How To Create An Evening Routine (For Beginners)

1. 01 Introduction: Do you struggled to get to sleep every night and make consistent progress towards your goals. If so, then an evening routine will be exactly what you need. Hi, my name is James, and in this Skillshare course, are going to be teaching you all about evening routines. What are evening routines? What they do? How do you form an IV routine? What are some of the habits that you should include? Wasn't tips you can use to form your own evening routine. What the benefits of early evening routine? How does it help you sleep? What are the most effective strategies to creating and following your evening routine? All of this will be covered in this Skillshare course. So let's begin with the basics. What is an evening routine? That is a good question. And even routine is simply a series of actions or habits that you do every evening, every night, just before he go to bed, similar to a morning routine and even in routine is repeated every single day. You follow the same habits, the same actions at the same series and sequence of these actions and habits every night before you go to sleep. The idea here is it helps you to wind down from the day to help prepare your mind to go to sleep, to be consistent daily progress towards the things that you want to achieve, and to be able to spend some time just for yourself, even in routines are a really enjoyable way to end each day and can be something that you look forward to. Their nice way to motivate you throughout the rest of the day and can really help you to get through some rough spots in each day. One of the main benefits of an even routine, which we are going to be learning a little bit more about later on, is its benefits for sleep. We all know that sleep consistency and having a set wake-up time, bedtime is very, very useful and important to getting good quality sleep every night. This consistent schedule with your circadian rhythm can be influenced by your evening routine. There are other factors as well that go into making your evening routine positive and helping you to have a better life and sleep better. For example, one of the things that you'll learn in this course is by staying away from your phone late at night, you can actually improve your quality of sleep and even in routine will help you to do just that. So if you're curious or interested at all about this course and what we're gonna be learning here that make sure you continue watching and stay tuned for the next video. 2. 02 MoreDetail: So now let's look at evening routines and a little bit more detail. As I said in the first video, one of the main benefits of having even routine is helping your circadian rhythm and getting better sleep. There are certain habits that you can include and exclude from the evening routine to aid your sleep. For some ideas about what you can do to help your sleep, you can check out one of my other Skillshare courses. But here we'll be focusing on those habits specifically, and some more tips and tricks for your evening routine to help you get to sleep. So why does this work? Our bodies are programmed to follow a circadian rhythm, and this is essentially our wake-sleep cycle. By having a set and consistent wake-up time and bedtime, you can help your body to fall into a kind of pattern of tiredness and waking up your body's internal hormones such as melatonin and adenosine helps you regulate your sleep cycle. If your sleep cycle fluctuates a lot because you don't have a consistent wake up. So I'm or bedtime if you're going to bed at 08:00 PM on sunlight and 12 PM on overnight, then you put it doesn't really know what to do. When should I release this hormone, insulin, make your body stop feeling tired? You bring cop figure that out accurately if it doesn't have some information to work from and having a set wake-up time at bedtime, do just that. It helps your body to operate more efficiently and thoughts helps you to get better sleep. There are some other benefits and uses of an evening routine though. One of the other main benefits of an evening routine is helping you to wind down from the day. It has been is particularly stressful day at work or you've just had a lot going on, or there's lots in your head. Having an evening routine and a specific sequence of habits that help you to relax each night can be really, really beneficial. This also helps you to get better sleep, which is obviously one of the things we're focusing on here, but it's also extremely valuable on its own. But if your mental health and your well-being, you can use evening routines to make sure we are progressing toward your goals every day. You can use them to improve your health, to improve your flexibility. You can use them to learn or just to spend some time for yourself as we've ever routine, your specific evening routine will be different to mine, which will be different to someone else's Example habits that I'm providing care are very beneficial to pretty much everyone. And of course you can go away, you can tweak, and you can suggest your own habits and implement whatever you want however you want. The idea behind this course is to help you have a better understanding, have a clearer direction that you can go in to form your own evening routine and to know what to include to help you live your best life. So to clarify, and even routine is a sequence of actions or habits that you follow every evening or every night before bed, which help you to achieve a goal or work towards something that you want to achieve, even if that's something small, like getting better sleep. Each evening routine consists of a sequence of habits. Habits, if you're not already aware, are automatic behaviors that our brain uses to save mental energy. They're repeated behaviors that offered some kind of reward in exchange for doing a specific behavior. Each habit run through a habit loop, or the habit cycle, which is Q, which is the thing that prompts the habit, craving, which is the motivation that drives the habit forwards. Then you have the routine, which is the hub itself, and the reward, which is the outcome of the habit. Each habit goes through this habit loop. And if the habit is successful, then your brain will remember that it's worth or doing in the future. That's an overview of habits. If you wanted to learn more about habits, I have a specific in-depth course all about habits. One thing covered in that course, which we'll be covering again here is the idea of habit stacking. This concept is very, very simple and essentially it goes like this. Before I do X habit, I would do why habit? Or after I do that, I will do why habit? As you can imagine, this comes in extremely useful when you're forming routines. I'm following routines for an evening routine. This makes a lot of sense because you would start your routine with a certain habit, which would then be followed by another habit and then another habit, et cetera, until you go to sleep. That's essentially the practical outcome of this course. How you can follow habit stacking to create your own evening routine. Before we learn about that, let's learn about setting a wake-up time out of bed time. 3. 03 WakeAndBedTime: As we looked at earlier, having a wake-up time and at bedtime is extremely useful for helping your circadian rhythm and getting better sleep. In fact, it's probably the most effective way to ensure you're getting good sleep every single night. All you have to do is pick a time that you want to wake up and then go to bed and making sure you're getting enough sleep each night and then actually wake up at that time? Every single day? Yes. That does mean weekends. So here is exactly how we do that. First, you start by choosing the time that you want to wake up each day and remember it, this will apply to weekends as well, your specific wake-up time that you choose. And I do encourage you to follow along here can be influenced by different things that you want to achieve in the morning or different commitments that you already have. For example, my wake-up time is 45 AM. This is because I want to go to the gym early in the morning. What is quiet? It was amazed that have some time in the mornings to welcome myself working with businesses and what was my goals? So my wake-up sign is 440 because I have things I want to achieve during that morning slot. I pick this early hour in the morning because I know that I'm most productive in the morning and I'm a morning person for you, however, you might be a night owl. So your most productive in the evening. If that's the case, then what you'd want to do is pick a wake-up time. There is slightly later in the day that leaves you enough time to get ready for work or wherever you want to do or need to do, and making sure that you have that time later in the day, at the end of the day, to make progress towards your goals for the sake of this course, let's use 60 m as an example. Next, you have to decide how much sleep you want to get. 700.5 hours of sleep is the most optimal time for every adult to get each night. This is because it's five complete sleep cycles and that's the recommended amount of seven to nine hours. Nine hours is the alternative for those who require a bit more sleep, and that is six complete sleep cycles. Now, you might be one of those people who says, Oh, I can function on six hours of sleep. I don't need more sleep. If that's you and that's fine, then go for it. Most people cannot function optimally on six hours of sleep. And I highly recommend that you try and aim for at least seven hours of sleep every night. But if that's you and you can't function on six hours, can function. Then go ahead and do that. So now you've figured out how much sleep you want to get each night, agile wake-up time. The next step is to work backwards. So with our 6AM example, wake-up time, we're going to work backwards 7.5 hours. That brings us to 1030 PM. If you're asleep at 1030 PM, then getting 7.5 hours of sleep is possible to wake up at 06:00 AM. I wanna put some emphasis there on asleep. If you're going to bed at 1030 AM and you want to get 7.5 hours of sleep and then still wake up at six AM. That's not possible because it takes you time to fall asleep. For most people, this is between 20 and 30 minutes, so it's very important to factor this time in to the next step. Next step is figuring out at bedtime. Your bedtime is the time that you want to turn off your lights, your curfew, some might call it and be ready to try to get the sleep. It's useful to leave a little bit more time than you think is necessary for the stage to ensure that you are actually getting enough sleep and being able to wake up at your desired time. As I said before, this is usually 20 to 40 minutes for most people, if you're unsure that I recommend starting with 13 minutes. This also helps us to work out easier maps. So you've got your wake-up time, you've worked backwards to the time when you need to be asleep, and then you've worked backwards some more to get to your bedtime. In our example that is 60 and wake up. So I'm ten flow C needs to be asleep and then ten PM bedtime, getting into bed at 10:00 PM and it takes you half an hour to fall asleep, then you know, you'll get 705 hours of sleep, the sleep that you want, and be able to wake up at your desired wake-up time. Essentially, that's how you set a wake-up time at a bedside. From here, you work backwards from your bedtime and include the time it takes to run through your evening routine. It's gonna take some trial and error at some measuring, some testing to figure out how long it takes you to go through your entire evening routine. If you're unsure about what you can include in your even your Jane Dartmoor, right? Because we're just about to get on to that. So just bear with me, keep watching and we'll learn how to plan a form your evening routine. 4. 04 RoutineAndHabits: As we looked at earlier, having a wake-up time and at bedtime is extremely useful for helping your circadian rhythm and getting better sleep. In fact, it's probably the most effective way to ensure you're getting good sleep every single night. All you have to do is pick a time that you want to wake up and then go to bed and making sure you're getting enough sleep each night and then actually wake up at that time? Every single day? Yes. That does mean weekends. So here is exactly how we do that. First, you start by choosing the time that you want to wake up each day and remember it, this will apply to weekends as well, your specific wake-up time that you choose. And I do encourage you to follow along here can be influenced by different things that you want to achieve in the morning or different commitments that you already have. For example, my wake-up time is 45 AM. This is because I want to go to the gym early in the morning when it's quiet. It was amazed that have some time in the mornings to work on myself, working my businesses. And what was my goals. So my wake-up sign is 440 because I have things I want to achieve during that morning slot. I pick this early hour in the morning because I know that I most productive in the morning and I'm a morning person for you, however, you might be a night owl. So your most productive in the evening. If that's the case, then what you'd want to do is pick a wake-up time. There is slightly later in the day that leaves you enough time to get ready for work or wherever you want to do or need to do, and making sure that you have that time later in the day, at the end of the day, to make progress towards your goals for the sake of this course, let's use 60 m as an example. Next, you have to decide how much sleep you want to get. 700.5 hours of sleep is the most optimal time for every adult to get each night. This is because it's five complete sleep cycles and that's the recommended amount of seven to nine hours. Nine hours is the alternative for those who require a bit more sleep, and that is six complete sleep cycles. Now, you might be one of those people who says, Oh, I can function on six hours of sleep. I don't need more sleep. If that's you and that's fine, then go for it. Most people cannot function optimally on six hours of sleep. And I highly recommend that you try and aim for at least seven hours of sleep every night. But if that's you and you can't function on six hours, can function. Then go ahead and do that. So now you've figured out how much sleep do you want to get each night? Agile wake-up time. The next step is to work backwards. So we've lost 60 m example wakeup, So I'm going to work backwards 7.5 hours. That brings us to 1030 PM. If you're asleep at 1030 PM, then getting 7.5 hours of sleep is possible to wake up at 06:00 AM. I want to put some emphasis there on asleep. If you're going to bed at 1030 AM and you want to get 7.5 hours of sleep and then still wake up at six AM. That's not possible because it takes you time to fall asleep. For most people, this is between 20 and 30 minutes, so it's very important to factor this time in to the next step. Next step is figuring out a bedtime. Your bedtime is the time that you want to turn off your lights, your curfew, some might call it and be ready to try to get the sleep. It's useful to leave a little bit more time than you think is necessary for the stage to ensure that you're actually getting enough sleep and being able to wake up at your desired time. As I said before, this is usually 20 to 40 minutes for most people, if you're unsure that I recommend starting with 13 minutes. This also helps us to work out easier maps. So you've got your wake-up time, you've worked backwards to the time when you need to be asleep, and then you work backwards some more to get to your bedtime. In our example that is 60, I wake up time, foci needs to be asleep, and then ten PM bedtime. If you're getting into bed, a tambien and it takes you half an hour to fall asleep, then you know, you'll get 700.5 hours of sleep, the sleep that you want, and be able to wake up at your desired wake-up time. Essentially, that's how you set a wake-up time at a bedside from here and you work backwards from your bedtime and include the time it takes to run through your evening routine. It's gonna take some trial and error at some measuring, some testing to figure out how many it takes you to go through your entire evening routine. If you're unsure about what you're going to include your evening routine, dark, right? Because we're just about to get onto that. So if you're still with me, keep watching and we'll learn how to plan a form your evening routine. Welcome to the practical section, how to plan and create your evening routine. We're going to begin with deciding on habits that you will deform in your evening routine. There are a few specific habits that I recommend everyone to include in their evening routine and to prepare for their morning routine with a set of habits that I recommend everyone to include in their morning routine. The first of these is to put away any technology and any screens, our phones or computers, or laptops or screens, they give off a light called blue light. Blue light is very, very damaging to asleep because it suppresses melatonin, which is the sleep hormone. If you're looking at screens late at night, particularly if you're looking at your phone in bed, you're going to struggle to feel tired because that blue light that's emitted off of the phone suppressing melatonin, which is preventing you from feeling tired and being able to fall asleep. Considering this one of the most important things that you can do for your sleep health and your well-being overall is to put away your devices. The first thing, your evening routine for me, what I do is I put my phone is charged, leave it downstairs, and then dope, touching into a wake-up in the morning. I've gone through my morning routine. I recommend that you could do the same. It's very useful to have your device, your phone, and your screens in a completely different room. Otherwise that always there is a structure and you can simply pick it up in the night if you can't get to sleep. And then you've just prevent yourself from going to sleep for a little bit longer. So that's the first thing I recommend. Put away your screens, put where your devices, and then leave them. The rest of the night until you go to sleep. For those who have ingrained habit of using your phone in bed, this is going to be difficult, but there is a solution. Walk around and we'll get to that later on. The next habit I recommend everyone to do is to fill a water bottle or glossary of water for waking up in the morning. When we wake up after 7.5 hours of sleep, we're dehydrated, we haven't drunk water is 7.5 hours. You wouldn't do that when you're awake. This is why it's so important to have water first thing in the morning, that feeling of quirkiness or tightness that you experienced from waking up? Yeah. Thus dehydration. If you have that water as soon as you wake up, I promise you, you'll feel much better almost immediately. It was aiding your health and your just feel great. So that's the second habit I recommend everyone to do is to fill a glass of water or water bottle to be drunk the next morning. They're the two main habits that I recommend to everyone, regardless of what their personal routines are. And these habits that I'm about to recommend now are pretty much applicable to everyone as well. But you can pick and choose from them which ones you like the most and which ones. So the purpose that you want the most, your evening routine should be about winding down from the day and relaxing. Kind of switching off. This is a good ritual to have when you're putting your phone away. So kinda disconnecting from the world and you just take some time away for yourself to wind down. That's enough sleep. There are few things that you can do to really help this process. The first is taking some time to stretch to help your body to physically worn down. This was the age of your flexibility and it shows that you have better health for longer, putting tension into your body and then releasing that tension also helps to relax you and prepare you for sleep. So that's one habit that I recommend everyone to do as well. Aside from the obvious things like getting dressed into your pajamas or brushing your teeth and go to the toilet. There are a few of the habits that I also recommend. One of these is prayer or practicing gratitude. Gratitude can be a really nice way to end the day on a positive note, simply taking some time to thank the universe or God or wherever it is you believe in or nothing in particular at all. The three things that you're grateful for can put a positive spin on the day and leave you feeling happy and in a positive state of mind. It also means that when you wake up you have a positive view of things rather than the weights of the previous day holding you down and have a habit that I always recommend is meditation. Meditation helps you declare your mind. Worn down, reduces your stress, helps you to calm and collect yourself and really prepare for sleep. One of the problems that many people face when they're trying to sleep is too many faults in their head. Meditation helps with exactly that. That being said, meditation is quiet time commitment if you don't have 15 minutes every night to spare. So an alternative is journaling. Journaling serves a similar purpose to meditation, where it helps you do through the events of the day, I'd get out of your head. You can combine this with gratitude as well. You can write your journal and then list out through things that you're grateful for and paper rather than saying them out loud. And then finally, one of the habits that I recommend to everyone is reading. Specifically, reading fiction is very important that we read nonfiction because it helps us to learn and improve. But fiction, specifically in the evening is very, very useful to help him. You wind down, it's a way to switch off your brain. And this is also a very, very useful for those of you that have that phone habit using your phone in bed. I was talking about earlier. If you're the type of person that needs some form of mental stimulation in bed than reading fiction could do exactly that for you. A good way to pass the time while you're leaving an hour or so to get disconnected from those screens and allow your body to feel tired and prepare itself for sleep. Those are the habits that I recommend everyone to include in that evening routines. From here, you can fill your evening routine with habits that you want to do yourself. These could be habits that you do every day anyway, and it makes sense to do them in the evening. Two examples could be brushing your teeth or preparing a breakfast, overnight oats for the morning. And I, for example, could be fitting your pet or watering your plants. It could be locking doors or it could be closing your curtains. Any of these small habits that you do every day and needs to be done every day. Atoms your evening routine to fill out a bit. The more things that you have in your evening routine up until a point, the better helps with consistency and keeping things on track. And also gives you more time to wind down, relax, and work through the events of the day. There's one important thing that I want to mention and that is exercise. Please try not to do exercise and your evening routine. The reason is because exercising gets your heart rate up, it gets your body moving and your blood flowing. This is not what you want when you're trying to go to sleep. Having an elevated heart rate and loss of energy in the body is entirely opposite of what your body wants to be doing before he can sleep. So try and avoid long exercise where possible. That being said, if you can exercise during the day, that's going to help you to be able to fall asleep easier later at night. In essence, your evening routine should consist of activities that help you to relax, to wind down, worked through the day, mentally. You can work this out by filling your evening routine of habits that you're going to be doing every day anyway, such as brushing your teeth or feeding a pet and round it off with these relaxing habits before you go to sleep. Now let's look at the specifics of forming an evening routine. 5. 05 ExampleHabitStacking: Earlier we looked at this concept of habit stacking, having now decided on the habits that you want to include in your evening routine from the previous section. You can then begin to create a plan and a structure to form your evening routine. I'll walk you through this process step-by-step right now. So let's begin by the habit that I recommended everyone to do, and that is putting your phone in any screens away. That's the first habit. Then you'll follow that up with a second habit. And in our example that was filling a water bottle for the morning. This is how I recommend everyone's evening routine stops. Then you can fill out with any habits that you want, so long as they're relaxing and help you to wind down. So here's an example of routine, and this is how you do it with habit stacking. First, you'd start by putting your phone away. So good evening routine starts. I put my phone away. Then after I put my phone away, I will fill my water bottle for the morning. After I filled my bottle for the warning, I'll go upstairs and I'll get dressed into my pajamas. After I've dressed in my pajamas, I will meditate. After I meditated, I would then practice gratitude for five minutes, saying three things that I'm grateful for and recapping on the day. After practicing gratitude, I will do a full body stretch for five minutes. After doing my stretching, I will get into bed and journal for five minutes. And finally, after journaling, I would then read fiction for half an hour and then you finish that off with, I'll go to sleep. So that is essentially how you form an evening routine. I recommend that you write this down on paper because it helps you to give a structured order that you can follow step-by-step, especially at the start when you're forming this evening routine after a week or so, a couple of weeks, then this evening routine will become automatic and you don't have to consciously worry about it. When your evening routine time comes around, then your body will prepare itself and your brain will know. Okay, thanks to my evening routine, get ready for bed to all of my stuff, and then fall asleep. Once you formed in the evening routine, it becomes much easier and quicker to add additional habits or remove habits from this evening routine if you've got a strong foundation to work from, so you've got five habits, for example, in your evening routine. Then it becomes easier to add additional habits or takeaway specific habits from that routine. Is it because the evening routine has already been formed and you can use habit stacking to your advantage. Essentially, habit stacking makes this process much quicker and easier. So say you wanted to add the habit of feeding your pets into your evening routine? Well, after I fill my water, then I'm going to feed my pets and then you just adapt to retune. Make sure you're following it. And before you know it, it's part of your evening routine going back to our timings from earlier. So I'll wake up time, our sleep time and our bedtime with densa, evening routine time after you've done your evening routine for a few weeks and you know roughly how long it takes you to complete your evening routine. You can use that to work backwards from your bedtime. So say it takes you an hour to do your evening routine. Work backwards from your bedtime, one hour. So I'll bet I was 10. What PAC wisdom nine. And then, you know, at nine o'clock, you should start your evening routine. So you put your phone away and you begin your evening routine by doing this, you know, you're compressing your evening routine. You go embed, prepared to go to sleep, and you've given yourself enough time to fall asleep to ensure that you're getting enough sleep to wake up and your desired wake-up time. If you have any questions or concerns or want me to clarify, then start our discussion below or get in touch, I'll be sure to help you out. Finally, let's move on to some tips and strategies to helping you form your evening routine. 6. 06 TipsAndStrategies: Welcome to the penultimate lesson in this course. Here we'll be covering tips and strategies to help them you form your evening routine. The first step we want to cover is habit stacking routines. It easier to form than single habits which usually takes 66 days on average. Because of habits vacuum, you can use habit stacking to back existing habits, thus making it quicker and easier to form your teens even if you don't have an existing evening routine, I'm sure you can find at least one habit that you already do every night. Even if this is something as basic as brushing your teeth or just getting into bed, you can use this habit to form your evening routine around it. So let's say you brush your teeth every night, for example, which I hope you do. Well. You probably want to be doing your phone away before you brush your teeth. So before I brush my teeth of a funny way, as you also want to be doing specific habits after you've put your phone away, but before you brush your teeth. So using habit stacking for your brushing your teeth habit as an example, before I brush my teeth, I will fill my water bottle. Before I fill my water bottle, I will put my phone away. After I brush my teeth. I will put my pajamas on. After I put my video Amazon, I'll meditate five minutes, whatever your routine is, use your existing habits as a base for habit stacking and work around them. This will help you to speed up the time it takes to form your routine. And other tip that I mentioned earlier is to write your evening routine out. Doing this helps to solidify the routine in your brain and thoughts helps you to follow it and understand what you're doing. And helps to become automatic quicker because you know what to do after each habit, I recommend you write this in both the list of hubristic you want to accomplish and then the desired order that you're going to be doing using habit stacking. So you start with your existing habit and then you work around that. Or if you already want to start from scratch, then you start with your first habit and then go according to this order that etc, etc, etc. The final tip is to play around with your older until you find something that works for you. Even routines are constantly changing and they will change throughout your life as you go on to do different things or want to achieve different goals. Sometimes you'd be wanting to wake up at 06:00 AM and sometimes you want to take up a full first-year. Sometimes you might want to wake up at 08:00 AM at sometime in the future, you might want to practice a musical instrument before bed. Or maybe you want to color your coloring book for five minutes. Whoever is that you want to include any stage in your life know that your evening routine can be flexible and adapt in the present note with this evening routine that you're trying to form, play around with the order experiment, try different things, test things and see what works, what doesn't work, what helps you get the best sleep? What helps you make the most progress towards your goals? Write these out, record these things, and then tweak some more, do some more testing, see how that impacts your sleep, how that impacts your progress, et cetera. Doing this will help you to optimize your evening routine and lived the life that you want to live. Just like anything in life improvement comes from development, iteration, testing and feedback. Do this if your evening routine to get the best results. 7. 07 Conclusion: Congratulations, You made it to the end of this evening routine course. I'm so glad you stuck with me throughout the entire thing. And I hope by now you should have a clear idea of what you want to include in your evening routine and how you're going to form that evening routine. We've looked at what evening routines are. How does a wake-up time at bedtime and evening routine time? What habits you should include your evening routine, how you go about forming these, how you can use habit stacking to form your evening routine as of different tips and strategies that you can use to successfully start creating your evening routine. I want to thank you again for learning with me. I do appreciate you sticking away to the end. I really do hope that I've been able to help you. Even your chains can be incredibly useful for helping you get better sleep and helping you work towards your goals. Even if those goals and just personal goals, like making sure you're working on yourself every day or giving yourself some mental time and space to relax and wind down each day. There's nothing more important than the health of yourself. So take care of your mind, your body, your soul, through your evening routine. I hope you've learned something and you're ready to go and create that evening routine if you haven't already. So here's my challenge to you. Create your evening routine as soon as you finish this course, if you haven't already write out all the habits that you want to include your habit stacking order, set your wake-up time, your bedtime, your sleep time, and your evening routine times, and then run that evening routine tonight. You don't have to do it perfectly because nothing is perfect. You do have to try. That's my challenge to you. I promise you, if you follow this every single night, you will see improvements and benefits in your life. Thank you so much again. And until the next course piece.