Blackout curtains and the hard Utah 5:30am light
Okay. We've done morning light, we've done evening light. Now let's talk about the actual window in your bedroom, because this is the lesson that got Todd to sleep till 7am for the first time in a year, and he still brings it up.
Here's the thing about summer here. The light doesn't ease in. It comes in hard around 5:30am, full brightness, no warning, because the air's so dry there's nothing to soften it. No haze, no humidity to diffuse it. It just hits your eyelids like someone flipped a switch. And your eyes register that light whether you're "awake" or not — your brain sees it through closed lids and starts nudging your body toward waking up, even if it's an hour before your alarm.
So if you're doing everything right — same wake time, morning porch light, dimming things down at night — and you're still getting jolted awake way too early in June and July, this is probably why. It's not you. It's the window.
What I actually did
Blackout curtains. Not the ones that say "room darkening" on the package, which I've learned is basically a nice way of saying "dims it a little." I mean actual blackout — the kind where you close them at noon and the room goes properly dark, like you could nap in there without knowing what time it is.
Todd thought this was overkill. He said it like that, "this is overkill," while I was up on a step stool with a drill. Then he slept till 7 and didn't say anything for about a week, and then I found a second set on order for the guest room. So. Overkill, apparently, is relative.
The practical part
A few things I learned by trial and error, since nobody tells you this stuff up front:
- Get curtains a few inches wider and longer than your window frame, not just window-width. Light sneaks in around the edges more than through the fabric, especially with that low morning sun coming in almost sideways.
- A tension rod or track that mounts outside the frame does better than an inside-mount blind, for the same reason. You want overlap on all sides.
- Check the gap at the bottom. This is the one everyone misses. If there's a strip of light coming in under the curtain at floor level, that's enough to wake a light sleeper.
- If you rent or can't drill into the wall, command strip hooks plus a cheap tension rod work fine. You don't need to remodel your bedroom for this.
One caution, just practical, not dramatic: if you're doing an outside-mount rod above a window and you're on a ladder or stool, have someone hold it, especially if it's over furniture. I've contracted long enough to have opinions about ladders in bedrooms.
Cool, dark, boring
This is the opinion I keep coming back to in this module: your bedroom should be cool, dark, and boring. Not fancy, not Pinterest-bedroom, just those three things. Dark we just covered. Cool matters more here than people expect, because our dry air actually makes a room feel warmer than the thermostat says — there's no humidity to carry heat away from your skin the way there is in other climates, so you sweat and it just sits there. I run our room a couple degrees cooler than I would've guessed I'd need. If you add a humidifier for the dry air, which a lot of people up here do, remember our water's hard and it'll clog the thing with mineral scale in a few weeks. Descale it or you're just running a humidifier that doesn't humidify.
The notebook part
I want to bring up my notebook again, because this is exactly the kind of change it's built for. I keep this little spiral notebook — same one I use for genealogy hunches, don't ask — where I write down one change at a time and what happened. Half of what's in there didn't do anything. The hot bath thing, big yes. A weighted blanket, no real difference for me. The blackout curtains were one of the clearest "yes" entries I've got, actual before-and-after, actual hours added.
That's the whole method, honestly. Not a stack of changes at once where you can't tell what worked. One thing. A week. Write down what happened. Keep what works, drop what doesn't.
Before next time
Go look at your bedroom window in the morning light and be honest about how dark it actually gets when you close whatever's currently up there. If light's getting through, that's your one thing to try this week.