Does Reading Before Bed Help You Sleep?
This is a question that I’ve asked myself a few times in the past: will reading before bed help me sleep? I find it hard to wind down after a long day of work, especially because I work an overnight shift and my job entails sitting at a computer for at least eight hours straight. Going right from staring at a computer screen to trying to sleep while the sun is up can be a real challenge that results in my lying there awake for hours at a time. This was actually part of a different experiment I did in which I read every day for a week straight, the video for which is on my YouTube channel.
In today’s post, I’ll use a combination of anecdotal experience and actual research I did (yeah, that’s right, I can be smart) to answer the simple question: does reading before bed help you sleep?
Blue Lights and the Effect on Sleep
You’ve probably heard this same advice over and over again: don’t look at your phone before bed. Put it across the room. Put it in another room. Don’t watch TV before or during bed. Yet, I know as well as you that you most likely do look at your phone before bed, just like I often do (regrettably). This suggestion isn’t just some boomer out there trying to tell you that “Phone Bad”, though. There’s a real science behind it. Blue light, the light emitted by most screens, is harmful not just for your eyes, but for your sleep as well. Blue light can decrease melatonin levels, which is crucial for restful sleep.
[Source: https://journals.physiology.org/doi/full/10.1152/japplphysiol.01413.2009]
This is actually going to extend beyond your phone, too. EReaders use blue lights, too, though some use a negligible amount (the Kindle Paperwhite, for example). This means that when it comes to screens before bed, my recommendation is to avoid all of them.
Reading Before Bed
The question remains: can reading before bed help you sleep? Is it better for you than just putting your phone away and closing your eyes? The answer is a pretty simple yes. I could end the post right here, but I’m going to expound on this point and give you a few reasons why reading a book before bed can help you sleep.
Distraction from Screens
Screen time, as mentioned in the previous section of this post, can lead to less restful sleep, so it’s good to keep yourself from looking at screens before bed. If you’re actively reading a book before you fall asleep, you’re not looking at your screen (unless you’re someone who is constantly jumping in and out of your book to check social media, which doesn’t sound like a great reading experience to me). This may seem simple, but it’s something that I didn’t even notice until I’d been reading before bed for a few days: I’m getting sleepy more quickly because I’m not looking at a blue light. I can’t look at screens because I’m reading a book! Duh!
Improve the Quality of Sleep
In 2021, there was a study conducted with nearly 500 participants on this very topic. They were working to determine if sleep quality could be improved by reading a book before bed. By the end of it, nearly half of the readers reported that their sleep had improved while only a quarter of those who were not reading reported better sleep. Those are necessarily sensational, groundbreaking numbers, but they do show that there’s definitely something to this notion that reading before bed can help you sleep.
[Source: https://trialsjournal.biomedcentral.com/articles/10.1186/s13063-021-05831-3]
It Doesn’t Take Long!
This is going to vary from person to person, but I personally found it to be quite interesting. For me, it does not take long at all for me to fall asleep when I’m reading a book. Nights when I’m not reading a book can often result in well over an hour of staring at the ceiling instead. When I am reading a book, I often find my eyelids feeling heavy after just twenty or thirty minutes. Before I know it, I’ve fallen asleep. This really stands in contrast to when I was much younger and could read well into the night, but… I guess this is growing up.
Additional Suggestions
Now, I’m not going to leave you with just that, though! I have a couple of additional suggestions for you that should help to improve the experience of reading before bed, at least from my own experience. These should help make reading before bed a more accessible, convenient, and reliable way to fall asleep easily when bedtime comes around.
First of all, don’t read with the brightest lights in the room. Don’t have every light in your room on. Don’t have them all dialed to the highest brightness percentage. Get a dimmable lamp or a soft, warm light for your bedside table. Better yet, if it’s available to you, get a voice-activated, colorful lighting setup that you can configure for bedtime reading. Myself, I have two reading modes for my bedroom: bedtime and daytime. During the day, the light is a robin’s egg blue color. At night, my reading lights are soft oranges and purples, to imitate a sunset. When I feel myself getting tired, I just tell Google to turn off the lights, close my eyes, and I’m gone.
Personally, I use Philips Hue, but there’s also a great bedside lamp that I’ll link below which could make for an excellent reading light!
My second tip is going to be don’t use eReaders for your bedtime. I have a Kindle Paperwhite and I love it, but even though its light isn’t as harmful as the lights of most other screens, I’ve personally found it to be less conducive to falling asleep than paper books. Again, I have nothing wrong with eReaders at all, but from my own personal experience, they’re better left for daytime reading as opposed to “I want to fall asleep please” reading.
Conclusion
And that’s the post! I wanted to put this up a while ago but just didn’t have the time to put it together in conjunction with my Reading Every Day for One Week video (which you can watch here). I also want to say that I’ve done my best to continue reading before bed ever since that video. While I’m not as consistent with it as I’d like (sometimes I’m just not in the mood), it has never failed to give me a good night’s rest! I really should be trying to read every single night, honestly.