Rātricarya: Night Routines Before Blue Light Became a Problem

Traditional evening practices for the screen-lit modern night

Āyurvedic guidance on evening practices, sleep timing, and pre-sleep rituals vs. the modern sleep hygiene industry (weighted blankets, sleep trackers, melatonin supplements).

The Hour of Greatest Wakefulness

At eleven in the evening on a Tuesday in April 2024, a thirty-one-year-old founder named Rohan Bhatia sat in his studio apartment in Koramangala, Bengaluru, watching the blue glow of his laptop. His Slack was still open. His calendar had a call at seven in the morning with a client in San Francisco. He had ordered in biryani at nine and eaten half of it. He had promised himself he would be in bed by ten thirty. He was a weighted blanket and a melatonin tablet and a set of blackout curtains away from the life he wanted, which was a life where he slept.

Rohan had already tried most of the things. He had an Oura ring. He had a meditation app. He had a sleep-tracking mattress cover. He had spent the equivalent of three months' rent on products marketed to him by the global sleep industry, which in 2024 was valued at approximately five hundred and eighty-five billion dollars ($585 billion) and was growing at double-digit rates. He was, by every measurable input, trying hard. His sleep score that week was sixty-two out of a hundred.

What none of the apps and rings had told him was that his problem was not a hardware problem. It was a doctrine problem. He had no rātricaryā.

Rātricaryā: Conduct for the Night

The Sanskrit word is rātricaryā. Rātri means night. Caryā means conduct, the way one carries oneself through a stretch of time. Rātricaryā is the classical Ayurvedic protocol for the evening hours, from roughly sunset to sleep, and for what surrounds sleep on either side.

The Caraka Saṃhitā treats it as a subset of dinacaryā, daily conduct. The Aṣṭāṅga Hṛdaya devotes substantial passages to it, because Vāgbhaṭa understood that the quality of a day is set by the quality of the preceding night, and the quality of the night is set by what happens in the two hours before sleep.