Morning routines are all the rage but I believe there is something to be said for starting the night before with an intentional evening ritual or routine. When we end our day on a pleasant note with everything set up to begin the next day, we have a much better chance of getting off on the right foot in the morning.
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Create an Evening Ritual
Our daily routines and rituals can and should change over time. We can’t expect to set up routines and never alter them again. Life and circumstances change and so should our routines.
I first wrote about creating an evening ritual back in 2016 which you can see here:
Create a Beautiful Life With An Evening Ritual
Some of what I wrote was aspirational rather than my current reality. It’s interesting to see that I have indeed incorporated some of what I set out to do. Not all, but some.
As we enter this new season of Autumn (in the Northern Hemisphere) as well as the ongoing pandemic, it seems a good time to re-evaluate our routines and fine-tune them if necessary.
My biggest challenge is getting in bed at a reasonable hour. Part of this is habit but part of it is that our dog is terminally ill and sometimes has trouble settling down at night. David has to get up early for work so I’m usually the one who stays up until Shiloh is resting comfortably. This is the season we are in and I’ve made peace with it. I just do the best I can.
I do, however, have more control over the rest of my evening routine. This is what it the ideal version looks like:
End the Work Day…
-Clean kitchen after dinner
-Take care of pets
-Tidy up
-Shut down my office for the day
Personal Care…
-Shower
-Skin care
-Turn down bed, spray pillows with homemade lavender spray
-Choose clothes for next day
Review Day and Plan for Tomorrow…
-Journal
-Make to-do list for next day
-Outline daily bullet journal page for next day
Evening Relaxation…
-Make cup of hot tea or cocoa (David makes me a martini on Friday nights)
-Go to my chair in our library
-Read/watch YouTube or a movie/listen to albums on our stereo
-I have been watching one or two episodes of The Golden Girls most nights just before I go to bed. I think it’s important to laugh every day and this show always elicits much laughter from me.
We have developed a general weekly routine for our evenings since the pandemic began:
Monday: David goes next door to Chris’ house and they watch an action film together. This is my night to browse through magazines.
Tuesday: This is supposed to be our night to listen to vinyl records on our stereo. Honestly, we haven’t been doing this but it’s the goal.
Wednesday: Pre-pandemic, this was choir rehearsal night for me. I haven’t replaced this with anything in particular but as I am writing this it occurs to me that I could find some outstanding choral performances to watch on YouTube. If you have any suggestions please send them my way.
Thursday: I go to Chris’ house and we watch a film together. We usually choose a foreign film or an old classic movie. David stays at our house with Shiloh and works on one of the models he is building (a new hobby for the pandemic).
Friday/Saturday: A dear friend of ours in New Orleans is a Bourbon Street musician who has been home since things shut down in March. He does a Facebook live show from his living room every Friday and Saturday night. His girlfriend films it while also reading the comments and taking requests. They do a great job interacting with the viewers so it almost feels like you’re there with them. Some nights he does a music trivia game or Pictionary (he’s an artist, too). David makes us each a cocktail and we enjoy the show together.
Sunday: Chris, David and I watch a Disney movie or comedy together on Sunday nights. I’ve been cooking “breakfast for dinner” on these nights but I’m going to switch things up. I think I’m going to start cooking a big Sunday dinner late afternoon and then we’ll just have homemade popcorn and hot cocoa with our movie.
I wrote about having a theme of sorts for each night about this time a year ago:
Theming My Evening Leisure Time
One thing we haven’t been doing is a weekly game night. We’ve played Cards Against Humanity with our daughter and son-in-law via Face Time a few times since the pandemic began. Lisa and I have been talking about making that a regular thing, probably one or two Saturday afternoons a month.
I’d like to play cards with David once in awhile and we are entering what I refer to as “puzzle weather”, too.
Ending the Evening…
-Turn off lights, go upstairs (quietly so I don’t wake Shiloh!)
-Brush teeth
-Crossword puzzles (I do two or three crossword puzzles on my phone each night)
-Read (If I’m still wide awake after doing the crossword puzzles)
-Lights out by 11 or 11:30 (ideally!)
Do all my evenings look like this? No. But it’s the goal and I’m doing pretty well overall. I just keep working at it and tweaking things as needed.
What about you? Do you have an evening routine or ritual? I’d love to hear about it in the comments.
If you could use some help and encouragement in creating your own evening ritual I hosted a challenge in my Make Over Your Life With Dee Facebook group. You can find the related posts via search or feel free to start a discussion at any time. There are sure to be others interested in this topic and willing to share tips and ideas.
And it you really want to dive deep, I highly recommend this course:
Love this book, too…
Funny, I had just commented on another blog about evening routine!
If my husband is home from work for dinner (sometimes he works 12 hours shifts and so eats dinner at work), we clean up afterwards, then go for a mile walk around our neighborhood. Then we might play some backgammon or Jeopardy on my phone, or watch a little TV. He goes to bed early since he gets up so early for work, so then the rest of my evenings are spent on my laptop, reading blogs and answering emails. Then I wash my face and brush my teeth, feed the cats, journal, then it’s my reading time until I’m falling asleep on the couch – which is usually 11 – 11:30.
I like the idea of taking a walk after dinner. Now that our weather is so nice we should take advantage of that. Good plan!
I’m working hard on making routines happen, and actually do have something vaguely resembling both a morning and evening routine at the moment. I’m hoping it sticks. Anyway, there’s some fluctuation in timing, but my evening routine basically looks something like this these days:
*Clean up after dinner.
*Feed the dogs.
*Potty run and then playtime for the dogs.
*Either call a family member, or settle down to watch a movie, or an episode or two of a show I want to watch (varies depending on if I’ve said I’ll call someone on a certain day, they call me, or I don’t have any phone commitments… If it’s the latter, I watch whatever I feel like watching on Netflix or Disney+ or Prime that evening).
*Bathe Lilie’s paws (like you, we’re dealing with some pet related issues that adds something to our evening routine… Though for us it’s just a fifteen minute addition to our evening, and maybe two minutes added to what we do in the morning).
*Settle Artemis for the night, and turn off the tortoise lamps.
*Give Mollie some attention and her evening snack, and make sure she has everything she needs for the night, and her radio is on (being a chinchilla she won’t be settling when we do, because she’s nocturnal).
*Final potty run for the dogs.
*Figure out what needs to be done the following day (which means getting anything out of the freezer that needs defrosting, making the following day’s to-do list, etc).
*Set out clothes for the morning.
*Get self ready for bed (all the things like brushing my teeth, etc).
*Give the dogs their treat balls to settle them properly for the night (Lilie won’t settle without one since we started giving her one as a puppy – on the vet’s recommendation – to make her settle and let me get in bed).
*Read a book on my Kindle for a while.
*Turn my bedtime audiobook on to listen to while I’m hopefully getting sleepy. Most nights that gets turned on some time around 11:00pm, but some nights I either get in to my book, or know I’m not ready to settle (either because I’m just not sleepy enough yet, or because my sleep schedule is messed up again and I ended up having a nap that day) so could end up deciding to keep reading the book on my Kindle for a while longer, and settle with my bedtime audiobook much later than that. Ideally though, I’d like to be settling down with my bedtime audiobook around 11:00pm, so that I’ll be falling asleep shortly after midnight, and I do try to achieve that.
I’ve gotten in to a bad habit of checking social media between tasks, which I’m trying to break myself of. Even worse, I’ve gotten in to a habit of checking it in the night when I wake and am having some trouble going back to sleep. I had gotten good at limiting my social media time, but then… Well, you know how it is. So I’m working on fixing that… Again.
We have a number of similarities in our evening routines. I used to check my phone during the night if I couldn’t sleep but have pretty much broken that habit. One thing that helped is that I set the “bedtime” setting on my phone for 10 p.m. to 7 a.m. The only exceptions I have set are the weather app (in case we are having storms) and the two crossword apps I use. I also delete the Facebook app each morning as soon as I upload a picture of my bullet journal page and do a quick scan of notifications. These two things have made a huge difference in my social media usage.
I’ve got the bedtime thing set from 10:00pm to 8:00pm. Unfortunately, while it stops notifications from actually coming through, it doesn’t stop me from going in and checking any for them manually, or stop me scrolling through my newsfeed. It helps, but doesn’t completely stop it. I’d do the removing the app thing, but it’s so fiddly for me to take it on and off all the time, and I have it on my phone because it’s easier for me to use Facebook and Twitter via my phone (which is stupid, considering it means having to use touchscreen, but that’s the case, whether it makes sense or not). So I’m having to find other ways.
It’s definitely a challenge!
Yes! Evening routines can set up our mornings for complete success. They’re just as important as morning routines.
Absolutely!
I keep the same sleep/wake schedule all week long (including weekends). And because I used to have insomnia but have worked through it, a routine is valuable to me.
When I get home from work, I put away lunch containers, start dinner, change into comfy clothes and often take my countacts out and wash my face right then. (If I wash my face just before bed, it wakes me up..so I’ve learned to do it as early as possible on nights I don’t have evening plans.)
I eat dinner, clean the kitchen, run the dishwasher (if needed) and put a load of laundry in the washer.
Then it’s my time: I’ll read or watch a show from my DVR or a movie on netflix or browse social media. I often watch friends’ videos on marco polo then record responses of my own to each friend. Often I’ll work on a project or two that I’ve been meaning to get to (sorting through the contents of a drawer or a shelf.. I’m learning to live with less and organizing what is most loved and used.
At 8:30 PM, my phone buzzes with the alarm to take my magnesium. I used to toss and turn for much of the early part of the night (9:30 PM to midnight) but now after taking magnesium glycinate regularly, I sleep so much better.
If I had been busy before 8:30, I settle down and turn on a show or a movie. This lulls me into a sleepy state by 9 or 9:30, and the second I lose interest in the show or find my eyes closing and I have to rewind to watch the part I missed, I turn everything off and head to bed. (I’ve been known to sleepily rewind too far, then hit fast forward but fall asleep while doing that and waking up to find I’ve slept until the fast forwarding ended the episode or movie is over – a clear sign to head to bed!)
Once in bed, I set my sleep app (Sleep Cycle) for the following morning, and put my apple watch and phone on chargers and crawl into bed, usually falling asleep within 10 minutes.
Everyone is different and for me, I’ve found that I toss and turn in bed until after midnight but manage to get some sleep (according to my sleep app)..and then I take my cozy blanket to the couch and put my feet up on the ottoman and promptly fall back asleep – for up to five hours of deep sleep without waking. I’m unsure why propping my feet up and sleeping this way works, but it has helped me get deep sleep each night. I’m working on a way to recreate that same position in my bed…but have yet to find a solution.
My alarm is set for 6 AM but I tend to wake by 5 or 5:30.
What fun to read everyone’s evening routines!
I struggle with sleep, too. I’m doing a bit better falling asleep lately (well, some of the time) but staying asleep is an issue. I recently started taking magnesium and I think it’s helping me fall asleep.