I’m in bed by 10:00pm most days. I read a book for a while and go to sleep around 11:00pm.
Backstory: I was a night owl for the longest time. Once I tried tracking “go to bed by midnight” on a habit tracking app and gave up because I never, ever managed to do it. I went to bed sometime between midnight and 4:00am for most of my twenties.
Lots of factors contributed to this: living in Europe (American internet was on fire when I was trying to get to bed); freelancing from home or coffee shops; and, honestly, having limited self control.
That said, I’ve observed the benefits of being a morning person for years, and I think I’m finally making it happen.
It’s easy to make bad decisions when we have low energy and rapidly decreasing willpower. I noticed that I tend to stay up all night doing nothing productive on the internet - if I’m on my laptop at 11:30pm, I’ll probably be on it until 2:30am. I fix this by using pretty aggressive content blocks on my laptop. I use the Mac app Focus and set it up to block anything vaguely related to social media, entertainment, or news from 10:00pm until 11:00am (and again at regular intervals during the day). It’s the only content blocker I’ve found that I can’t figure out how to disable; it’s awesome if you struggle with distraction on your computer.
I used to have Focus set until 11:00pm, but I found that even if I stopped using social media at that time, I’d be too tired to get ready for bed in a timely manner. (Ironic, huh?) 10:00pm makes more sense as my wind-down time. I keep Focus blocking distractions until 11:00am in the morning because that’s another low-willpower time of day for me; if I groggily start checking the internet in the morning, I set myself up for having a bad day.
On that note, I charge anything with an LCD screen in my living room overnight. The only device I allow myself to have in my bedroom is my Kindle. Even with Focus and f.lux on my Mac and phone, those devices are too distracting to let me get a good night’s sleep - I don’t want to be tempted to wake up in the middle of the night to see my notifications.