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Okay, hot take, but: a self-care night routine is more important than a morning routine.

(That sound you hear is the 5AM girlies getting their pitchforks.)

Yes, yes, ideally you’d have both! But if you are starting from scratch, trying to go from being all over the place to calm and centered, I really believe you’re better off starting with a night self-care routine or bedtime routine and building up from there. 

Why do a self-care night routine?

Imagine that you’re trying to get ready for your day after a rough night’s sleep. You hit snooze several times, rush out the door, forget your packed lunch and your important papers, and arrive to your day in a bad mood. 

No morning routine can fix that! What you need instead is the night routine that’s going to set you up to get the good night’s sleep and prevent you from feeling stressed or confused in the morning. 

Having the right night self-care routine sets you up for success in having that calm, peaceful morning that you’re longing for. If you want to develop a morning routine, you probably want to do this calming night routine first. Building up your mental health at the end of the day is one of the best ways to improve your mental health. 

What goes in a self-care night routine?

Everyone’s will be different! But here are some great ideas that will help you plan a routine that works for you.

Right before I start my routine, I make a pot of herbal tea. It cools a little during my closing shift and is waiting for me for the rest of my routine. I do chamomile tea with a little valerian and spearmint tea added. It’s a little treat in my evening routine!

1. Closing shift (15 minutes)

Have you been seeing this phrase on social media? I love this concept! The idea is, just like if you were working in a store or restaurant and you had the last shift of the day, you need to do a little cleaning to get the workplace closed for the day and set up for tomorrow. 

Depending on where you’re at in life, your closing shift might look different. A high school student might need to pack her backpack and charge her computer. As a mom of two, my closing shift includes checking their backpacks and packing their lunches, then quickly tidying my living room and bedroom. 

The best way to plan your closing shift is to ask yourself: what are the challenges I have in the mornings? For me, I often forget my purse at home when I leave for work, so I started putting it on top of my work bag the night before. It takes five seconds, and since it’s part of my night routine, it doesn’t matter if I’m a little bleary in the morning–it’s impossible for me to forget it. 

Here are some other ideas for your closing shift:

• Load and start your dishwasher. 
• Set out what you need for coffee or breakfast the next morning.
• Walk through your house with a basket, grabbing everything that is not in its place. 
• Set out your clothes for the next day.
• Decide what you’re having for lunch tomorrow, and pack a lunchbox or set out the ingredients.
• Plan any errands that may need to be done the next day, and place online orders if you need to.
• If you are responsible for kids or pets, make sure that they are also set up for the next day.
• Put your shoes, bag, purse, and anything else that needs to go to school with you by the door. 
• If there’s anything you can’t put by the door, get creative. I often put my car keys in my lunch box in the fridge to prevent me from forgetting my lunch. 

2. Act of self-love (5 minutes)

If this name feels over the top to you, that’s okay–for a long time I couldn’t call it this myself either! 

If “closing shift” is there to make your morning run smoothly, the “act of self-love” in your night routine is there to make your day more pleasant.  What is one thing that you can do for your tomorrow self tonight that will make her happy?

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These are very personal and individual choices, and I wrote about them at length in my acts of self-love post! But I can give you some ideas of what mine are:

Act of Self-Love ideas

• Adding something special to your lunch, or taking an extra few minutes to make your lunch extra appealing. 
• Organizing your papers, folders, or work bag so that things are easy to find tomorrow.
• Resetting your bathroom counter so you walk into a clean and peaceful space in the morning. 
• Setting up your morning spaces so that you’ll be able to move easily through the morning.
• Packing a magazine in your work bag so that you actually take a mental break during lunch. 
• Cleaning your sneakers so they look great tomorrow.
• Clean your space for ten minutes beyond what you do in closing shift, focusing on the places that bother you.
• Doing that thing that only takes a minute but that you’ve been putting off or stressing over.

An act of self-love is the one small thing you can do for yourself to make tomorrow better. As time goes on, you’ll start to really enjoy doing these things at night even though they aren’t exactly fun tasks. Just focus on giving this small gift to your future self.

3. Brain dump (5 minutes)

Grab a sheet of paper and write everything that’s on your mind down. Putting yourself in a position where you need to remember something for tomorrow and it’s only in your head is a recipe for both bad sleep AND forgetting the thing. I love my Notion, but doing this exercise on paper really helps me more (and I can move things into Notion the next day if they’re important). Get the to-do list out of your head and onto the page. 

If you are a bullet journal person, bullet journaling was MADE for this. I like to divide the sheet of paper into three sections: work, home, and other. 

If you want to try it the way I do it, do this: 

Brain Dump Layout

Under work (or school!), just put down everything you need to do or remember the next day. Once it’s on the paper, you can safely let it out of your mind. As a teacher, I put down the day’s lessons, any copies I need to make, meetings I need to have, or emails I need to send. (The emails always get me!) Don’t start planning or writing, and don’t give more detail than you need to spur your memory. Once you’ve written it down, let it go from your mind from the night. 

Under home I put my personal life stuff. If I need to get groceries or text someone about plans or order birthday party decorations, all of that would go here. I usually note my workout here as well so that I don’t forget about it! If there is something I need to do, plan, or show up to, it goes here. 

And then the other section is for mental stuff. If there’s something that I feel like I’m somehow not “done” thinking about, I put it here. It sounds funny, but if there’s something bothering me or something I’m stressing about, the act of writing it down here helps my mind let it go for the evening. It’s like saying, “okay, we will come back to this and take it seriously tomorrow, but for now we have to be done.” I definitely used to be someone who would stare at the ceiling and stress a lot of the time instead of sleeping, and this strategy has really helped me let go. (And most of the time, in the morning, I look at these things and they don’t seem nearly as bad as they did at night!)

It’s great to get some Affirmations For Beauty in here too!

. Hygiene and skincare (10 minutes)

I like to brush my teeth before I do my skincare. It feels a little gross to me to do my skincare and then go in and floss and be moving all this bacteria around. So I do my oral care routine first (I want to write a post about this!) and then do my skincare after that. (Update: here’s my oral care routine!) 

(Actually, to be totally clear, I double-cleanse my skin, so first I put my jojoba oil on my face, then I do my whole floss-tongue scrape-water flosser-mouthwash-toothbrush routine, then I wash off the oil and do my skincare.) 

I put ten minutes here, but I know a lot of people have skincare routines that are much longer than that! And if I’ve had a bad day or need to take care of myself a little extra, I will tack on a face mask or even a relaxing bath. 

The thing to think about here is not what you do, but how you do it! If you’re doing your skincare and scrolling social media, you’re not putting yourself in the right mindset. Soothing music might be a great addition to your nightly self-care routine, but TikTok probably isn’t. I make sure I get my body care routine in here too. 

Skincare routine mindset

• You are all set for tomorrow. You have released all your worries. Now, focus inward.
• Don’t introduce new worries, insecurities, or things you feel like you “have to” do from social media.
• Consider calm music, or even no music and no outside stimulation at all.
• As you go through your routine, try to focus on calm thoughts or relaxation, or on emphasizing taking care of yourself and loving yourself.

5. Calm your mind (10 minutes)

You can go a lot of different ways here. 

• If you like yoga, spend a few minutes on your yoga mat relaxing your body. 
• If you are artistic, you might like to draw or paint a little. 
• If you’re crafty, maybe you do a few lines of your knitting or unpick a few stitches in your sewing.
• If you like to meditate, you might add a mindfulness meditation on your own or with a video. Maybe some essential oils or gentle music?

Lately I have been ending every night with a meditation from Tracks to Relax, which has been really great for me. I don’t listen until I fall asleep, I just listen until I think I could fall asleep and then go into bed. They have a paid membership but I don’t subscribe, I just listen to the free ones.

This is a hard section of the routine for me, and I flunk it on a regular basis! I tend to be anxious or to ruminate. But getting ten minutes in to calm down improves my sleep quality so much. You shouldn’t skip the final step! Taking a little extra time to calm down is so good for your emotional health, your sleep, your growth, your everything! 

Should I have my phone in my self-care night routine?

That’s individual. Honestly, I do usually have my phone with me during my self-care night routine because I use it in my last step to listen to a meditation track. But I never use social media during my night routine, and I would encourage you not to either. Whether you skip electronic devices all together or not is up to you.

(If I’m being tooootally honest, sometimes I need to scroll social media before my night routine to get motivated to do my closing shift! I search ‘closing shift’ on TikTok and try very hard to resist the urge to look at anything else. I’m not perfect and you don’t need to be perfect either! But if you can remove social media from your mind before bed, it removes a lot of the thoughts that pull us off track.) 

But we know that the blue light from our phones can disrupt circadian rhythms, and that sticking to your consistent bedtime is a little tougher when there’s so much to scroll. 

You know yourself–if you have your phone, will you be able to ignore it and stay focused? Will you enjoy your closing shift more if you can listen to your music?

​Sleep hygiene check:

If you’re still having trouble getting enough sleep even after you nail down your self care evening routine, you can check your sleep hygiene. 

Instead of being more self-care night routine ideas, this is more about your sleep environment. So, les about getting your mind right and more about getting your room right. Your sleeping environment should be dark, cool, and quiet. 

Before you go to bed one night, around your usual bedtime, turn off the lights and check your room. Is it dark? Ideally, you want complete darkness in order to sleep. For me, this meant two things: picking up blackout curtains, and covering the little lights on electronics with duct tape. 

This is still a work in progress for my home, because my bedroom has a skylight. So instead of total dark, I often have the moonlight or dusk coming in. So I’ve gotten a sleep mask instead. 

A two-pack is worth it because you really need to wash these regularly! 

Cold and quiet can be harder to control. If you can’t control the temperature in your bedroom, getting a lighter quilt or blanket can be a great way to lower your sleep temperature. It’s really your core body temperature you’re trying to change, not necessarily the temperature in the room.

And then — if your room isn’t actually quiet, consider white noise. Whether that’s a typical white noise machine or a fan running in the room, it can help to drown out any sounds. When my kids were small enough to need a baby monitor, hearing the white noise through the monitor was so great for getting a restful night’s sleep! 

A routine is so important but your environment is really your sleep foundation! The good news is that it’s cheap and easy to improve your room for sleep. 

Self-care night routine results 

I hope this brings you happiness! 

I think that a self-care night routine gives you a quiet little pocket of your day where you’re focused on yourself. Doing your night self-care routine helps you set up your best possible morning, get better sleep, and remove some of the struggle points from your life. 

If you commit to this routine for a month, I promise you’ll never go back — this is such a grounding, serene routine that has the potential to streamline your life. You may find yourself waking up earlier, stressing less, and building up your self-esteem because you’re showing up for yourself consistently. You deserve all of that!

Save this post so you can do your routine again tomorrow!

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