Why you cannot switch off, and what actually helps

There is a difference between being distracted and being relaxed, and most of what people do after a hard day is the first thing. A screen occupies your attention without lowering your baseline, which is why four hours of it can leave you as wound up at midnight as you were at six.

What actually lowers the baseline is a shorter list than the internet suggests, and most of it comes down to giving your nervous system unambiguous evidence that nothing is required of you.

Things that reliably work

• Heat. A sauna, a hot bath, or a jacuzzi — heat produces a genuine physiological shift, not just a psychological one.
• Sustained touch. Massage of almost any kind, for at least forty minutes. Below that the effect is real but brief.
• Slow breathing, done for longer than feels necessary. Ten minutes, not two.
• Walking without a destination. Unstructured movement, ideally outside.
• Being somewhere that is not your home or your office, where none of the objects are asking you for anything.

Things that mostly do not

Alcohol lowers your inhibitions rather than your stress, and ruins the sleep that would have helped. Screens hold attention without releasing tension. And 'catching up on things' in the evening — the small useful tasks — keeps you in exactly the mode you were trying to leave.

Why massage works better than most of the list

It combines three of the effective items at once: sustained touch, warmth, and a place with no demands in it. It also lasts long enough to matter. A twenty-minute chair massage is pleasant; sixty to ninety minutes is the point at which people report the effect carrying into the next day.

If you are specifically wound up rather than physically sore, tantra is the treatment to book, because the pacing is the active ingredient. If you are physically knotted as well, body to body gives you real pressure alongside it.

The one thing to change tonight

Whatever you choose, give it longer than feels warranted. Almost everybody stops the thing that was working at about the point it started to work.