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How an Evening Routine Can Help Decrease Your Social Anxiety

Since we’ve already embarked upon the subject of following the cycle of night and day, you can add significance to your evenings just as easily as you can to your mornings. Let’s focus on making sure that you get an optimal amount and quality of sleep first.

There are certain adjustments all of us can make to the habits, or routines that usually drive our evenings.

For example, most of us tend to go to the bathroom, take a shower, brush their teeth and perform their whole evening ritual the last thing before going to bed. And that’s not as good for your sleep as it may seem. Bathrooms, and especially bathroom mirrors are usually filled with a great number of lights and lamps, and by exposing ourselves, our eyes, to those lights our bodies get tricked into believing that we’re still in the middle of the day.

Let me explain why that happens.

There’s a hormone called Melatonin, which is responsible for alligning our bodies with the cycle of night and day (See? I told you it was a thing!), or rather anticipating the daily onset of darkness. Melatonin is what kicks in when you’re falling asleep, and it’s triggered by the amount of light your eye registers.

So, when you’re standing in front of the mirror, with all those lights facing you directly, your body starts thinking that this amount of light must be a shining star of some sort, just like our Sun and if that’s in place then there still must be day outside.

In order to avoid this “misunderstanding” I’d like to suggest that you finish all your bathroom rituals at least half an hour before going to bed. And this brings us to another part of the routine.

For that last half an hour you could do another activity that will help you get closer to the person you’d like to be. If you always wanted to learn playing an instrument, solving a Rubik’s cube, juggling, etc. then this time is perfect for practicing that activity. Our brains are much more responsive to learning motor skills in the evening or at night.

Even if the guitar lick won’t necessarily play as smoothly when you’ll be practicing it before going to bed, you might just wake up knowing how to perform it almost effortlessly!

And if you’re not working on any skill like that, you can just spend it reading a book with your bed lamp. 30 minutes of reading a day, leads to one book read per week. And that’s around 50 per year, not counting what you read during your morning exercise and the rest of the day. Quite impressive, isn’t it?

The next thing you can do in the evening is going through your morning journal (check out the section on Routines in our free Social Anxiety Course, if you haven’t started writing a morning journal yet). Scanning that page won’t take long, but it will allow you to reflect on whether you met all your goals for the day, and if not what can you do to make that happen the next day.