Most adults need seven or more hours of sleep per night, but hitting that number means nothing if the sleep itself is shallow or fragmented. Improving your sleep comes down to a handful of practical changes: controlling light exposure, keeping a consistent schedule, managing what you eat and drink, and rethinking your relationship with your bed. Here’s what actually works.
Work With Your Body’s Internal Clock
Your brain runs on a roughly 24-hour cycle that controls when you feel alert and when you feel drowsy. When light enters your eyes, specialized cells signal your brain to stop producing melatonin, the hormone that drives sleepiness. As the evening darkens, melatonin production ramps up, and your body’s cortisol output (which fuels daytime energy) drops. This entire system hinges on consistent light cues.
The single most effective thing you can do is wake up at the same time every day, including weekends. This anchors your internal clock so that sleepiness arrives predictably each night. Bright light exposure in the morning, ideally sunlight within the first hour of waking, reinforces the signal. In the evening, dim your indoor lighting. Blue light in the 460 to 480 nanometer range, the wavelength emitted by phone and laptop screens, suppresses melatonin more than any other part of the visible spectrum. Putting screens away an hour or two before bed gives your brain the darkness cue it needs to start winding down.
Redesign Your Bedroom
Your bedroom should do two things well: stay dark and stay cool. For darkness, blackout curtains or a sleep mask block the ambient light that can pull you into lighter sleep stages. Bedroom lighting, when you need it, should sit around 50 to 100 lux at floor level, roughly the brightness of a single dim lamp. Overhead lights at full power can easily hit 150 lux or more, which is enough to interfere with melatonin production if you’re exposed for long stretches before bed.
Temperature matters more than most people realize. A cool room, generally in the mid-60s Fahrenheit, helps your core body temperature drop, which is a natural part of falling asleep. If you’re regularly waking up sweating or kicking off covers, your room is too warm. Noise is the other variable. A fan, white noise machine, or earplugs can neutralize the random sounds (traffic, a partner’s snoring, neighborhood dogs) that cause micro-awakenings you may not even remember in the morning.
Use Your Bed Only for Sleep
This is one of the core principles of cognitive behavioral therapy for insomnia, the most effective long-term treatment for sleep problems. The idea, called stimulus control, is simple: your brain should associate your bed with sleep and nothing else. That means no scrolling your phone in bed, no watching TV, no working on your laptop, and no lying awake staring at the ceiling.
The rules are straightforward. Only lie down when you’re genuinely sleepy, not just tired. If you can’t fall asleep within 15 to 20 minutes, get up, go to another room, and do something quiet and boring until drowsiness returns. Then go back to bed. This feels counterintuitive, especially when you’re exhausted, but it breaks the pattern of associating your bed with frustration and wakefulness. Over a few weeks, your brain relearns that bed equals sleep.
A related technique, sleep restriction, works by temporarily limiting the hours you spend in bed to match the hours you actually sleep. If you’re sleeping five hours but spending eight hours in bed, you compress your window to five hours. As your sleep becomes more efficient and consolidated, you gradually expand the window. This builds up enough sleep pressure that you fall asleep faster and stay asleep longer.
Watch What You Drink (and When)
Caffeine blocks adenosine, the chemical your brain accumulates throughout the day to create sleep pressure. That’s exactly why coffee makes you feel alert, but it’s also why an afternoon cup can sabotage your night. Caffeine’s half-life is roughly five to six hours, meaning half the caffeine from a 3 p.m. coffee is still circulating in your system at 8 or 9 p.m. A reasonable cutoff for most people is early to mid-afternoon, though individual sensitivity varies.
Alcohol is trickier because it genuinely makes you feel sleepy at first. But once your body starts metabolizing it, your sleep fragments. Your brain briefly wakes up over and over throughout the night, sending you back into light sleep stages each time. The deepest, most restorative phase of sleep, REM, takes the biggest hit. You may sleep for seven or eight hours after a few drinks and still wake up feeling unrested. The closer to bedtime you drink, the worse the effect. Even two or three drinks in the evening can noticeably reduce sleep quality.
Nap Strategically (or Not at All)
Naps aren’t inherently bad, but their timing and length determine whether they help or hurt your nighttime sleep. A short nap of 15 to 20 minutes can boost alertness for a couple of hours without reducing the sleep pressure you’ve built up during the day, so it won’t interfere with falling asleep that night. Set an alarm. If you sleep for about an hour, you’re likely to wake up during deep sleep, which causes significant grogginess that can take 15 to 30 minutes to shake off.
If you do need a longer nap, aim for roughly 90 minutes, which is the approximate length of one full sleep cycle. You’ll wake up from a lighter sleep stage and feel less groggy. Keep naps before mid-afternoon. Napping later in the day cuts into your body’s accumulated drive to sleep, making it harder to fall asleep at your normal bedtime.
Supplements: What the Evidence Shows
Melatonin is the most widely used sleep supplement, and it can help, but not in the way most people think. It’s most useful for shifting the timing of your sleep (after jet lag, or when your schedule changes) rather than knocking you out like a sleeping pill. One clinical trial found that a combination of melatonin (5 mg), magnesium (225 mg), and zinc taken an hour before bedtime for eight weeks produced significant improvements in sleep quality. In that study, 59 percent of people in the treatment group achieved scores indicating good sleep, compared to just 14 percent in the placebo group.
Magnesium on its own has modest evidence behind it, particularly for people who are deficient (which is common, since many adults don’t get enough through diet). It plays a role in muscle relaxation and nervous system regulation. Foods rich in magnesium include nuts, seeds, dark leafy greens, and whole grains. Whether you get it from food or a supplement, it’s unlikely to cause dramatic changes on its own, but it can be one useful piece of a larger strategy.
Build a Consistent Wind-Down Routine
Your brain doesn’t have an off switch. It needs a transition period between the stimulation of your day and the quiet of sleep. A wind-down routine, even a short one of 20 to 30 minutes, signals to your nervous system that it’s time to shift gears. This can be as simple as dimming lights, reading a physical book, stretching, or taking a warm shower. The specific activities matter less than the consistency. When you do the same sequence each night, your brain begins to treat that routine as a cue for sleep.
Avoid anything that spikes your heart rate or mental engagement close to bedtime. Intense exercise, stressful work emails, heated conversations, and doom-scrolling all push your body into an alert state that takes time to come back down from. Exercise itself is excellent for sleep, but ideally finish vigorous workouts at least a few hours before bed. Light movement like walking or gentle yoga in the evening is fine and can actually help.
How Much Sleep You Actually Need
The CDC’s current recommendations vary by age. Adults aged 18 to 60 need seven or more hours. Adults 61 to 64 should aim for seven to nine hours, and those 65 and older do well with seven to eight. Teenagers need considerably more: eight to ten hours per night.
These are ranges, not targets. The right amount for you is the amount that lets you wake up without an alarm feeling reasonably refreshed, stay alert through the afternoon without relying on caffeine, and function well cognitively and emotionally. If you’re consistently sleeping seven hours and feeling wrecked, you likely need more. If you feel great on six and a half, forcing yourself to stay in bed longer can actually worsen sleep quality by creating the kind of fragmented, shallow sleep that sleep restriction therapy is designed to fix.