Recovering From a Late One in Your Forties

What helps is water before you sleep, a proper breakfast rather than a sweet one, daylight early, and a short nap instead of a long lie-in. What does not help is writing off the whole day, which is the usual approach and the reason Sunday ends up feeling worse than Saturday night ever did.

Recovery in your forties is mostly about sleep and timing. Your body clock notices a late one far more than it used to, so the quickest route back to normal is to make the next day look like a normal day as early as you can.

Start the Night Before

A big glass of water before bed and another one beside the bed is the oldest advice going because it works. Do it while you are still standing up, before you reach the stage where it feels like too much effort.

Then take your makeup off, get your clothes off the floor, and put your phone on charge somewhere you will find it. Ten minutes of effort at one in the morning buys you a much better nine o'clock.

What It Costs

Almost nothing, and the two things worth spending on both get spent before the late one rather than after it.

• Getting home properly. A shared taxi beats a long cold wait, and the wait wrecks the next day more than the extra hour does.
• Something decent in the fridge for the morning. Eggs, bread, fruit, whatever you will actually eat. Buy it on the Friday, because you will not go out for it.
• Nothing else at all. There is no drink, powder or sachet worth buying for this, whatever the packaging says about it.

If you spend on one thing, spend it on getting home. Everything about the following day is easier if you were in bed an hour earlier than you would otherwise have been.

Get Up Before You Feel Ready

Sleeping until one in the afternoon feels like the obvious move and it costs you the whole of Sunday and most of Sunday night as well. Get up at a roughly normal hour, even feeling rough, and take the extra sleep later as a nap instead.

Twenty to forty minutes in the afternoon puts you back in credit without pushing your bedtime into Monday. Set an alarm for it, because the nap that quietly runs to two hours is the one that ruins the week.

Daylight, Early

Get outside within an hour of getting up. Not a walk with a purpose, not a run, just twenty minutes outdoors with your eyes open.

It is the fastest thing you can do to feel human again, it settles your body clock for that night, and it works perfectly well in North East drizzle in February. Standing in the yard with a cup of tea counts.

Eat a Real Breakfast

Something with protein in it and something salty. Eggs on toast, beans, a bacon sandwich, last night's leftovers. Your appetite may not be interested, in which case eat a small amount anyway and then eat again an hour later.

What tends to backfire is starting with something sweet, because you will be hungry and flat again within the hour. Fruit alongside it, fine. A pastry and a large coffee as the entire meal, less so.

Keep Drinking All Day

Not a litre in one go at eleven in the morning. A glass every hour or so, spread across the day, alongside your tea and coffee rather than instead of them.

Keep a bottle where you can see it and you will drink more without thinking about it. Steady beats heroic, here and everywhere else.

Pace the Day Itself Next Time

The most effective recovery happens before the event. A day out that starts in the afternoon and finishes in the evening gets you home in time for a full night's sleep, which is much of the reason daytime clubbing suits you better now than a two in the morning finish does. A Dreamworx afternoon at Digital finishes in the evening, so most of the recovering is done before you go to bed.

The same trick works on any long day. Eat before it, sit down for twenty minutes somewhere in the middle, and take a glass of water between everything else. None of that is exciting and it is the whole difference between a good Sunday and no Sunday.

Give the Next Day One Small Thing

A single easy fixed thing stops it turning into eight hours of scrolling. A walk, lunch at somebody's house, a job that takes an hour. Small, specific, and preferably outdoors.

Then be genuinely finished by nine. An early night on the Sunday is what actually closes the whole thing off, and by Monday morning it will feel like nothing ever happened.