A twelve minute evening routine

Start about an hour before you want to be asleep. Two minutes to close the day down, eight minutes of one practice, two minutes of lying still afterwards. Twelve minutes done every night beats forty minutes done twice.

Why twelve and not thirty

The length of a routine decides how often you skip it, and how often you skip it decides whether it does anything. An evening practice works through repetition over two to three weeks. A thirty minute routine that survives four nights out of fourteen produces nothing. Twelve minutes is short enough to still happen on the night you got home late and are already annoyed, and that night is the one that counts.

The shape

Two minutes, close the day. Phone face down and out of arm's reach. Lights down to one lamp. If there is a thought you keep circling, write one line about it on paper. Not a list, one line. The point is to stop holding it.
Eight minutes, one practice. One. Long out breath breathing, or humming, or a body scan, or legs up a wall, or two minutes of shaking followed by breathing if you are wound up and flat at once. Pick before you sit down, not while sitting.
Two minutes, do nothing. Stay lying down. Do not check whether it worked. The checking undoes it.

What to leave out

Anything with a screen, including a guided session you watch rather than listen to. Anything that requires choosing between options once you have started. Anything measured, including a sleep tracker score, because watching the number becomes its own source of tension. Any practice you have to be in a good state to begin, since the nights you need it are the nights you are not.

When it starts working

The first night usually feels like not much. Somewhere in the second week people notice they fall asleep faster, or that the 3am waking is shorter when it happens. The change is in how fast you come down, not in never being wound up again.

The morning half, which nobody mentions

Ten minutes of daylight in your eyes within an hour of waking does more for tonight than anything you do tonight. If you only do one thing on this whole page, and evenings are chaos, do that instead.

If picking is the part that fails

Wind Down Daily does the picking. Three taps before bed on how you slept, how tight you are, how much is left. That same evening, one practice of around twelve minutes, and one line saying why that one. Five days free, then twenty nine dollars once or twelve dollars a month.

This is wellbeing practice, not treatment, and it does not replace care from a doctor or a therapist.