A realistic wind-down routine

Every sleep routine written for women seems to assume a bath, a book, a herbal tea and ninety uninterrupted minutes.

This one assumes you have about ten minutes, one ear listening for a child, and a real chance of being needed again before morning.

Start with the one that matters most

If you change nothing else, change where the phone charges. Out of the bedroom, on the kitchen counter, on the other side of a door.

It is the single highest-return change available, it costs nothing, and it removes both the scrolling and the 2am glance at the time that turns being awake into being anxious about being awake.

If your phone is your alarm, buy the cheapest clock in the shop. It is the best money you will spend on sleep.

Ten minutes, not an hour

• Dim the lights in whatever room you're in for the last stretch of the evening — lamps rather than the overhead
• Put tomorrow somewhere. Three lines on paper so your brain stops rehearsing the list
• Do one thing that is physically the same every night — teeth, a glass of water, the same two stretches. The sequence is the signal, not the content
• Get into bed before you are desperate, not after

The daytime half

Most of what determines how well you sleep happens long before the evening, which is good news when the evening is not your own.

• Daylight in the morning, ideally within an hour of waking, even for five minutes on a doorstep
• Caffeine has a longer tail than people think — a two o'clock coffee is still working at bedtime for many women
• Move at some point in the day, however unglamorously
• A consistent wake time does more than a consistent bedtime, and it is the one you can actually control

When you are woken anyway

Keep it dark and dull. No overhead light, no phone, nothing that requires deciding anything.

If you are properly awake and it has been twenty minutes, get up and sit somewhere dim rather than lying there negotiating. Lying awake frustrated in bed slowly teaches your body that bed is where you are frustrated.

The honest part

If you have a baby waking twice a night, no routine will fix that, and any article claiming otherwise is selling something. What a routine can do is make the sleep you do get easier to fall into and less broken by worry.

And if the tiredness stays long after the nights have settled, that is a different problem and worth an appointment rather than a better bedtime.