? What’s Your Bedtime Ritual

I’ve been pondering this question quite a bit lately. The easiest thing to do is to watch TV, and that’s what most of us go for. After all, it’s the end of a long day and you’re tired. You need to do something to unwind. A nice TiVo’d episode of Jon Stewart seems like a great option, particularly if you’re sipping a beer and sitting with your hand in a bowl of popcorn at the same time (the grown-up version, perhaps, of milk and cookies).
But given how many people claim to feel starved for time, the question is whether watching TV is the best, most rejuvenating thing to do with the somewhat limited “me time” working parents claim to have. In one old study called the Americans’ Use of Time Project, people ranked TV somewhere in the middle of a scale of human happiness. While it scored better than going to the dentist or taking the car to get repaired (no surprise) it scored below experiencing art or music, reading books or sex.
So if you only have an hour, it seems like one of those other options would be better. Sex would be best, but as most people like to combine that with bedtime, that still leaves some pre-bed time on the table. Or perhaps your partner isn’t home or doesn’t exist. What else should you do?
The other night, after spending way too many minutes of that precious hour surfing random web sites, reading emails and the like, I decided to simply go outside and sit. The constant rain of the past two weeks had let up for a bit, and the early fall weather was just cool enough to be nice. I forced myself to stay seated, resisting the urge to check email, and let my mind wander. I pondered questions of what I wanted to do with my life, and things I should be happy about. I didn’t laugh as much as I would have at Jon Stewart. But I did still go to bed pretty relaxed.
How do you spend that last hour before bed?