In August 2023, Erling Haaland described his evening routine on Logan Paul's Impaulsive podcast, and a few million people decided to copy a Premier League striker's bedtime.
The routine is more interesting than the headlines made it, partly because one element is far better supported than the others and partly because the most valuable thing he said was not about any product at all.
Here is each element, what he actually said, and an honest grade on whether it transfers to someone whose job is not scoring goals for Manchester City.
Note on brands: Haaland has not said what brand of tape or glasses he uses, and nothing in this article should be read as an endorsement by him of any product. Where I recommend something, that is my recommendation.
What he actually described
The reported routine, from that interview:
- Taping his mouth shut to sleep — "You should try and tape your mouth. I sleep with it"
- Wearing blue-light-blocking glasses for roughly three hours before bed
- Treating sleep as the top priority — "I think sleep is the most important thing in the world"
- A stated philosophy of small consistent inputs: "Doing a lot of things is not good but doing small things every single day for a longer period really pays off"
That fourth point is the one worth stealing, and I will come back to it.
Element 1: Mouth tape — grade A- for the right person
The best-supported element, with an important qualification.
The mechanism is simple and mechanical. If your jaw falls open overnight, you breathe through your mouth: faster, drier, bypassing the filtering and humidifying the nose does, and skipping the nitric oxide produced in the sinuses that contributes to airway vasodilation. Tape holds the lips together so that does not happen.
For a habitual mouth breather with a clear nose, this reliably fixes morning dry mouth within a few nights and often reduces snoring in the first week. Those are small, checkable outcomes.
The qualification is real, though. A 2025 systematic review in PLOS One led by Brian Rotenberg reviewed 10 studies and found minimal evidence for mouth taping as a treatment for sleep-disordered breathing outside of mild obstructive sleep apnea — and flagged a genuine asphyxiation risk for anyone with nasal obstruction.
Both things are true at once. Tape is not an apnea treatment and should never be used as one. For an adult with a working nose who wakes with a sandpaper throat, it is a cheap mechanical fix with a fast read-out. Screen first — STOP-BANG, and the apnea distinction is here.
If you try it, use something built for overnight lip wear rather than a roll of surgical tape, which tends to peel around hour four and pulls facial hair — the comparison is here. I use Titan Recovery's bamboo silk mouth tape.
Transfers to you? Yes, if you screen first and actually breathe through your mouth at night. This is the element with the clearest mechanism and the fastest feedback.
Element 2: Blue-light glasses, three hours out — grade C+
The most-copied element and the weakest link in the chain, though not for the reason most critics give.
The underlying science is solid: light in the short-wavelength range suppresses melatonin and shifts circadian rhythm timing. Evening light exposure genuinely delays sleep onset. That much is not controversial.
Where it gets shakier is the leap from that to therefore amber glasses fix your evening. Trials of blue-blocking lenses for sleep are mixed, many are small, and effects are generally modest. More importantly, the glasses address one channel — spectrum — while doing nothing about the other two that matter at least as much: total light intensity and what the screen is doing to your arousal. A pair of orange lenses will not offset an hour of work email in bed.
The honest ranking of evening light interventions is: dim the room, get the screen out of the bedroom, reduce overhead lighting — and then, if you still have unavoidable bright evening exposure, glasses as a supplementary tool. Haaland's version puts a three-hour buffer around bed, which is a genuinely serious commitment and probably doing more work than the lenses themselves.
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If you want a pair, these are the amber-lens blue-light glasses I use — genuinely amber, not the barely-tinted "computer glasses" that block a token amount of the relevant range. Our fuller assessment of whether they work is here.
Transfers to you? Partially. Do the free things first. Glasses are the last 15 percent, not the first.
Element 3: Prioritising sleep above everything — grade A, with an asterisk
"I think sleep is the most important thing in the world" is the highest-leverage thing in the entire routine, and it is also the element nobody copies, because it is not purchasable.
Duration and consistency dominate every optimisation you can layer on top. Adults need roughly seven to nine hours, and no tape, supplement or pair of glasses compensates for six. Schedule regularity matters comparably — a stable sleep and wake time is one of the strongest levers available and costs nothing.
The asterisk: a professional footballer can actually do this. His job rewards sleeping 10 hours. He has no commute, no second job, no infant, and a support staff whose function is to remove friction from exactly this. When he says sleep is the most important thing in the world, he is describing an occupational reality as much as a personal value.
Most people copying the routine have constraints he does not, which is precisely why the free structural elements — protecting duration, holding a consistent schedule — matter more for them than the accessories, not less.
Transfers to you? The principle, completely. The implementation, partially, depending on your life.
Element 4: The consistency philosophy — grade A+
The most valuable line in the interview, and the one that got the least coverage: "Doing a lot of things is not good but doing small things every single day for a longer period really pays off."
That is a better description of how sleep interventions actually work than most of what is written about them. The failure mode I see constantly is people assembling an elaborate ten-item protocol, running it for nine days, and abandoning all of it. The protocol was not wrong; it was too heavy to survive contact with a tired Tuesday.
Two or three things done every night for a year beats ten things done for a fortnight. This is also why friction matters more than efficacy at the margin: an intervention you skip is worth zero regardless of how well it performs in a trial. The evening timeline article covers how to sequence a small stack so it survives.
Transfers to you? Entirely, and it is free.
The routine, ranked by what to actually do
If you are copying this, do it in this order:
| Priority | Element | Cost | Evidence |
|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | Protect 7-9 hours, consistent schedule | Free | Strongest |
| 2 | Dim lights, screens out of the bedroom | Free | Strong |
| 3 | Mouth tape, after screening | ~$0.54-0.83/night | Good for the right person |
| 4 | Blue-light glasses for unavoidable evening exposure | One-off | Modest, mixed |
Most people invert this list, because items 3 and 4 are purchasable and items 1 and 2 require rearranging your evening. Buying the accessories while sleeping six hours on an irregular schedule is the most common way to spend money on sleep and get nothing back.
What is missing from the routine
Worth noting, since the routine gets treated as complete:
- Bedroom temperature. Probably the most underrated free intervention. A cool room supports the core temperature drop that accompanies sleep onset — the setup checklist is here.
- Alcohol. Reliably fragments the back half of the night. For most adults this is a bigger lever than every accessory combined.
- Caffeine timing. A long half-life means an afternoon coffee is still active at bedtime for plenty of people.
- Morning light. The strongest signal for anchoring circadian timing, and it happens 16 hours before you want to be asleep.
None of those photograph well, which is roughly why they do not make it into podcast clips.
The honest summary
One element of Haaland's routine is well-founded for a specific and identifiable group of people: mouth tape, for adults with a clear nasal airway who habitually breathe through their mouths at night, after screening for apnea. One is modest and over-ranked: blue-light glasses. And two are free, dominant, and almost universally skipped: protecting sleep duration and doing a small number of things consistently.
The most useful thing he said was not about tape or glasses. It was that small things done every day for a long time beat elaborate things done briefly. Copy that first, and the rest of the routine either becomes worth adding or turns out to be unnecessary.
For the other athletes who have described this practice and what they actually said, the sourced roster is here.