Christmas Eve excitement triggers the same stress hormones that keep you up before a big exam or job interview. Your body floods with cortisol and adrenaline, raising your heart rate and keeping your brain on high alert. The good news: a few deliberate techniques can override that wired feeling and help you drift off, even when your mind is buzzing about tomorrow morning.
Why Excitement Keeps You Awake
Falling asleep requires a gradual decline in physiological and mental activity. Your heart rate slows, your muscles relax, your thoughts lose their structure. Anticipation does the opposite. Whether you’re five years old or fifty, the thrill of Christmas morning ramps up your sympathetic nervous system, the same fight-or-flight response that evolved to keep you alert in the face of something important. Cortisol levels rise, and that elevated cortisol specifically disrupts the deep sleep stages your body needs most.
This is completely normal. You’re not broken, and you don’t have insomnia. You just need to convince your nervous system that it’s safe to power down.
Set Up Your Room for Sleep
Before you try any mental techniques, make sure your environment isn’t working against you. Keep your bedroom between 60 and 67°F (15 to 19°C). Your body needs to drop its core temperature slightly to initiate sleep, and a cool room helps that process along. If holiday guests or travel have you in an unfamiliar bed, bring your own pillow or blanket if you can. Familiar textures signal safety to your brain.
Dim the lights at least an hour before you plan to sleep. Bright light, especially from screens, suppresses melatonin production. Research guidelines suggest keeping light exposure to a minimum during the three hours before bedtime. If you’re watching a Christmas movie or scrolling through holiday photos, switch your device to its warmest screen setting or put it away entirely for that last hour.
Take a Warm Bath or Shower Earlier in the Evening
A warm bath one to three hours before bedtime can shorten the time it takes to fall asleep by about 20 to 33 percent. The mechanism is counterintuitive: warming your skin dilates blood vessels near the surface, which actually accelerates heat loss from your core afterward. That drop in core temperature mimics what your body does naturally as it prepares for sleep. Even 10 minutes is enough to trigger the effect, so you don’t need a long soak.
Watch What You Eat and Drink
Christmas Eve dinners tend to be heavy, which can work both for and against you. Turkey is famously high in tryptophan (273 milligrams per 3-ounce serving), the amino acid your body converts into serotonin and then melatonin. Pork roast, beef, salmon, and lobster are also strong sources. Dairy foods like warm milk or cheese contain moderate amounts too. A dinner built around these proteins gives your body raw material for sleep hormones.
The bigger concern is caffeine. Coffee, hot chocolate, chocolate desserts, and some teas all contain it, and caffeine has an average half-life of about five hours. That means half the caffeine from a 3 p.m. cup of coffee is still circulating at 8 p.m. If you’re planning to sleep by 10, cut off caffeine by early afternoon. Switch to herbal tea or decaf for evening drinks.
Avoid eating a large, rich meal right before bed. Give yourself at least two hours between your last big plate and lights out. A small snack is fine, but a stomach working hard to digest a heavy meal will keep your body too active to settle.
The 4-7-8 Breathing Technique
This is one of the fastest ways to shift your nervous system from “excited” to “calm.” Slow, deep breathing activates your parasympathetic nervous system, which directly counteracts the cortisol and adrenaline keeping you alert. The 4-7-8 method has been shown to increase vagal activity, the nerve pathway responsible for slowing your heart rate.
Here’s how it works: exhale completely through your mouth with a whooshing sound. Close your lips and inhale silently through your nose for a count of 4. Hold your breath for a count of 7. Exhale slowly through your mouth for a count of 8. That’s one cycle. Repeat for six cycles, then breathe normally for a minute, and do another set if you’re still awake. Most people feel noticeably calmer within two or three sets.
Progressive Muscle Relaxation
If your body feels physically tense from excitement, progressive muscle relaxation works by deliberately tensing and then releasing each muscle group. Start at your fists: clench them tightly for five seconds while breathing in, then release all at once and notice the difference. Move to your biceps, then your triceps, forehead (wrinkle it into a frown), eyes (squeeze them shut), jaw, tongue pressed against the roof of your mouth, lips pressed together, neck, shoulders shrugged up to your ears, stomach, lower back, buttocks, thighs, calves, and finally your shins and ankles.
The key is paying attention to the contrast between tension and release. By the time you’ve worked through your whole body, your muscles are more relaxed than they were before you started, and your brain has spent several minutes focused on physical sensation rather than Christmas morning.
Cognitive Shuffling for Racing Thoughts
This technique was developed by cognitive scientist Luc Beaudoin based on research into how the brain transitions to sleep. As you naturally fall asleep, your thoughts become random and disorganized. Cognitive shuffling mimics that process deliberately, tricking your brain into the pre-sleep state.
Pick a simple, neutral word like “chair” or “water.” Avoid anything emotionally loaded (so skip “presents” or “Santa”). Take the first letter and think of as many words starting with that letter as you can, picturing each one: for “chair,” you’d start with C and imagine “cat,” “candle,” “cloud,” “castle.” When you run out, move to H, then A, then I, then R. The randomness of this exercise gently pulls your brain away from structured, excited thinking. Most people don’t make it through the full word.
The Military Sleep Method
Originally developed to help soldiers fall asleep in uncomfortable conditions, this combines physical relaxation with mental clearing. Lie on your back, close your eyes, and systematically relax every part of your body starting at your forehead and working down to your toes. For each area, consciously think about how it feels and give it permission to go slack. After your body is relaxed, clear your mind by imagining yourself lying in a canoe on a calm lake with nothing but blue sky above you, or lying in a black velvet hammock in a dark room. If thoughts intrude, repeat “don’t think” to yourself for 10 seconds.
This method reportedly works for 96 percent of people after six weeks of practice, so don’t be discouraged if it doesn’t knock you out on the first try. Even partial success will leave you more relaxed.
Practical Tips for the Evening
Structure your Christmas Eve so that the most exciting activities happen earlier. Open one gift, play a game, or do your family traditions in the early evening rather than right before bed. Give yourself at least 30 to 45 minutes of calm, low-stimulation time before you try to sleep. Reading a book (a physical one, not a screen) or listening to quiet music works well as a wind-down buffer.
If you’ve been lying in bed for more than 20 minutes and you’re clearly still awake, get up and sit in a dimly lit room for 10 minutes. Do something boring. Flip through a magazine, fold laundry, or listen to a sleep story or guided meditation at low volume. Staying in bed while frustrated teaches your brain that bed is a place for wakefulness, not sleep. Return when you feel drowsy.
For kids, the same principles apply in simpler form. A warm bath, a consistent bedtime routine, a cool and dark room, and a calm story all help. Telling a child to “just go to sleep” rarely works when their nervous system is firing on all cylinders. Teaching them the breathing technique or the muscle relaxation game (squeeze your fists tight like you’re holding snowballs, then let them melt) gives them something to do with all that energy besides stare at the ceiling.