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In our series Sleeping With…, SELF talks to successful people from different career paths, backgrounds, and stages of life to find out how they make sleep magic happen.
“If I close my eyes, it’s only because it helps me concentrate when I’m really sleepy, so please don’t take offense,” Kristen Bell tells me. She’s nestled into a corner booth at the vegetarian restaurant where we’ve met, curled in a half-ball on the leather seat. Bell arrived to New York City the night before from Austria, where she spoke at the Global Women’s Forum for Peace and Humanitarian Action. “I think I could feel better. But I could feel worse,” she says as she blows on her steaming green tea and picks at a red velvet cupcake.
Even in the midst of jet lag, IRL Bell is just as chipper, optimistic, and inspired as you’d imagine, considering the repertoire of iconic characters she’s played over the years. Depending on who you ask, Bell is Princess Anna or she’s Veronica Mars. She’s also Sarah Marshall, she’s Jeannie van der Hooven, and, most recently, she’s Eleanor Shellstrop, the protagonist of NBC’s existential comedy The Good Place, which aired its final season in January.
But Bell is more than the sum of her characters. She’s also dry, funny, and drops a tastefully planted F-bomb every now and then. When we eventually discuss her daughters, five-year-old Delta and six-year-old Lincoln, whom she shares with her husband, actor Dax Shepard, I consider, enviously, how pleasant it must be to hear her read a nightly bedtime story. She has that kind of presence—and that kind of voice. To her husband, she is Bell, (yes, like a teammate), and to her children, she is Mom. Now Bell is focusing on a few new titles: cofounder with Shepard of Hello Bello, a brand of affordable plant-based baby, home, and parenting products; and author. Her first children’s book, The World Needs More Purple People, coauthored with Benjamin Hart, comes out this June.
Bell lives with her family in Los Angeles, where her nighttime routine consists of putting two kids to bed (usually more than once), reconnecting with Shepard, and some time spent playing with what she calls her “robot bed.” For Bell, her bedtime routine is all about winding down. “Dax gets the majority of his energy at night, and I am the opposite,” she says. “That has always been strange for us. He comes home after work and I’m like, Oh, my God, take it down a notch. He has to let me know if he’s feeling excitable or frisky because it’s a lot of energy for me to deal with at 10 p.m.” Read what it’s like to sleep with Kristen Bell below.
On how she gets her kids to actually go to bed
Dax and I always try to put our kids to bed together. We need that man power because they are very strong-willed children and have both of our stubbornness combined. They go to bed at 7:30, so we will go into the bedroom at 7:00 and have a Supreme Court debate about whether or not they should brush their teeth. Recently I’ve been using this technique called the four walls technique, which I learned from Adam Grant, who was on my husband’s podcast, which is where you have someone come to their own conclusion by asking them a series of questions that leads them to believe it is the right decision. For example, I say, “What’s your favorite food?” [The kids] say, “Macaroni and cheese.” “What do you love about it?” “It’s delicious.” “What does it make you feel like?” “Makes me feel full.” “Okay, what do you use to eat macaroni and cheese?” “My teeth.” “Oh, great, so if you didn’t have your teeth, you couldn’t eat macaroni and cheese?” “Yes.” “And do you know how you keep your teeth?” You lead them to their conclusion.
I think in an effort to get my kids down, I’ve sometimes missed really beautiful moments where they were trying to share something with me or I was just watching them be silly. I’ve learned to take a step back and really take in the half hour I have with them at night and not try to rush them as much. Those are very magical times, and bearing witness to it as opposed to trying to rush it is what I’m erring on the side of, and I’ve been a lot happier since I’ve started doing that.
Kids don’t want to get advice day in and day out. Nobody does. I change my tactics often. Sometimes I have success by going in the bedroom with them and not saying anything, just sitting down on the bed, and they will reroute themselves. Sometimes, if I’ve had a really exhausting day, I’ll look at the clock at 6:30 and tell them that it’s 7:30. They can’t read the clock, and that is just fine with me.
When they were babies, like jelly roll babies, I would sit in the bathtub with them every night because my doula had recommended I let their brains start to connect that “After the dip in the warm water is when I sleep the longest.” They have to connect patterns—life is about connecting patterns, right? So, as they got older, it became, “We brush our teeth, we wash our hands, we put on our jammies, and we read two books.”
Lately we’ve been listening to audio books to put them to bed, which is pretty cool. We’re on book four of the Harry Potter series, and they love it. If we’re not listening to an audio book, we read books. And there’s usually some sort of Daddy wrestling match that happens to get out all the energy right before bed.
On her current favorite kids reads
There are so many good children’s books right now. Our favorite family one is called Quackenstein Hatches a Family. It’s by this writer I love named Sudipta Bardhan-Quallen, about a crotchety old duck named Quackenstein who lives at the zoo and sees that everybody has a baby to snuggle with except him. So he adopts an egg, and when it cracks open it doesn’t look like him and he gets really scared. But then he learns to love it—and it’s a little platypus. To me, it’s a metaphor for like, there’s no such thing as other people’s children, which is really important.
We have a couple of biographical books about Gloria Steinem that they love. They’re very into Gloria Steinem. They also really like this book called Dear Girl, which is just simple nuggets of advice for girls. My daughter is also very into this book series called Good Night Stories for Rebel Girls.
We also like this book called Edwina, which is by Mo Willems. It’s about being right: Do you want to be right, or do you want to be kind?
I wrote a children’s book that comes out in June, and it’s called The World Needs More Purple People. It came out of this idea that children absorb all of these conversations about divisiveness all day. We wanted to combat that and have a book that served as a reminder of the ways that we’re similar, not just the ways that we’re different, because [kids] are finding ways that we’re different all day. What are the things that every human being on the planet believes is true? It’s about acknowledging our similarities—like laughter is good.
On the tools that get her kids to sleep
We used a noise machine when they were little because I had read that the sounds in the womb are pretty much like white noise, and why not re-create that? So I was like, Duh, I’ll do that. I always dim the lights the minute we go into the bedroom, which I also recognize is because I have a dimmer, so that’s a luxury—people don’t always have that—but I find those kinds of signals are important.
We have something called a Jooki that I love. It’s a little speaker that’s shaped kind of like a donut, and it comes with five little figures that go in the center and are preprogrammed to music. One is their dance music, one is their nighttime music, one is their audiobook, and you can reprogram it through Spotify. So at two years old, my daughter could grab it and throw her own music on and she’s not touching a phone, she’s not using a screen, and it has an automatic shutoff.
And the other thing we love are our lamby lights. It’s a nightlight where the lamb’s face lights up and they can push the back on and off and it has an hour turnoff. So when they started to get nervous about being scared of the dark, they’d be able to turn their lamby light on and have a nightlight right in their hands.
I give them body massages a lot. I will just rub their back or their hands. I use our stuff, the Hello Bello lotion. It’s not too greasy, I know what’s in it because I picked it, and the lavender is great for them at night because it is a little bit of an extra soothing smell.
On what goes down once the kids are asleep
[I] take a deep breath. Snuggle up on the couch with my husband. We usually have an hour of TV to watch whatever show we’re currently obsessed with. We finished Cheer, obviously, duh, so good. We watch a lot of Frontline and a lot of 60 Minutes. John Oliver, obviously. We talk shit about our kids and go through pictures of them on our phones.
At that point, we usually reconnect about our days because when we’re not working the same job, it’s easy to just lose sight of the other person’s priorities. And we like to stay on the same team. So, what did you do today? Oh, how did you interact with that person? Was it as tough as it was yesterday? What’s your schedule look like next week? Just all the housekeeping stuff. And then, at that point, one of the girls has gotten up and had a hangnail or thought she saw a scorpion or what have you, and we usually put her back to bed two or three times before she finally falls asleep. And then I shower and get ready for bed.
I love a good CBD salt bath. Lord Jones has an amazing CBD bath salt that I love. Then we watch TV in bed. We had always both dreamed of having a Craftmatic adjustable bed, so we got a Sleep Number. It is absolutely the best thing on earth. It’s the most elegant way to live. I’ll be like, “Do you want to watch TV?” And he’ll go, “Yeah. Let me bring you up.” [Bell makes a buzzing sound.] It’s spectacular. So usually we play around with our robot bed for awhile.
On Dax’s side of the bed
His podcast has been a saving grace because he gets so much debate and so much heated, beautiful conversation out. He’s always been a bit of an insomniac, and around the time the Hunger Games came out he wasn’t going to read it, which I thought was grounds for divorce. And I said, “Well, what if I read it to you?” And he said, “Sure, whatever.” Well, I came up with all the voices. Cut to me reading it to him at night, and he’s falling asleep a lot easier. I don’t know what that says about the sound of my voice to his brain, but I ended up getting through all three books with him. We realized audiobooks are a great way for him to be soothed to sleep because he can just zone out. So, in our bedroom, the last part of our night is putting on an audiobook. He puts it on his phone and sets the timer to 60 minutes, and then we both just doze off.
Usually I am in a full matching set of jammies. Currently I’m into this velour tracksuit by Suzie Kondi. It is so comfortable, and then I wear it the entire next day when I take my kids to school. And Dax just sleeps in his chonies. He’s an underwear kinda guy.
[Dax’s] side of the bed is 100% messier, but that’s also because he’s currently working more than I am, so he’s not home as much and I’m able to tidy up. We both have a stack of books that we’re desiring to read that I doubt we’ll ever get to. The irony is that he can always find things easier than me. My side looks clean, but I can’t ever fucking find anything.
On silk pillowcases and hoarding sheet masks
I love a silk pillowcase. Love it. I’m currently using one from Upstate. I feel like it helps my skin and helps less breakage on my hair. I, for the life of me, cannot keep it on my bed because my children are addicted to building forts. The amount of times during the day that I am moving ottomans off the dining room table or all the pillows from one bedroom back or all the pillows from the living room back into the bedroom is absurd. I even got a tie-dye one because I was like, Nobody can steal this from me. This is going to be the most obvious pillowcase, because there’s no other tie-dye pillowcases in our house. They still steal it. So I suppose when I put my kids to bed I look for my silk pillowcase for about 10 minutes.
My girlfriends and I recently discovered that we were all saving our sheet masks for nothing. For what? Doomsday? And we were like, We’ve all got like a dozen sheet masks—why are we saving these? So we created Sheet Mask Wednesday. We Marco Polo each other in our different sheet masks and catch up about the week. My husband tried to be involved the other day, but he’s got a bigger face, and so the sheet mask was really just right here [motions to the center of her face]. He acts like he’s not into it, but he’s all over my products. I’m like, “I’m sorry, where’s my hyaluronic acid? Where’s my Clarisonic?”
Sulwhasoo makes an amazing mask that I had gotten as a gift. It’s called the Concentrated Ginseng Renewing Mask, and I put it on, and it was like—this is unreal. I Marco Polo’d my girls and was like, “Happy Hump Day, this mask is sick, we all got to get it.” I look it up—they’re $25 a piece. So now, after I’m done with it, I press the mask back together because it’s still juicy and use it again in a couple of days, so I can at least get two uses out of it and I feel a little bit better about the price tag. But that one is the best I’ve ever come across.
On raising grounded, confident girls
Recently I’ve found a lot of success when I can get my daughters to gang up on me. When they treat each other the worst, I have to say something like, “Well, I’m just glad you guys aren’t ganging up on me,” and that gives them this idea of, “Ooh, we can be coconspirators and battle Mom together.” Because what I care about is that they’re forming a bond.
It’s very important to me that they share a bedroom. I think their lives will be easier than most other people’s on the planet, and to develop a good character, it’s important to always be going through something. I like the fact that they will have to figure out how to share a bedroom, figure out how to share your closet, figure out how to share your space. If that’s the worst thing about your life, that you have to share a bedroom with your sister, you’re going to be okay.
We talk very candidly about the problems people have faced in the world. All people, period. We chose a preschool that is super cute and celebrates every world holiday, so they know a ton about other cultures. When my daughter was four, she woke up one Friday morning with a little fever, and she was panicking because that was the day that Cesar Chavez’s granddaughter was going to come to talk to them. And she was visibly panicked. I called the school and said, “Can I just keep her on my lap? She won’t touch anything.” It was preschool, so they said okay.
I found circles of people, whether it’s through the charter school that we chose or our group of friends, who make kindness important—make it a priority. I read a chapter called “Why White Parents Don’t Talk to Their Kids About Race” in a book called NurtureShock, and it was a lesson in “don’t ignore things.” Say, “Barack Obama was our first black president. That’s crazy, right? Because we see people of different colors all the time.” We acknowledge the complexities of the problem while simplifying it for their minds. And we talk about how women used to not be able to work as easily.
On screen time and whether her daughters watched The Good Place
My oldest daughter loves it. My little daughter doesn’t really understand it or could care less, but my oldest daughter just got into it because she’s come to work with me and also because she knows those people—they come over and they’re friendly. I hadn’t been watching it with her, I think my husband was, but I’d be happy to watch it with her. It’d be like reliving some of my best memories. I’m really happy with the ending that was written. I’m really happy that that piece of art is out there and that I got to be a part of it. But I’m sad because I miss everybody.
They’re not allowed to play with our phones or have any screens really. They are allowed to watch TV on the weekends and we’re pretty liberal with it, which I’ve been considering paying more attention to. But since they’re not allowed at all during the week, they will wake up at 6:30 on a Saturday morning and they will watch TV until noon. I will also sleep until 9:45, which is really nice, and then get stuff done. But I will say, I notice how hard it is to pull them away from the TV at noon.
Kristen’s Favorite Things:
Quackenstein Hatches a Family by Sudipta Bardhan-Quallen, $16, Barnes & Noble
Dear Girl by Amy Krouse Rosenthal, $10, Amazon
Good Night Stories for Rebel Girls by Francesca Cavallo and Elena Favilli, $23, Amazon
Edwina, the Dinosaur Who Didn’t Know She Was Extinct by Mo Willems, $13, Amazon
The World Needs More Purple People by Kristen Bell and Benjamin Hart, $13, Amazon
Jooki Music and Story Player for Kids, $200, Amazon
Fin Nightlight, $35, ZAZU
Hello Bello Baby Lotion, Lavender, $6, Walmart
Lord Jones High CBD Formula Bath Salts, $65, Sephora
Sleep Number c2 Smart Bed, $1,499, Sleep Number
Kondi Raglan Top, $198, Bandier
Kondi Slim Harem Pant, $100 (originally $198), Bandier
Upstate Silk Pillow Case, $150, Upstate
Clarisonic Skincare Mia Prima Facial Cleansing & Pore Minimizing Skincare Device, $99, Amazon
Sulwhasoo Concentrated Ginseng Renewing Creamy Masks, Set of 5, $120, Bloomingdale’s
NurtureShock by Po Bronson and Ashley Merryman, $10, Amazon
All product links featured on SELF are independently selected by our editors. However, when you buy something through our retail links, we may earn an affiliate commission.
