The order is doing most of the work here. Light comes first because it is the one cue your body reads without any effort, the tea and the rug come next so you are already settled before the book arrives, and reading sits last because it is the only step that ends on your body's signal rather than the clock.
Step 1: Swap the ceiling light for lamps
Start here because light is the cue your body actually reads, not the clock. At 8 PM, kill the ceiling fixture and switch on two lamps placed at or below eye level, with warm 2700K bulbs. Height matters more than brightness: overhead light comes down into your field of view, while a lamp below eye level mostly lights the room around you. A workable version is one lamp on a dimmer set to about a third. What people get wrong is dimming the room and then picking up a phone, whose screen throws more light into your eyes than the ceiling light you just switched off. By the time step 2 starts, the room should already look like evening.
Step 2: Brew the tea and sit with it
The kettle does more work than the herb does. Chamomile if you want something bland and warm, peppermint if you ate late and feel heavy, and the choice matters far less than the eight minutes it takes to boil, steep, and sip it sitting down. Because step 1 already dropped the room into lamplight, this is the first stretch of the evening where you are doing exactly one thing. Keep the mug at the table, not at the desk, and skip a second cup after 9 PM unless you enjoy waking at 3 AM. Where this falls apart is speed: people boil, gulp standing at the counter, and are back on a screen in ninety seconds, which turns a pacing device into just a drink.
Step 3: Three stretches on the rug
Three poses, not a workout. After the tea you have been sitting still for a while, and this step is where the body catches up with the room. Unroll nothing, the rug is enough. Do a seated forward fold, a figure-four hip stretch lying on your back, and slow cat-cow on hands and knees. Hold each for sixty to ninety seconds and make every exhale longer than the inhale before it. The usual failure is scope creep: adding a fourth pose, then a fifth, then a foam roller, until it has become a training session that leaves you wired. A second one is timing, since doing this immediately before climbing into bed means going straight from floor to pillow, so let step 4 do the final settling. Stop short of anything that hurts.
Step 4: Read paper until your eyes droop
Finish with paper. This is the only step that ends when your body says so instead of when a chapter, an episode, or a timer says so, which is why it comes last: the earlier three have already removed most of the reasons to stay awake. Pick a book you are mildly interested in, not gripped by. A thriller at 10 PM is a decision to be awake at midnight. Sit up with a lamp behind your shoulder, keep a bookmark in the page, and close the book the moment your eyelids get heavy, even mid-paragraph. Pushing for one more chapter is the reliable way to lose the effect. Reading on a tablet reintroduces the light problem from step 1, so leave the phone charging in another room.
A phone reminder vanishes the instant you swipe it away, and a to-do app keeps the item listed forever whether or not you ever did it. A paper strip taped to the lamp behaves differently: every step you finish gets cut off, so the strip gets visibly shorter and stays somewhere in view until the last line is gone.