Read fiction before sleeping

Phạm Trần Hoàn Thịnh

For many of us, life’s challenges include making time for yourself, and getting enough sleep. For some of us, that includes finding time to read more books. Maybe the people who don’t read novels simply never found the time to try.

Summer holidays might give you time for additional sleep and reading, not necessarily on the beach. In any case, you can always try introducing a new good habit, and replacing a bad one.

Doomscrolling

Doomscrolling feels obviously bad for your mental health, especially as a way to kill time before going to bed. Self-inflicted negative energy seems unlikely to lead to a good night’s sleep. The proliferation of text neck (a.k.a. tech neck) syndrome doesn’t help either.

Replace doomscrolling with wholesome-scrolling. Some social media platforms let you combat algorithmic surrender (a.k.a. cognitive surrender), by curating a wholesome feed. For example, Reddit communities include moderated doom-free feeds, such as r/wholesomememes and r/justgalsbeingchicks.

Replacing doomscrolling with wholesome-scrolling makes the problem worse, though. Nice content won’t make you rage quit, and you’ll stay up even later, way past bedtime. Worse yet, whatever the content, the screen keeps you awake as well.

Late-night blue light

Everyone will recognise the NHS’s list of insomnia, at some point in their lives. Fortunately, it also states that insomnia ‘usually gets better by changing your sleeping habits’, and lists concise and practical dos and don’ts. In particular:

do not watch television or use devices, like smartphones, right before going to bed, because the blue light makes you more awake

This pairs nicely with the positive advice to:

relax at least 1 hour before bed – for example, take a bath or read a book

If you have a bath at home – almost universally true in England – you can do both at the same time. Relaxmaxxing by reading in the bath also makes it easier to read without attention-seeking family members interrupting.

Fictive Rest

It turns out reading fiction in bed might do more to help you fall asleep than merely keeping phones and tablets out of reach. In 2010, Canadian writer Douglas Coupland published this definition of fictive rest, taken here from the appendix of his novel, Player One.

Fictive rest

The common inability of many people to be able to sleep until they have read even the tiniest amount of fiction.

Although the element of routine is important at sleep time, reading fiction in bed allows another person’s inner voice to hijack ones own, thus relaxing and lubricating the brain for sleep cycles. One booby trap, though: Don’t finish your book before you fall asleep. Doing so miraculously keeps your brain whizzing for hours.

This explains why you can’t finish a really good book when you don’t sleep enough: you never read more than half a page at a time, before falling asleep. Don’t fight involuntary eye-closing when you read in bed. Take the hint that you should go to bed earlier, or get up later.

Minimum viable reading

It doesn’t matter how long you read before bed, as long as you get sleepy, and don’t feel like books take forever to finish. Instead of spending your life stuck on some book, read enough to fall asleep, but also enough to actually finish a book in days or weeks, rather than months.