Nearly two thousand years ago, the Roman writer Seneca described the last minutes of his day. "When the lamp is taken out of my sight, and my wife, who knows my habit, has ceased to talk, I pass the whole day in review before myself, and repeat all that I have said and done." Then he described the sleep that followed: "How sweet is the sleep which follows this self-examination? How calm, how sound?" He also had a wife who knew when to stop talking, which helps.
He was onto something. Among 401 adults, the more grateful people fell asleep faster, slept longer and slept better. When the reasons were picked apart, it came down to what was in their heads as they drifted off: more pleasant thoughts, and fewer worrying ones. It held even after their personalities were taken into account.
So the way we end the day shapes the night. Gratitude before sleep is one of the oldest bedtime habits there is, and one of the few that has been put to the test. Here is where it comes from, why the end of a day carries so much weight, what gratitude can and cannot do for sleep, and how to close the day so the night can have it.
The oldest bedtime habit
Seneca did not invent it. He borrowed it from an older philosopher, Sextius, who "when the day was over, and he had betaken himself to rest", would ask his own spirit: "What bad habit of yours have you cured to-day? What vice have you checked? In what respect are you better?"
Another ancient version comes from the Golden Verses, a collection of moral advice in Greek verse traditionally credited to the followers of Pythagoras, whose exact age is unknown. "Never allow sleep to close your eyelids, after you went to bed, until you have examined all your actions of the day by your reason." Three questions follow: what have I done wrong, what have I done, what have I left undone? And then a line that is easy to miss: "if you have done any good, rejoice."
In 1524 Ignatius of Loyola set out his own evening examination in five steps. The first step was not the faults. It was to thank God for the benefits received. Only after that came the review of what had gone wrong.
Win the Morning, Win the Day: Simple Rituals That Separate High Achievers from the Rest has Benjamin Franklin's version, which ended each day with "What good have I done to-day?"
Children have their own version. "Now I lay me down to sleep" is a bedtime prayer from the 18th century, and perhaps its earliest form sits in George Wheler's 1698 book The Protestant Monastery, under the heading "Upon lying down, and going to sleep".
The language keeps a trace of all this. "Thank" comes from the Old English þanc, which meant both gratitude and thought, and it grows from the same root as "think". To thank someone was, first, to think of them. It still is.
Why the end counts
Why should the last ten minutes of a day matter more than any other ten?
There is a clue in how we remember experiences. The peak–end rule says that we judge an experience mostly by its most intense moment and by how it ended, rather than by the sum of every minute. In 1993, Daniel Kahneman and his colleagues had people hold one hand in cold water at 14 °C for 60 seconds. Another time they held the other hand in the same water for 60 seconds, then 30 seconds more while it warmed slightly to 15 °C. Asked which one they would rather repeat, they were more willing to choose the longer one, more cold in total, because of its gentler end. The authors concluded that they "liked the memory of it better". Thirty seconds of slightly less cold changed how all ninety were remembered.
That test was about a minute and a half of cold water, not a whole day, so take this as a hypothesis rather than a finding. But it fits what Seneca noticed and what the 401 adults showed: the last thing we turn over in our minds is the thing we carry into the night.
Sleep itself seems to take the day seriously. In rats, brain cells that fired together while the animals worked through the day's tasks fired together again in the deep sleep that followed, and not in the sleep before. What happened awake was being re-run. That was rats, and the cells were mapping places rather than moods, but it is a reminder that the night is not a blank page: it works on what the day hands it.
What gratitude can and cannot do
Gratitude has been put to the test at bedtime, in small groups.
Forty-one students whose racing minds kept them awake were each given one of three short routines by email: listing things they were grateful for, writing their worries down earlier in the evening with a next step for each, or imagining a calm and pleasant scene. All three cut their worrying, calmed them before sleep and improved their sleep. None did better than the others.
In 119 young women, two weeks of writing down things they were grateful for improved their sleep quality and lowered their blood pressure, compared with women who wrote about ordinary events or did nothing.
The connection shows up in illness too. Among 186 people with early heart failure and no symptoms yet, the more grateful slept better, were less low and less tired, felt more able to look after their hearts, and had lower markers of inflammation in their blood. That is a link, not proof that one causes the other, but it is a striking one.
Pain tells a similar story. In 224 people living with chronic pain, the more grateful slept better, and better sleep explained part of the link between gratitude and less anxiety, and a smaller part of its link with less depression. Again, a snapshot rather than proof.
Across 19 controlled tests of gratitude exercises, sleep quality improved in five of the eight that measured it, and several of the tests had flaws. So it is a gentle help, well worth trying, rather than a cure. A gentle help is still a help, and this one costs nothing.
Some of what is said about it goes too far. Gratitude is often claimed to lower cortisol, raise serotonin and switch on melatonin. In those 119 women, there was no link with cortisol at all, and The Science of Serotonin: Everyday Habits That Lift Your Mood explains why the serotonin story is shakier than it sounds. Nor does gratitude make the brain's night-time clearing "60% more efficient": that figure comes from sleeping mice, in which the space between brain cells grew by 60% during sleep, whatever mood they were in. The mice were not feeling grateful. They were asleep.
The practice
The heart of it is simple. Before turning out the light, write down three things that went right today. Pen and paper keep the screen out of it, and one of these makes the writing a small pleasure.
They do not need to be profound. A kind word from a colleague. The taste of soup at lunch. The relief of crossing one task off the list. Small and real beats big and vague. The soup counts.
Make it specific. "I'm grateful for my family" slides past. "I'm grateful for how my daughter laughed when she spilled paint on her shirt today" lands. The more concrete the detail, the more it brings the moment back.
Try three layers. If three things come too easily, go a little deeper. The senses: what felt good today, a warm bath, clean sheets, sunshine on our face, a meal we enjoyed. People: what did someone do for us? Name the act rather than the person: "I'm grateful that my partner made dinner so I could rest", not "I'm grateful for my partner". How we coped: where did we manage well? A good decision under pressure, a calm word in a tense moment, help we asked for.
Thank the body. If the mind will not cooperate, start with the body instead. Close your eyes and move from the toes upwards: "Thank you, legs, for carrying me. Thank you, hands, for that report. Thank you, eyes, for my daughter's smile."
This is close to mindfulness, and mindfulness has been tested on sleep. Forty-nine older adults who slept badly took six weeks of classes, in either mindfulness or good sleep habits. The mindfulness group's sleep improved more, and their tiredness and low mood eased too.
With children. A bedtime routine is worth the trouble at any age. When 405 mothers of babies and toddlers aged 7 to 36 months were given a set nightly routine for two weeks, the children fell asleep faster and woke less often and for less long in the night, and the mothers' mood improved. Three good things fit neatly into a routine like that: each of us says one, and the small ones count as much as the big. Children are very good at this. Their lists are mostly snacks.
When it feels forced
Gratitude can feel fake, especially on a hard day. Forcing a feeling rarely works. A few ways round it:
Start neutral. Note what happened, without asking ourselves to feel anything about it. "The sun was shining. I had lunch with a friend. I finished the report." Appreciation often follows on its own.
Be honest. If the mind refuses gratitude altogether, try: "I'm grateful I can be honest about struggling today." It counts. Honesty is a fine place to start. Gratitude does not have to be cheerful to be real.
Imagine it never happened. 5 Steps to Manifest Your Dreams with the Law of Attraction has a way in that sounds backwards: people who wrote about how a good thing in their life might never have happened felt better than people who wrote about how it came about, and imagining they had never met their partner made people happier with the relationship. On a flat evening, picture the day without the friend who called.
On the worst days, keep it basic. A roof, a meal, getting through. A few quiet minutes, a kind word from a stranger. There is no need to find a silver lining in something that was hard.
The old review, kindly
The ancient reviews were mostly about faults. That sounds like a recipe for lying awake, and on a bad night it can be. But look at how Seneca handled his. "Why should I be afraid of any of my shortcomings," he wrote, "when it is in my power to say, 'I pardon you this time: see that you never do that anymore'?" He named the mistake, drew the lesson, and let it go. Two thousand years later, that is still the hard part.
That is the version worth keeping. One thing that went badly, one thing to do differently, and then a full stop. Ignatius had the order right: the good things first, so the mistake lands on a softer floor. Seneca's own letters, in , are full of the same plain good sense.
Closing the day's business
Gratitude is one way to close the day. The worries need somewhere to go as well.
Review the day earlier, not in bed. Some time in the evening, take five minutes. What was hard today? What did it teach? What is one thing we will do tomorrow? Writing the worry down with a next step was one of the three routines that helped those students sleep.
Give the worry a time. Why Your Stress Management Backfires has the students who put their worrying off to a set worry period each day and ended up with fewer bodily complaints. A worry that turns up in bed can be told where it belongs: in tomorrow's slot.
Give the unfinished task a plan. How to Boost Energy Levels Naturally: Little-Known Remedies That Actually Work has why this works: unfinished tasks intrude on whatever we do next, and when people were allowed to make a specific plan for one, the intrusion stopped. The same article has the bedtime version: fifty-seven young adults spent five minutes before bed writing either a to-do list for the coming days or a list of what they had already done, and the to-do group fell asleep faster. The more specific the list, the faster.
Keep a notepad by the bed. When a work thought arrives after the lights are out, write it down under tomorrow's date and let it wait there. It will still be there in the morning, and we will be rested enough to deal with it.
Do not take the argument to bed
"Never go to bed angry" is old advice, and there is a reason behind it. In one test, people learned unpleasant memories and then tried to push them out of mind, either the same day or after a night's sleep. After sleep, the memories still stirred them, and they were harder to push away. Sleep seems to settle what we take into it. So it is worth choosing what we take.
If there is a row, try to settle it, or at least set it down, before bed. A sentence will do: "I'm still upset, and we'll talk tomorrow." If the other person is not ready, write down what we want to say and put it with the notepad. A row tends to look smaller after breakfast.
If the mind still will not settle
Some nights the thoughts come back anyway. Forty-one people with insomnia were given different instructions for one night. Those taught to picture an absorbing scene in rich detail fell asleep sooner than those given no instructions. A favourite walk, pictured step by step, is one way to do it. Down to the colour of the front door. A general instruction to distract themselves did not help. A detailed picture gives the mind enough to do that it stops going back to the worries.
Counting sheep is the old version of this trick. An early reference to it comes in Harriet Martineau's Illustrations of Political Economy of 1834, and an earlier one, with goats instead of sheep, in Don Quixote in 1605. The test above gives the sheep their modern upgrade: a beach or a waterfall, pictured properly, beat plain distraction.
If sleep still will not come after a while, get up and go to another room for something quiet, then come back when sleep feels close. Keeping the bed for sleep, and not for lying awake, is one of the most effective parts of the treatment built for insomnia. If we are unsteady on our feet, it is safer to take great care getting up in the dark, or to skip this one.
The letter
Once in a while, write a longer letter of thanks to someone who made a difference. Say what they did, what it changed for us, and what it says about them. A makes it feel like an occasion.
The worry is that it will be awkward. 7 Simple Changes to Improve Your Health, Starting Today has why that fear is misplaced: people who wrote thank-you letters underestimated how surprised and how pleased the recipient would be, and overestimated how awkward it would be. 10 Tips to Fall in Love with Yourself has the bigger lift: writing a letter of thanks and then delivering it in person left people happier and less low for a month, the biggest boost of the five exercises tested.
It is the nicest homework there is. And the only kind that makes someone else's day.
The everyday version is shorter, and it may matter most at bedtime. In couples who lived together, feeling grateful after the day's small kindnesses predicted more connection and more satisfaction with the relationship the next day, for the one who felt it and for the one who had been kind. A "thank you for today" across the pillow costs nothing.
The rest of the evening
The habits around the list matter too, and other articles cover them in depth. How to Fix Your Sleep and Wake Up Rested, linked below, has the wake-up time that anchors the night, the bedroom and what steals sleep. Reset Your Body Clock: Sleep Hacks, Tested has morning light, warm feet and a dark evening. And one line belongs here, because the gratitude list belongs to it: on evenings when people read from a light-emitting tablet rather than a printed book, they took longer to fall asleep, made less melatonin and were groggier the next morning. The pen and the book go together.
When it is more than a busy mind
If the racing thoughts, the panic or the low mood keep coming back however well we close the day, they deserve more help than a gratitude list can give. The treatment with the best record for insomnia is a talking therapy built for sleep, called cognitive behavioural therapy for insomnia. It is the first-line treatment for insomnia and probably works better than sleeping pills. Its strongest parts are limiting the time spent in bed, keeping the bed for sleep, and changing the thoughts that keep us up. Chronic Insomnia, linked below, has how it works.
The lamp
Seneca had no notebook by the bed and no evidence to quote. He had a lamp, a quiet house, and a habit. He looked back over the day, forgave himself what needed forgiving, and slept, he said, calmly and soundly. His wife, we hope, did too.
We have the same few minutes, and now a little evidence to go with them. Five minutes and a pen, and the day can end the way we choose.
Tonight, before the light goes off, write down three things that went right today, and make one of them small.
Still groggy after a full night? How to Fix Your Sleep and Wake Up Rested: Complete Guide to Better Sleep — why the grogginess after a good night is normal and how long it should last, waking up unable to move, why an alarm is a call to arms and the snooze lasts nine minutes, what a partner does to your dreams, and the old habit of a first and a second sleep.
Lying awake for hours? Chronic Insomnia: Why Trying Harder Keeps You Awake — why trying harder keeps you awake, how less time in bed brings more sleep, giving the bed one job, and the maths that runs in your head in the small hours.
Do you know someone whose mind races the moment their head hits the pillow? Send them this, and tell them about the soup.
Disclaimer: This article is general information. For advice about your own health, talk to a qualified health professional, especially if worry, panic or low mood keep you awake most nights.
Affiliate Disclosure: This article contains affiliate links. As an Amazon Associate, All For Life earns from qualifying purchases, at no extra cost to you. We only link to products we would recommend without the commission.
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