Getting consistent, quality sleep comes down to a few core habits: keeping a regular schedule, controlling your environment, and avoiding the specific things that disrupt your body’s natural sleep signals. Adults need at least 7 hours per night, with those 61 to 64 benefiting from 7 to 9 hours and those 65 and older aiming for 7 to 8. Teens need 8 to 10. If you’re not hitting those numbers, the fixes below are where to start.
Set a Consistent Wake Time
Your body runs on an internal clock driven by two hormones: melatonin, which rises as darkness falls and makes you drowsy, and cortisol, which peaks in the morning and keeps you alert. This system works best when it can predict your schedule. The single most effective thing you can do is wake up at the same time every day, including weekends. A consistent wake time anchors your entire sleep cycle, making it easier to fall asleep at night without effort.
Napping can help if you’re short on sleep, but keep naps between 20 and 40 minutes. Longer naps push you into deeper sleep stages, leaving you groggy afterward and making it harder to fall asleep that night.
Make Your Bedroom Cool and Dark
Your core body temperature needs to drop slightly for sleep to begin. A bedroom between 60 and 67°F (15 to 19°C) supports this process. Above 70°F is too warm, and below 60°F is too cold. If you don’t have air conditioning, a fan pointed near (not directly at) your body, lightweight breathable sheets, and minimal clothing can help.
Darkness matters just as much. Your brain produces melatonin in response to darkness, and even moderate light suppresses it. In one study, three hours of blue light exposure (the kind emitted by phones, tablets, and LED bulbs) held melatonin levels at roughly 8 pg/mL, while the same duration of red light allowed levels to climb to nearly 17 pg/mL. That’s a dramatic difference from a seemingly small change. Blackout curtains, or even a sleep mask, eliminate ambient light from streetlamps and electronics.
Manage Light and Screens Before Bed
Blue light from screens is particularly effective at suppressing melatonin because its wavelength (around 464 nm) directly activates the light-sensing cells in your eyes that regulate your internal clock. The suppression becomes significant after about two hours of exposure, which means scrolling your phone from 9 to 11 p.m. is actively delaying your ability to fall asleep.
You have a few practical options. Most phones and computers now have built-in night modes that shift the screen toward warmer, redder tones. These help, though turning screens off entirely one to two hours before bed is more effective. If you need light in the evening, use dim, warm-toned bulbs rather than bright white or daylight LEDs.
Watch Your Caffeine and Alcohol Timing
Caffeine has a half-life that ranges from 2 to 10 hours depending on your genetics, age, and liver function. That means half the caffeine from an afternoon coffee could still be circulating in your system at midnight. Research has shown that 400 mg of caffeine (roughly two large coffees) taken even six hours before bedtime significantly disrupts sleep compared to a placebo. If you’re sensitive to caffeine or struggling to fall asleep, cut it off by early afternoon at the latest.
Alcohol is trickier because it genuinely makes you drowsy at first. It increases deep sleep in the first half of the night, which is why a nightcap can feel like it “works.” But it simultaneously suppresses REM sleep, the phase most important for memory and emotional processing. In the second half of the night, as your body metabolizes the alcohol, sleep fragments. You wake more often, spend more time lying awake, and your overall sleep quality drops. Even moderate amounts produce this pattern. The closer to bedtime you drink, the worse the effect.
Take a Warm Shower or Bath
A warm shower or bath 1 to 2 hours before bed is one of the more underrated sleep tools, and the mechanism is counterintuitive. Water at 104 to 109°F (40 to 42.5°C) for as little as 10 minutes draws blood toward the surface of your skin, especially your hands and feet. After you get out, that blood rapidly releases heat, dropping your core temperature faster than it would on its own. This accelerated cooling signals your brain that it’s time to sleep. Studies using this approach found both improved sleep quality and a measurable reduction in the time it takes to fall asleep.
Use the 20-Minute Rule
If you’ve been lying in bed for 15 to 20 minutes and you’re still awake, get up. This is the core principle of stimulus control, a technique from cognitive behavioral therapy for insomnia. The goal is to train your brain to associate your bed with sleep, not with frustration or wakefulness.
The rules are straightforward: only get into bed when you feel sleepy, not just tired. If you’re not asleep within 15 to 20 minutes, leave the bedroom and do something quiet and low-stimulation in dim light, like reading a physical book. Return to bed only when you feel drowsy again. Repeat as many times as needed. Avoid using your bed for watching TV, working, or scrolling your phone. Over time, this retrains the association between your bed and falling asleep quickly.
Consider Magnesium
Magnesium is one of the few supplements with some evidence behind it for sleep, though that evidence is limited. A meta-analysis of three trials in older adults found that magnesium supplementation reduced the time to fall asleep by about 17 minutes compared to placebo. Total sleep time improved by about 16 minutes, though that result wasn’t statistically significant. The studies were small (151 participants total) and had methodological limitations.
Still, magnesium is inexpensive, widely available, and generally well-tolerated at doses under 1 gram per day. It’s not a replacement for the behavioral strategies above, but if you’re already doing everything else right and still struggling, it’s a reasonable addition.
Build a Wind-Down Routine
Your body doesn’t have an off switch. It needs a transition period between the activity of your day and the stillness of sleep. A consistent pre-sleep routine, even a simple 30-minute one, acts as a signal. This could be a warm shower, dimming the lights, reading, or light stretching. The specific activities matter less than the consistency. When you repeat the same sequence each night, your brain begins to associate those cues with the onset of sleep, and the process of falling asleep becomes more automatic.
What to avoid in that window: vigorous exercise (finish workouts at least a few hours before bed), heavy meals, stressful conversations or work emails, and anything on a bright screen. The goal is to progressively lower your level of stimulation so that by the time you’re in bed, sleep is the natural next step rather than something you have to force.