Most nights, whatever time I actually get into bed, I read for something close to forty minutes before I let myself turn the light off. Not exactly timed, I don’t sit there with a stopwatch, but close enough that I notice when a night runs shorter, usually because service ran long or I’m too wiped to keep my eyes open, and I feel the loss of it the next day in a way that’s hard to explain to people who don’t have a version of this themselves.
It started, honestly, as damage control. Restaurant kitchens will wreck your evenings if you let them, you come home wired and greasy and too keyed up to sleep even though you’re exhausted, and for a couple of years I handled that by scrolling my phone in bed until I passed out, which is exactly as bad for actually resting as it sounds. A friend suggested reading instead, something with an actual stopping point, a chapter, and it worked well enough that I never stopped doing it even after I left restaurant lines for catering, where the hours are better but the instinct to unwind badly apparently didn’t go anywhere.
What I’ve noticed over the years is that the book barely matters for the winding-down function, any book does that job fine, but it matters enormously for what I actually remember reading. The dense stuff, the Sapolsky, the Scarry, all of that gets read during the day when I’ve got real attention to give it. The forty minutes before bed is where the easier, stranger stuff lives, and I think that’s the right division of labor even though I didn’t plan it that way on purpose.
I’ve protected this habit more stubbornly than almost anything else in my schedule, turned down a couple of late dinner invitations over the years specifically because I didn’t want to blow up my night reading, which sounds a little precious written down. Forty minutes isn’t a lot of time in the scheme of a day. But it’s mine in a way very little else in a catering schedule actually is, nobody’s event, nobody’s timeline, just whatever book happens to be on the nightstand and however long it takes me to get sleepy enough to put it down.