I had no idea that brushing my teeth right before bed was keeping me awake — a doctor explains why and what to do instead to fall asleep fast

The seeds of a good night’s sleep are sown well before you get into bed — as I’ve only recently appreciated. For years, I’ve waited until I actually want to fall asleep before beginning my bedtime prep, only to then wonder why I no longer feel tired once my nighttime tasks are complete.

Sound familiar? Here, Dr William Lu, a sleep medicine physician, explains why the timing bedtime tasks, such as cleaning your teeth and washing your face, has more of an impact on your ability to fall asleep than you might think — how correcting it can help you fall asleep faster.

"The timing of those 'getting ready for bed' tasks matters because they act as psychological and physiological cues," explains Dr. Lu, medical director at Dreem Health.

Key takeaways: At a glance

• What you do in the lead up to bedtime has a direct impact the quality of your sleep, say experts.
• Waiting until right before you want to go to sleep to start your bedtime prep can give you a ‘second wind’ — a burst of energy just at the wrong time.
• Instead, getting ready for bed at the beginning of your evening helps ready both brain and body for sleep, so you fall asleep faster.

The nighttime routine mistake I didn't know I was making

For years, my nighttime routine has pretty much been the same. Whether I’m watching TV, scrolling on my phone or reading a book, I’ll wait until I can barely keep my eyes open and then I decide to start getting ready for bed.

By the time I'm finished, I’ve usually got a second wind of energy and I feel pretty alert. So much so that, even though I was falling asleep on the couch a few moments ago, my homeostatic sleep drive (sleep ‘hunger’) has decreased so much I find it difficult to nod off.

"When you brush your teeth, wash your face, and change into sleepwear, you’re signaling to your brain that sleep is the next step, which helps shift your body into a wind-down mode," explains Dr. Lu.

"If you fall asleep on the couch first, you’re essentially starting your sleep cycle in a low-quality, unintentional way, and then interrupting it to 'restart' in bed, which can trigger alertness and make it harder to fall back asleep."

What I’m doing instead

Now, instead of waiting until the very end of the day to get ready for bed (usually while trying to make as little noise or use as little light as possible to avoid waking the rest of my family up) I’ve shifted my wind-down routine to earlier in the evening — and Dr. Lu approves.

"Ideally, you want to do your bedtime prep right before your intentional wind-down period, not after you’re already sleepy," says Dr. Lu, who is also a board-certified neuropsychologist.

I've found that switching the timing of when I get ready for bed has benefited me in two specific ways.

For starters, getting ready for bed earlier means I have more time to do it. That means instead of a harried two-step skincare routine (a quick splash of water and a slick of moisturizer), I can spend longer on my self care.

Second of all, getting my bedtime prep out of the way earlier in the evening means that when my head starts nodding and my eyes are drooping, all I have to do is crawl into bed.

"Think of it as the transition point between daytime and nighttime," explains Dr. Lu. "Once you’re fully ready for bed, you can relax without needing to get back up, which helps preserve that drowsy feeling and makes it easier to fall asleep naturally when you get into bed."

Why it matters when you get ready for bed

You might not have paid too much attention to when you get ready for bed. However, timing your nighttime ablutions can make or break your night’s sleep. Here’s why…

Helps you stick to a regular bedtime

A regular bedtime is one of the pillars of the 7:1 sleep rule, which is the practice of clocking up at least seven hours of sleep and going to bed within the same one-hour window (half an hour on each side of an anchor time), at least five nights per week.

It might sound complicated, but, as part of a groundbreaking study alongside Vitality, researchers at The London School of Economics and Political Science (LSE) mined 47 million nights of sleep tracking data over several years and discovered that falling asleep at roughly the same time every night and getting as much sleep as you need can help you live up to four years longer.

I’ve found that getting ready for bed at the beginning of the evening helps reverse engineer my chosen bedtime, so I stick to the golden 7:1 sleep rule.

Helps prepare your body for sleep

A nighttime routine is essentially the same series of activities that prepares both mind and body for sleep (it acts as a cue to your body clock.)

Instead of whipping through my bedtime prep at the very end of the night (and when I already want to be asleep), moving it to earlier in the evening means it's incorporated into my shift to wind down.

“A bedtime routine just means doing the same things in the same kind of steps,” chartered psychologist and neuroscientist Dr Lindsay Browning previously explained to us.

“A bedtime routine really is about winding down,” explained the sleep expert. “It's about transitioning from the busy stress work of the day to sleep. And we can only sleep when we relax. When we’re anxious, we can’t sleep. So anything, literally anything, that you find relaxing is going to help you sleep.”

For me, that's allowing myself enough time to apply my retinol and hyaluronic acid before settling down for the evening.

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