The Chair by the Window: Where to Sit When You’re Awake at 3 A.M.
KEY TAKEAWAYS What lights your face during the awake hour likely matters more than the room you are in. Two lab studies of evening light found that room light and screen light pushed the body’s night signals the wrong way. Neither tested a 3 a.m.…
How to Get Out of Bed Without Waking Your Partner at 3 A.M.
KEY TAKEAWAYS A shared mattress carries your movement to the other side. In a 2026 review, the four studies that measured it found that 30% to 46% of movements were shared between bed-sharing partners. Research on sound points to the single loudest…
It Isn’t the Blue Light. It’s What You’re Reading.
KEY TAKEAWAYS A review in Sleep Medicine Reviews pulled together the experiments on bright screens before bed. The delays were consistently tiny, and in several studies people fell asleep faster with the bright screen than without it. A trial of…
Turn the Clock Around: The Worst Habit of the Middle of the Night
KEY TAKEAWAYS In an experiment with 60 people, those told to watch a clock while trying to sleep reported more worry and took longer to fall asleep. It held for good sleepers as well as poor ones. In a second experiment with 38 people, clock-watchers not…
Why You Never Sleep Well the First Night in a Hotel
KEY TAKEAWAYS Bad sleep on the first night somewhere new has a name, the first-night effect, and a 2016 Brown University study found a reason for it: one half of the brain sleeps more lightly and stays on watch. That watchful half reacts most to…
Why the Hallway Light Wakes You Up and Not Your Partner
KEY TAKEAWAYS People differ enormously in how strongly their bodies react to light at night. In one study the gap was more than fiftyfold, so your partner sleeping through the hallway light tells you nothing about yourself. In a large lab study, ordinary…