempting to focus on bedtime. Should you go to bed earlier? Put your phone away? Try a different pillow? Have a bath?

But sleep expert and psychotherapist Heather Darwall-Smith believes we may be looking in the wrong place. “When I’m working with a client, I start from the moment they wake up in the morning,” she says. “What I really want to do is get people to step away from sleep.”

Her idea is simple: there is more we can do during the hours we’re awake to support sleep than we can do once we’re lying in bed trying to force it. And one of her most important recommendations takes just five minutes.

Start your day slowly

Darwall-Smith suggests spending five to 10 minutes in the morning simply sitting with a nice warm drink — tea and coffee are allowed! — and thinking about the day ahead. Not scrolling. Not immediately answering emails. Not rushing straight into the next task. Instead, ask yourself: What have I actually got to do today?

“We all try and squeeze a lot into 24 hours,” she says. The problem is that we can start the day with an unrealistic list of everything we believe we should accomplish, then spend the next 12 hours trying to catch up.

Darwall-Smith encourages people to look at the day more realistically. What genuinely needs to happen? What can wait? Where are you likely to have the most energy? That matters because how we move through the day can affect how we arrive at bedtime.

Don’t spend the whole day running

Darwall-Smith believes we need to get better at recognising that energy naturally rises and falls. “We are going to have a time of the day where we drop,” she says. “We are going to have a time of the day when we’re up.”

Yet modern life encourages the opposite: constant productivity, constant availability and the expectation that we should be able to operate at the same level all day. “We have a culture of always on,” she says.

Her solution isn’t to reorganise your entire life. Instead, she recommends noticing your own patterns and working with them. If you know you reliably hit a slump in the afternoon, for example, perhaps that’s not the moment to schedule your most demanding task.

And if you’re naturally more alert in the evening, recognise that energy burst rather than automatically treating it as a reason to stay up later. The aim is to understand your own rhythm rather than constantly fighting it.

Let the pressure out during the day

There’s another part of Darwall-Smith’s approach that is particularly useful if you tend to arrive at bedtime feeling wired.

She compares the body to a bottle of fizzy drink. “In the morning you get up, and as the day goes on, it’s like you’re shaking a bottle,” she says. By bedtime, “that bottle is full of pressure.”

That doesn’t mean you have to give up your job and go and become a monk somewhere. Simple moments of deliberately releasing the pressure can mean you arrive at bedtime feeling much calmer. Darwall-Smith recommends what she calls “punctuating time”.

When you’re waiting at the traffic lights, instead of getting frustrated, breathe. Between meetings, stand up and stretch. Walk around instead of automatically picking up your phone. Look out of the window. Drink some water.

“It’s important to get out of your mind sometimes,” says Darwall-Smith. “Remember that you’ve got a body and that you can breathe.”

These tiny pauses create breaks in the relentless momentum of the day.

Try her five-minute reset tomorrow

Before you launch into the day, sit down for five minutes. Have your tea or coffee. Don’t rush it.

Ask yourself:

• What actually needs to happen today?
• What can wait?
• When am I likely to have the most energy?
• When am I likely to dip?
• Where can I give myself a little space?

Then, as the day unfolds, look for opportunities to release some of the pressure before it reaches bedtime. You don’t need to turn this into another project. “This is much more of a mindful process, just developing that awareness,” says Darwall-Smith.

In other words, you’re not trying to achieve the perfect day, you’re simply paying attention to your body.

Images: Shutterstock