This unexpected bedtime habit helped ease my nighttime anxiety

There are roughly a hundred crows outside my window, staring straight through me like they know something I don’t. A textbook case of nighttime anxiety dressed up as something far more sinister. I stand frozen on the other side of the glass. Then they break in. They circle. They scream. They peck at my head. I wake up. It’s 4:09 AM.

This wasn’t a one-off. My dreams had grown jagged, absurd, increasingly vivid. That viral video of a crow chasing a dog? My brain repurposed it into a horror sequence. “It’s called the day residue effect,” explains Dr Vivek Barun, a neurologist and epilepsy specialist at Artemis Hospital. “The content we are exposed to before bed often shows up in our dreams.”

After I quit my full-time job in April, my routine dissolved. I stopped sleeping well. My nights became a carousel of Reddit rabbit holes, sea monster theories and ganji chudail videos. I’d stay up late, wake up unrested and carry a head full of racing thoughts, especially at night.

My therapist asked me to log my daily routine and a pattern emerged: the doomscrolling spiked first thing in the morning and just before bed. That’s when she pointed out that what I’m consuming right before sleep might be the problem. I was bringing nighttime anxiety into bed and wondering why I couldn’t rest.

Trying to cut screen time didn’t work. I’d want to log off Instagram, then find myself just one reel away from learning about a haunted palace in Rajasthan. The modern-day Chakravyuh is the infinite scroll. You think you’ve escaped, then you’re pulled back in by a recommended video about ghost towns in Himachal.

Then I stumbled onto a YouTube vlog where Aaliyah Kashyap casually mentioned she’d started watching children’s shows before bed and it helped her sleep. No preachy, prolonged routine. No blue light sermon. Just… cartoons. I was intrigued.

Ruchi Ruuhi, therapist and counselling psychologist, explained how slower narratives create a sense of temporal spaciousness, signalling the body to slow down. “This helps activate the parasympathetic nervous system, lowers the heart rate and prepares the body for rest,” she said.

So that following night, I cued up an 11-minute episode of Oswald, the blue octopus with the bowler hat who once ruled my pre-school TV time. I also made a rule: no phone after 12:30 a.m.