7 Tips for sleep

Since I’ve started my Happiness Projects, I’ve become more and more convinced that sleep is vitalto happiness and energy. (Here are fourteen tips on getting more sleep.)

But it can be very hard to turn out the light.

If you want to get more sleep, but have a hard time getting into bed, try these strategies:

1. First things first: give yourself a specific bedtime. Most adults need 7-9 hours of sleep, so look at your wake-up time, and do the math. Even if you don’t go to bed at your bedtime, knowing, “Well, it’s midnight, so I’m two hours past my bedtime” might help prod you to bed.

2. Don’t wait until you feel sleepy to think “Hey, maybe it’s about time for bed.” It’s all too easy to keep yourself alert and busy way past the time that you should be asleep. Beware the dreaded second wind! If you insist that you’re quite wide awake at 1:00 a.m., test yourself: sit in a dim room with your head back for five minutes. How does it feel? Are you still wide awake? Along those lines…

3. Stay away from the internet for at least an hour before your bedtime. Television, too, but I think the internet is even more apt to make me feel artificially wide awake. I used to try to go through my emails one last time before bed, to get a jump on the morning, but I realized that this stimulating activity made it much harder to go to sleep.

4. Don’t drink caffeine for several hours before your bedtime.

5. Remind yourself how great it feels to wake up naturally, before the alarm goes off, without that sickening jolt into wakefulness. Then, when you’re surfing the internet at 11:30 p.m., ask yourself, “Am I making a good trade-off?” I was once talking to a group of medical students, and one guy protested, “But if I go to bed at 11:00, I won’t have time to watch some TV before bed.” I asked, “Is watching that block of TV so fun that it outweighs the pleasure of getting enough sleep?” (I don’t know what he decided.)

6. Get ready before bed well ahead of time. I realized that, perversely, I often put off going to bed because I was too tired to take out my contacts, brush my teeth, and get changed. Now I get ready earlier in the evening. Side benefit: once I do these things, I’m less likely to head to snack. On a related note…

7. Create a bedtime ritual, and do it at the same time every night. Maybe you fix yourself a cup of herbal tea, maybe you read in bed, maybe you do an evening tidy-up. By doing the same thing every night, you will cue yourself to start heading to bed.

One bit of folk wisdom that I heard when I had very young children was that “Sleep begets sleep.” I found that to be true of my children, and also of myself. Counter-intuitively, I sleep better when I’m well-rested than when I’m over-tired.

If you'd like to read more on this subject, check out my book The Happiness Project,chapter one--all about energy.