The rules of the bedroom

In 1977 a sleep researcher at Dartmouth named Peter Hauri wrote a short list of rules for people who couldn't sleep, and called it sleep hygiene. Forty years later a Berkeley neuroscientist named Matthew Walker put the science into a bestseller, Why We Sleep, and the list became common knowledge. The rules haven't changed much because they work.

Regular hours: same bedtime, same wake time, every day, weekends included. The body's clock is the single biggest lever on sleep quality, and nothing wrecks it like sleeping in on Saturday. A cool, dark, quiet room: sixty-five degrees or so, blackout curtains or a mask, earplugs if you need them. No screens in the last hour, because the light tells the brain it's morning. No caffeine after early afternoon; it lasts longer than you think. Alcohol kept away from bedtime, because it knocks you out and then fragments the second half of the night. Get morning light within an hour of waking, which sets the clock for tonight. And the bed is for sleep: if you can't sleep after twenty minutes, get up, do something dull in dim light, and come back when you're tired.

That's the list. Hauri would have said that the hard part isn't knowing it. It's that every one of the rules asks you to give up something you like: the late show, the glass of wine, the Saturday lie-in, the phone in bed.

For this chamber, I'd frame it this way. Sleep hygiene is attention applied to the hours you're not aware. You can't attend while you're asleep. So you attend before: to the room, the light, the clock, the hour. The night takes care of itself if the evening was taken care of.