The Quiet Power of Going to Bed on Time

For a long time my 'me time' was the hour after the kids were asleep, when I would sit on the couch with a glass of wine and my phone and watch one more episode of something and then one more and then one more, until I was crawling into bed at eleven-thirty wrecked, only to have Noah wake me up at five-forty for water.

I called that hour mine. It was not mine. It was the leftovers of mine. It was what was left of me after everyone else had had a turn.

I started going to bed at ten last month. Just ten. Not nine, not 'when the sun goes down,' just ten. By eleven I am asleep. By six I am awake before the alarm with enough margin to do my four words in the journal and my lemon water and my three things in the mirror, and the day starts in a way that does not feel like an ambush.

Mark thinks I have lost my mind. Mark stays up until midnight on the recliner with the History Channel on. That's fine. Mark is wired different. We are not the same and we don't have to be the same to be in the same marriage. That is also a thing I learned this year.

Here is what changes when you go to bed on time. Your skin. Your patience with the four-year-old who has put his shoes on the wrong feet for the third morning in a row. Your ability to think a clear thought during the breakfast rush. Your interest in the run. Your interest in your husband. Your interest in your own life.

I do not want to be one of those women who turns sleep into a moral issue. There are seasons — the newborn months, the sick weeks, the family emergencies — where ten is laughable and you do what you can do. I have been there. I will be there again. But for me, in this month, in this season, ten o'clock has been the difference between feeling like I am drowning and feeling like I am swimming.

What helped me actually do it: I move my phone out of the bedroom at nine-thirty. The phone charges in the kitchen. I read a paper book in bed. Boring books are best. I am currently reading a memoir about a woman who runs a sheep farm in England and I am asleep by page four every night, which is the highest compliment I can pay an author.

Run this morning was fifteen minutes straight. Fifteen. I am going to cry about it later. I did not even feel like I might die at the end, which is new.

Worked Miller's. Came home. Poured candles. Folded laundry. Made meatballs. Picked up the kids. Emma read me four pages of the chapter book. Noah told me he wants to be 'a bird scientist' when he grows up, which I think is the best job I have ever heard of.

Mark home at five-thirty. Dinner at six. It's almost six now. The phone goes in the kitchen at nine-thirty. The light goes out at ten. Sleep is the most underrated beauty product of all time. Talk tomorrow. — Lucy