The target
Adults need seven to nine hours and teenagers eight to ten. The test is simple: if you require an alarm every day and fall asleep within a few minutes of lying down, you are short. Sleeping in on weekends repays a little of the debt, but a swing of more than an hour shifts your body clock, and Monday morning then feels like jet lag because it is.
The room and the evening
Set the bedroom to somewhere between 60 and 67 degrees, since the body has to cool slightly to fall asleep. Block light with blackout curtains or a sleep mask, and use earplugs or a steady fan for noise you cannot control.
Give yourself thirty to sixty minutes of winding down with dim lights and nothing demanding. Screens are a problem less for their light than for their content, which is built to keep you awake. Charge the phone across the room. Alcohol deserves particular suspicion: it brings sleep on faster, then fragments the second half of the night.
When you cannot sleep
Lying in bed awake teaches the brain that bed is a place for being awake. The technique sleep clinics teach is the opposite of trying harder:
- Go to bed only when you are sleepy, not merely when the clock says so.
- Get up if you are still awake after roughly twenty minutes, without watching the clock.
- Do something dull in dim light in another room, such as reading a paper book.
- Return when sleepiness comes, and repeat as needed.
- Rise at your fixed time regardless of how the night went.
Keep the bed for sleep and sex only. Hold naps to twenty or thirty minutes and take them before mid-afternoon, or they will borrow from the coming night.
When it is medical
Trouble sleeping at least three nights a week for three months is chronic insomnia, and the first-line treatment is a structured form of cognitive behavioral therapy, not pills. Loud snoring with pauses or gasping, or heavy daytime sleepiness despite enough hours, suggests sleep apnea, which is common, underdiagnosed and treatable. Bring either one to a doctor. Melatonin shifts the timing of sleep more than it sedates, and supplements are loosely regulated, so follow the label and ask a pharmacist before taking it nightly.
Note Driving drowsy impairs you much as alcohol does. If your eyelids are drooping at the wheel, pull over and nap for twenty minutes, because an open window and loud music do not work.
