According to Shawn Stevenson, a wellness expert interviewed by Yahoo, the optimal bedtime for life, vitality, perfect skin, and hair is 10 p.m. According to Stevenson, it’s because we work best when following the natural patterns of the sun’s rising and setting. Poetic, but impractical.
Most New York humans are in the office until about 7 p.m., which means dinner is 8 p.m. at the earliest — 8:30 or 9, more realistically. And then there is the minimum one to two hours necessary for the nighttime ritual of wasting time, loafing around, picking things up and putting them down, applying a face mask, FaceTiming your friends, thinking about stuff. Not to mention these concrete reasons why 10 p.m. is obviously not the optimal bedtime for any adult: Better Call Saul (AMC, 10 p.m.), How to Get Away With Murder (ABC, 10 p.m.), Girls (10:30 p.m., HBO), and, of course, just one more episode of Law & Order: SVU (USA*, every time you think it’s bedtime).
*This post has been corrected to show that Law & Order: SVU is on USA, not TBS.
