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About this tool
Build a bedtime, wind-down, caffeine cut-off and nap schedule backwards from your wake time, sized for age-related sleep changes.
The Senior Sleep Routine Planner builds a full evening and morning schedule backwards from a fixed wake time, the anchor sleep medicine asks people to hold steady seven days a week. It sets lights out from your sleep target plus the minutes you usually take to fall asleep, then places the wind-down hour, the caffeine cut-off eight hours before bed, the last alcohol and heavy meal three hours before, and a nap window capped at 30 minutes and finished by 3 pm. Add a week of sleep diary averages and it also reports sleep efficiency against the 85% target used in CBT for insomnia.
Open Senior Sleep Routine Planner on AltFTool — it loads instantly in your browser.
Add your input to the workspace.
Adjust the options until the result looks right.
Copy or download the output and put it to work.
The schedule is derived from the wake time rather than the bedtime, which is the order sleep medicine recommends.
Caffeine, alcohol, heavy meals, exercise, bright light and fluids each get a clock time, not a vague rule.
The optional sleep diary produces a sleep efficiency percentage and a sleep-restriction time in bed with a 5.5 hour floor.
The National Sleep Foundation consensus recommends 7 to 8 hours a night for adults aged 65 and over, compared with 7 to 9 hours for adults aged 18 to 64. The need does not collapse with age; what changes is that sleep becomes lighter and more broken, so more time in bed is often required to get the same amount of sleep.
The circadian rhythm advances with age, meaning the whole sleep window shifts earlier — sleepiness arrives in the early evening and waking follows before dawn. Getting bright light in the early evening rather than the morning is what nudges the clock later. Going to bed at 8 pm and then complaining about waking at 4 am is usually the phase advance at work, not insomnia.
Caffeine has a half-life of about 5 hours in most adults and longer in older adults and in anyone taking certain medicines, so a cut-off around eight hours before bed is a safe default. For a 10:40 pm bedtime that means no tea, coffee or cola after about 2:40 pm.
Short naps are fine and can improve alertness. Keep them to about 20 to 30 minutes and finish before mid-afternoon: longer naps take you into deep sleep, which causes grogginess on waking and reduces the sleep pressure that helps you fall asleep at night. If night-time sleep is poor, cutting a long nap is one of the first things to try.