Vanessa Hill

This kind of came up in our research when people would say, I lost track of time.

I was on autopilot.

All of a sudden it was 2 a.m.

So you have this...

habit at play where it's really just shaping your behavior in a way that you don't realize.

The reason I have started talking about habit in response to your question is because sometimes we need these environmental cues to come out of it.

right?

So if you're on autopilot and you're kind of not paying attention and your brain is just going on doing whatever it wanted to do, sometimes a notification can help you come out of that.

Sometimes you could get an alert on your watch being like, hey, you wanted to go to bed at 11 o'clock to get up for work at 6.30 in the morning.

Do you want to do that?

We have smart speakers.

We have smart lights.

We have all of these things in our home ecosystem that can actually

help us come back to our intentions in a way that can be helpful, that we can use to try to nudge our behavior more in line with where we wanted it to be.

Right.

There's this thing in research called the intention-behavior gap, and it exists across many areas of health, including sleep, where we have intentions to do things, whether it's to go to bed at a certain time, to go to the gym regularly, whatever that may look like.

But our behavior is often quite different from what our intentions are.

And this exists with bedtime and bedtime procrastination, where a lot of people have an intended bedtime or a scheduled bedtime, which is often driven by the time you need to get up for work or school.

or when your kids get up.

And then we have the time that we actually go to bed and there's this discrepancy, right, between our intention and our behavior.