When it comes to falling asleep, especially amid these super-stressful times, the struggle is real for most of us. As our heads hit the pillow, thoughts, fears, and concerns swirl around despite feeling adequately tired. While sleep science tells us that engaging in a consistent bedtime routine can help induce the zzz’s, it’s best that we leave smartphone doom-scrolling out of it and reach for a book instead. Not only can bedtime books become part of a great nighttime routine, but a 2009 commercial study conducted by Mindlab International found that reading reduced stress in its subjects in just six minutes—by 60 per cent. If that’s not reason enough to hit up your bookshelf, we’ve rounded up the answers to why bedtime reading can help you sleep better. Plus, find out which books to crack open tonight.

Reading books at any time of the day has been shown to boost your brainpower, including memory, vocabulary, imagination, and more. Combine this with the meditative powers of stories, and picking one up is a no-brainer. Mindfulness or meditation help to stop that broken record of thoughts, worries, and concerns, and contrary to popular belief, it doesn’t have to be a formal practice to work wonders. Kathryn Nicolai, podcast host and author of Nothing Much Happens, a collection of bedtime stories for adults, explains how stories can be meditative. (In fact, as a yoga and meditation teacher, she’s learned to sneakily get people to meditate via her stories.) “In terms of going to sleep, when there’s a narrative, something for your brain to follow along with, you are interrupting its tendency to cycle through thoughts about the rest of the day, thoughts about tomorrow, other worries and fears,” she says. “You’re interrupting that path because you are following along with a narrative. And that’s what allows the mind to get quiet and to find sleep.”

The Little Prince, Goodnight Moon, and Madeline are kids’ mainstays, so why not bring the calming powers of these sweet reads into adulthood. Keep in mind that you can always ask the book experts at Indigo if you need help picking your next read. While the perfect sleepy story is an individual choice and is related to how you react to the content, Nicolai has found a formula that tends to work.

“A bedtime story should make us feel safe and relaxed, and so there needs to be a certain amount of pleasurable, soothing content. It should be rich in sensory details, noticing how things smell and taste, and look, because I think that helps the reader put themselves in that story,” she says. And research shows that while we read, particularly details that describe scents, feelings, or movements, parts of the brain responsible for sensory, olfactory, and even motion are activated. So perhaps we’re more “in” the story than we actually think.

Many sleep experts agree that the worst thing you can do when you wake up in the middle of the night is to stay in bed worrying about getting back to sleep. Try flicking on your book light and reading something pleasant, like poetry or short stories, or take your mind to a happy place, the fodder for which could come from a nice poem or story. “I always think of it like your brain is a truck with a brick on the gas pedal … and if you just let it go, it’ll race and keep you up all night. If you have this file cabinet of soft stories, of safe places, of comfortable, cozy ideas that you could pull out and open up, and steer your truck onto that field, off the expressway, then you’re going to fall back asleep,” says Nicolai.