I have a shutdown ritual, which clearly demarcates the end of work and the start of the night after work. And the shutdown ritual—so it has to—you have to close open loops, right? So you got to make sure this is like a review type period. Let me look back at my inbox and look at my plan.

Let me look at my time block and my calendar. Really make sure—there's nothing urgent that needs to be dealt with that I didn't, and there's nothing that's just in my head that I don't want to forget that's not written down somewhere. Like, take care of all of that, right?

So you review all these things. You get what am I going to do tomorrow. You don't have to build your whole plan for tomorrow, but you have a sense for it. And then you need some sort of demonstrative thing you do to indicate that you finished a routine, right?

So my longtime newsletter readers know I used to actually have a phrase. I would say, "Schedule shutdown complete," like a crazy phrase, right? It's not how normal people talk, right? Now I have a planner that has like a checkbox that says "shutdown complete" next to it. The reason why that is a demonstrative anchor is that you use this then for cognitive behavioral therapy because at first people have a hard time shutting down work.

I mean, I invented this because I had a very hard time shutting down working on my dissertation. I just—what, this proof doesn't work and blah, blah, blah. So what you do is when you get a rumination post-shutdown, "Hey, what about—what's going on with our work? Are we doing the right thing?

Do we forget this or that?" Instead of engaging in the rumination, well, it's like, "No, I think we're okay. Let me think about my schedule tomorrow. What's my plan?" You instead can just say, "I said that crazy phrase," or "I checked that box." I wouldn't have said that phrase unless I had gone through everything and made sure that I had a good plan and nothing's being missed and it was okay to shut down work.

Because of that, I'm not going to engage with your rumination. I said the weird thing. Let's get back to what we're doing. This is like cognitive behavioral therapy that after a month or so, you are really able to actually effortlessly disengage from work and do everything—all the other stuff that matters without having the constant ruminations about work, which gives your mind an actual break to do other things.

So I mean this is more mental health and productivity. But for me, it was critical. I mean I can really remember when I came up with this, exactly where I was in my grad student career. I mean there's just too many ideas and concerns that were just roiling. Once I did this, it took a few weeks and then I could actually shut down and go on and do other things.

Yeah. The paired associative nature of the brain can make it really problematic if you're thinking about work at the dinner table. You start to associate the dinner table with work. When Matt Walker came here to do this six-part series that's soon to be released and we were discussing insomnia, he said one of the major issues with insomnia is people who have trouble falling asleep or staying asleep will often stay in bed when they can't sleep.

And then the bed becomes associated with challenges with sleep, hence the recommendation that virtually every sleep coach and sleep scientist recommends that people actually, if they can't sleep for 20 minutes or so of effort, then you get up and leave the bed and go someplace else until you feel sleepy enough to go back and try or fall asleep on the couch elsewhere.

I put that in as a note to you. But this seems incredibly important also for enrichment of relationships with spouses and children and people in your life. I mean, the problem is the first thing that we ask people when they walk in the door typically was how was work today?

Or how was work? What did you do today? Tell me about your school day. Tell me about your work. Maybe we need to come up with better questions. Yeah. Like here's something interesting we could do. Or here's like something I read about unrelated to work. No, I think it makes a huge difference.

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