I Tried This Analog Nordic Evening Ritual for a Month, and My Life Changed in One Significant Way

Over the past few years I’ve come to understand that I am, in my heart of hearts, an extrovert. That’s not to say that I don’t value my alone time. But every week I say yes to too many plans, and find myself looking at a stuffed calendar full of professional and social obligations while trying to balance other work, personal writing, exercise, keeping my home clean and neat, staying on top of cooking healthy dinners, and, of course, getting proper sleep to fuel all of it. I’m not complaining! I like my life. It’s very fun. But I have a cyclical experience where I am way too busy for about three weeks, and then I shut out the world for a weekend, say no to every plan that comes my way, and reset my space and my energy. 

It works well enough, but I was hoping for something better. So when I came across this Instagram post from @nordwise.en, an Instagram account dedicated to Nordic living, explaining a Scandinavian evening ritual that helps promote deeper rest, I decided to try it out for a few weeks and see if it could help me unplug when it’s needed. Spoiler alert: It was really hard to stick to. But I took away some changes that I hope I have the discipline to keep going all the time. 

The Instagram post explains why Scandinavians prioritize “unplugged evenings” through a practice called kvallsro, which translates to evening peace. At 8 p.m., you dim your lights, switching from the big overhead light to your lamps and dimmer bulbs. Then, you cool your bedroom — typically by opening your window to cool your bedroom down. Before you leave your workspace, you’re supposed to write down tomorrow’s to-dos to get them out of your mind while you’re trying to rest. The final hour before you go to bed, you make a cup of warm tea and switch to analog/screen-free entertainment — a book, journaling, a conversation with a loved one. 

All of these steps are supposed to help clear your mind, promote a calm brain, and help you get better, deeper sleep overnight. “By dimming the lights to embrace Kvallsro (evening peace), cooling the environment, and choosing analog moments over digital noise, the nervous system is finally given permission to power down. Rest is not just the absence of work; it is an active investment in your well-being,” reads the caption.

I already naturally followed a number of these practices. At the end of every workday, before I leave my laptop behind, I write the next day’s to-do list for work and my personal life down in my work journal before I log off for the day. I am also extremely anti-big-light, so as soon as the sun goes down the only lights I keep on in my apartment are gorgeous mood-lighting-esque lamps — even in the kitchen. I don’t like to run the AC or have my windows closed in my bedroom at night, so I keep the windows open and have a fan blasting.

The only real and significant change I had to make when it came to my bedtime routine was leaving my phone behind and turning off the television at least an hour before bed. In the mornings, to track my results, I’d open my Hatch Sleep tracker on my phone to see how my sleep quality was affected by being off of my phone.

Unplugging from my phone proved to be the hardest part of the Nordic evening ritual, in a way that honestly feels embarrassing to admit — especially because I have a good setup to leave my phone behind. I have a Hatch alarm clock, so I don’t need my phone right next to me every night. I also love reading for fun, so swapping out my hour-long evening bedtime doom-scroll with a work of fiction is certainly not too difficult at all. I got through a few books trying out this quiet hour — I started and finished Hamnet, The Ministry of Time, and John of John. I’ve begun The Loneliness of Sonia and Sunny, and I’ve picked up a copy of Lapvona for my next read after I finish that. Add a cup of hot tea? I’ve been in heaven. However, I’ve found that even when I am really good about replacing my phone hour with a book, it’s hard to not just pick up my phone every few minutes on pure muscle memory. I’ll remember that I need to set up my workout stack for the next day on my Peloton app, or I’ll simply just want to open Instagram or TikTok for a few minutes in between chapters of my book, or I’ll remember I didn’t text someone back earlier in the day, and, boom, I’ve got my face three inches from a big blue light.

Also, while I was typically pretty good about this routine from Sunday to Thursday, or really Monday night through Thursday night, life (and my phone addiction) still got in the way. If I had dinner with friends on a Wednesday night, I typically just got home, brushed my teeth, had a glass of water, and got into bed with my phone, feeling like the night was already burned. Sometimes I’d forget I was doing the experiment altogether and be on TikTok until 10:30 p.m. and jump up with a start like, Oh crap. On Friday night and Saturday night? Forget it. Even if I wasn’t out with friends, if I had spent that Saturday on the couch I’d go straight from watching a movie or a TV show to bed. Add that on top of the little micro-interruptions I let interrupt my reading flow on the nights I did follow the unplugged ritual, and you can see that I had one persistent problem, over and over again.

It’s hard to say, for a few reasons. For one, I already followed most of the tenets of the Swedish practice of kvallsro, so much did not change about my evening routine. Secondly, as I mentioned above, even when I was good about my unplugged evenings, I still had to battle with my muscle memory to not pick up my phone to get one or another task done before the next day or simply doom-scroll. That, plus the interference of the regular rhythms of my pretty active social life and general lack of discipline mean that there’s more experimentation to be done here. Some nights were total washes — on the first Friday of October, for example, I went to a concert and was so amped by the experience that I only slept a few hours that night, when I did finally fall asleep. Other times, I just forgot that I was supposed to be off my phone. 

But I will say this: The nights that I was good about reading, even if I grabbed for my phone a few times, I fell asleep much earlier than nights that I was on my phone. My sleep quality might have looked the same (i.e., the same amount of time spent waking up or in REM, core, and deep sleep) give or take 20 minutes here or there, but the amount of sleep I was getting definitely grew, which is better than any other outcome I could have hoped for myself. And whether or not it helped with my sleep, reading every day made me happy and more generative creatively. Reading for an hour a day just for fun is good for my brain, it helped me relax before bed, and ultimately just reminded me that I’m not helpless to scroll every single night. I love to read; it makes me a better writer and thinker, and a happier person. I found myself more inspired when I opened up my laptop to work on my personal writing. I even wrote a poem for the first time in years. 

Moving forward, I’m going to plan on setting up my Peloton workout stack for the next day at the end of my workday, rather than before bed. I’ll also make sure to get the other stuff (my DuoLingo, any texts I have lingering, etc.) done before it’s time to relax with my book and my tea. That way I can really stop thinking about the “tasks” I have coming up and focus on just having an hour to myself at the end of every night. 

Ultimately, although I’m not sure that this ritual made me a better sleeper (although it might, with more tinkering and discipline), the biggest benefit of doing this for the past month has been that it’s helped me remember what I love the most in this world: reading and writing. Spending more time doing one helps me remember how much I love the other, and vice versa. It’s made me more generative as a creative writer, and for that I will keep this ritual moving forward as I continue to see what other benefits it will unlock.