Getting the night ready: ten minutes of breathing before bed

People tell me the same sentence, almost word for word: 'once I'm asleep I sleep beautifully, I just need an hour to get there.' Then comes the list of attempts, the earlier bedtime, the herbal tea, the new pillow, the app that counts sleep cycles. The tiredness is there all right. What is missing is the handover from one state to the other.

I watch the opposite happen most weeks at Pointe Rouge. People turn up with a locked jaw, talking fast, three emails already answered in the car, and twenty minutes later they are dawdling on the sand, hunting for their keys in slow motion. In between they breathed differently, and that was all they did. In your own bed at night you have the same lever within reach.

Your nervous system wants a slope

Your body holds the line all day. It answers whatever turns up and it braces for what comes next, including through the five o'clock meeting in that windowless room on the second floor. Then in the evening we ask it to shut everything down in thirty seconds, somewhere between the last message sent and the light switch. It cannot, and I think we are rather unfair to it about that. Work on slow breathing points the same way: lengthening the out-breath goes along with the body tipping towards rest. In a session I see it happen with no equipment at all, voices drop a tone and somebody always ends up yawning.

Ten minutes, the same ritual every evening

1. 01Bring the light down about twenty minutes before the time you want to be asleep. A bedside lamp, a reading light, never the ceiling bulb. It is the easiest signal to give, and the one the body picks up fastest.
2. 02Sit on the edge of the bed, or lie on your back, one hand on your belly and the other on your ribs. Perfect posture does not interest me; I only want you to feel where the air lands.
3. 03Two minutes with nothing changed. Breathe the way you breathe, and watch. Plenty of people work out right then that their breath sits high, that it is short, and that it catches for a fraction of a second after the in-breath. Noticing it is already doing something.
4. 04Now set the rhythm: in through the nose for four counts, out through the nose or through slightly parted lips for six to eight, without forcing the end of it and without shoving the air out. If you are hungry for air on the next in-breath, take a count or two off the out-breath. Comfort beats the number.
5. 05Five or six minutes of that, then drop the counting and let the breath go its own way for a last minute. Very often people fall asleep during that minute, and they half hold it against me for making them miss the end.

Four things that wreck the night without anyone noticing

• The screen at arm's length in the dark. Everyone blames the blue light, and my suspicions are mostly about the rest of it: the endless scrolling, the news, other people's lives, a brain switched back on the second you asked it to wind down.
• The last email, the one you skim at eleven at night to put your mind at rest, which then leaves you sitting with a problem you cannot fix before tomorrow morning. Read it before dinner if you must read it.
• Late training. A hard session finished at half nine leaves the body hot and alert long after the shower. I will never tell you to give up sport. Move the session, or give it ten minutes of coming back down at the end.
• The review of the day, done in bed once the light is off and with no pen anywhere near. Tomorrow's jobs keep circling because they are written nowhere. Two lines scribbled on the kitchen notepad often do more for your night than any breathing technique, mine included.

Three in the morning, eyes wide open

Waking in the night is ordinary. What builds insomnia is what you do in the five minutes afterwards. Do not look at the clock: knowing it is ten past three gives you nothing and starts you counting the sleep you have left. Leave the phone where it is. Stay on your side, still, and go back to long out-breaths, without counting them precisely, letting the body weigh a little heavier with each release of air. A thought comes back? Name it once, silently, then return to the breath. And if after twenty minutes or so you are still wide awake, get up in the half dark and do something calm and dull, folding laundry does the job nicely, then go back to bed when the tiredness returns. I thought that last instruction was ridiculous for years, until the night I tried it on myself.

So, tonight: lamp low at ten, five minutes of long out-breaths sitting on the edge of the bed, and you do it again tomorrow. It took me years to admit that repetition does most of the work, far ahead of technique. I have no idea whether that holds for everyone, but tell me in a fortnight how it went for you.