The $70 Billion Question of How to Sleep Better

In these divisive times, sleep may be the last great unifier. We all want to know how to get more of it but no one seems to be able to answer the burning question of how to sleep better.

It’s a health question, sure—sleep is just as vital to your physical health as it is to your sanity—but it’s also a social one. We gripe about the fact that we’re “good, just tired,” every time someone asks how our day is going. We throw our money—roughly $70 billion of it—at mattresses that promise to cure our sleep problems, at pajamas that promise to make us actually want to go to bed early, at sleep trackers that promise to tell us why we feel so groggy even after sleeping in.

We’re obsessed with sleep. We all want to talk about it, we all want more of it, and yet it remains elusive. Why the hell haven’t we figured out how to sleep better by now?

“People are tired. I mean, we're in a society that literally never stops, and that really hasn't happened up until probably the last maybe 10 or 15 years,” says Michael Breus, a sleep specialist and author of Good Night: The Sleep Doctor’s 4-Week Program to Better Sleep and Better Health. The problem is that lack of sleep is easy to mask—at least in the short term. A 2 p.m. coffee run can save you from feeling like a zombie in the moment but isn’t helping the larger problem. “The truth of the matter is, this is a cumulative problem,” says Breus. “When you only sleep five and a half hours every night for a year, you wonder, Gee, why am I not feeling so hot?”

It’s catching up with us. Sleep problems are on the rise—to the point that the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention have called insufficient sleep a health epidemic.

But at the same time, we also have more tools than ever to combat all that tossing and turning—white noise machines, weighted blankets, and a flood of data to help scientists better understand what’s keeping us up at night. Now, aside from quitting your job, moving to a meditation retreat and retiring to a life of leisure, there’s no magic pill that will solve all your sleep problems. But we asked the experts for their insight on how to sleep better to make it just a little easier to get a better night’s rest.

1. Get up at the same time every day.

“If I could pick one thing, if I really said, ‘There’s only one thing that everybody needs to know,’ it’s to keep the same wake-up time seven days a week,” says Breus.

Most of us don’t do this. By the time the weekend rolls around, catching up on sleep seems it should be the priority, but that’s not how it works, Breus explains. “What you end up doing by sleeping in is shifting your circadian rhythms. For example, if you stay up late on Friday, sleep in on Saturday, stay up late on Saturday, sleep in on Sunday, what does your brain want to do Sunday night? Doesn’t want to go to bed,” he says. “That’s why Mondays stink.” Our bodies crave consistency, so try to keep your weekend wake-up time within an hour of when you get up on weekdays.

2. Forget the eight-hour rule.

The whole eight-hour rule is more of a general guideline—not a one-size-fits-all sleep prescription. In reality, everyone’s sleep needs are different. You might do totally fine on six hours while your partner is impossible to deal with if they get anything less than nine.

So how do you figure out how much you need? It’s a little inconvenient, but sleep experts recommend giving yourself a two-week vacation from alarm clocks (which you probably need to actually be on vacation to do). In that time, go to bed when you get tired, and get out of bed as soon as you wake up, noting the average amount you naturally sleep each night.

3. Know your chronotype.

The amount of sleep you need is only one part of the equation. If you want to know how to sleep better, knowing your chronotype—aka your internal biological clock—will help you stick to your personal best sleep wake cycle.

The idea is to work with your chronotype—so if you’re a night owl, see if you can negotiate a later start to your day with your boss. To figure out your chronotype and what it means for your schedule, Breus recommends chronoquiz.com.

4. Know the difference between sleep quality and sleep quantity.

When we talk about sleep, we tend to talk about how many hours we got—but it’s the quality of those hours that really matters, says Breus. Things like caffeine and alcohol can mess with the quality of your rest, so you might be missing the most restorative sleep stages and waking up groggy.

5. Stop caffeine by 2 p.m.

“Caffeine is so often used, but nobody knows that it’s got a half-life of six to eight hours. What a lot of people don’t recognize is, that means if you stop drinking it at 2 p.m., eight hours later is 10 p.m.—and that’s the average bedtime for most people,” Breus says. That can mess with your sleep quality. “Lots of people can drink a cup of coffee at dinner and fall asleep, but man, the quality of their sleep sucks,” Breus explains. “If you stop caffeine by 2:00 p.m., you have a far greater likelihood of getting not only better-quantity but also better-quality sleep.”

6. Don’t drink three hours before bed.

“People think that alcohol is a nightcap, that it helps you fall asleep—that’s not actually true,” says Matthew Walker, professor of neuroscience and psychology at the University of California, Berkeley, and author of Why We Sleep. “Alcohol is a class of drugs that we call the sedatives, and unfortunately sedation is not sleep. Alcohol typically fragments your sleep.”

In other words, while you might fall asleep quickly, your sleep quality suffers after a couple glasses of wine—especially in stages three and four, which are the most physically restorative sleep stages, Breus says. “My recommendation is to stop drinking alcohol three hours before bed,” he says. “It takes the average human body approximately one hour to digest one alcoholic beverage. So if you had a couple of glasses of wine at dinner, you give yourself three hours, you’re in good shape.”

7. Exercise—just not before bed.

Regular exercise helps improve just about every system in your body and—shocker—sleep is no exception. Just make sure you’re not exercising too close to bedtime, or it could leave you tossing and turning. “Sleep follows the core body temperature cycle,” Breus explains. Around 10:30, your core body temperature naturally begins to drop, which signals your brain to release the sleep hormone melatonin. “If you exercise too close to bed, you raise your core body temperature and that cooling mechanism can’t happen.”

8. Chill things down.

The same cool-down principle applies to the actual temperature of your bedroom too. “We need to drop our core body temperature by about one degree Celsius throughout the night to fall asleep and stay asleep,” says Walker. “That’s the reason you will always find it easier to fall asleep in a room that’s too cold than in one that’s too hot, because too cold is in the right temperature direction for good sleep.”

The ideal temperature for sleep is between 60 and 67 degrees Fahrenheit, according to the National Sleep Foundation.

9. Drink water, not coffee, in the morning.

If you typically wake up feeling as though coffee is the only thing that will save your poor broken soul, we get it. But according to the sleep experts, it could be contributing to your feeling of ceaseless fatigue if it’s the first thing you drink. “Sleep is a dehydrative event—you lose almost a full liter of water just by the humidity in your breath, so you wake up dehydrated,” Breus says. Coffee is a diuretic, so when that’s the first thing you drink, it just ends up making you more dehydrated. “That certainly is going to have an effect on your overall energy level,” Breus says.

10. Try to avoid electronics.

Screen time is like kryptonite for a good night’s sleep. “The light that is emitted from any device has a blue frequency. That wavelength hits a specific cell in your eye called a melanopsin cell, and it turns off the melatonin fostered in your brain,” says Breus. Coupled with the brightness of the light itself, it signals your brain to stay awake. But unless you have perfected the whole “ditch your devices for a book” thing (which, congrats) it’s hard to avoid all screen time before bed. So sleep experts recommend being strategic about it. “There’s a difference between a television, a phone, a tablet, and a laptop. The main difference is proximity,” Breus explains. “If I’m watching television, it’s all the way across the room. But if I'’ve got my phone, it'’s only probably about 16 inches from my eyeballs. The proximity of the light from your phone, from your tablet, or from your laptop is pretty significant as opposed to light coming from across the room.”

11. Seriously, stay off your phone.

Aside from the fact that your phone screen delivers the biggest dose of sleep-disrupting light, using your phone also tends to be more stimulating than watching something on Netflix. “If you’re trying to get your high score on Candy Crush, or you’re watching on your tablet the last episode of Game of Thrones, you’re really not getting yourself set up for sleep, right?” Breus says. “There’s such an emotional valence to things like Facebook and email and game playing. Handheld devices are far more interactive.”

12. Go dark at night.

“We are a dark-deprived society in this modern era, and we need that darkness at night to release melatonin,” says Walker. “If we’re not getting darkness at night, then that can be problematic.” Luckily there are some really basic solutions: room darkening curtains or an eye mask. “Another trick is to try to dim down half of the lights in your home in the hour before you go to sleep,” he adds. “You will be surprised at how sleepy that actually makes you.” Consider this your excuse to burn that fancy candle.

13. But maximize natural light during the day.

“Every single morning, people should be getting 10 to 15 minutes of direct sunlight to help them reset their circadian clocks,” says Breus. Even on a cloudy day, “the strength of light outside is typically manyfold stronger than a bright office inside,” adds Walker. “Some kind of natural light exposure, even if it’s working next to a window, is great. If you don’t have that opportunity, try to take a break during lunchtime to get outside.”

14. Get a white noise machine.

“We know noise pollution can wake people up, even if they’re not consciously aware of it,” says Walker. A white noise machine can mask whatever is going on outside your window so you stay in dreamland all night.

15. Spruce up your sheets.

“I believe that sleep is a performance activity, and as with any performance activity, you need the right equipment in order to perform,” says Breus. Luxe sheets, cozy pillows, a fancy duvet that makes you want to take endless #bedstagrams, all can have an added performance benefit for sleep, Breus says. You don’t have to go out and spend hundreds of dollars for a night of rest but “if you have an uncomfortable bed, there’s no question it’s going to make your situation worse,” Breus says.

16. Pay attention to how quickly you fall asleep.

“Anybody who falls asleep in under 10 minutes—like people who fall asleep as their head hits the pillow—that’s not a good sign,” says Breus. It seems counterintuitive, but if you’re passing out the minute you climb into bed, it’s a sign of sleep deprivation, he says.

17. Get the right pillow.

Not all pillows are created equal. Depending on whether you sleep on your back, your stomach, or your side, you need different types of support for the best sleep quality. Breus also recommends replacing your pillow every 18 months in order to get the best night’s rest.

18. Choose the right alarm.

Why does the default alarm setting always sound as if the world is ending? That kind of abrupt jolt out of bed can leave you feeling groggy. For a gentler wake-up that mimics a natural rise, try an alarm that incorporates a gentle light and gradual sound, so you can wake up feeling refreshed (rather than panicked).

19. Meditate.

“The number one thing that I hear in my office is, ‘Dr. Breus, I can’t turn off my brain at night,’” Breus says. “Sleep requires some runway. It’s not an on-off switch. There’s a process that needs to occur there and we need to let that process happen by giving our body the opportunity to fall asleep.” Meditation is one such way to help quiet your mind to get you in the right headspace for sleep. If you don’t have a meditation practice, try spending five minutes before bed going over what made you happy that day.

20. Do yoga.

Yoga can help accomplish that same goal. “I personally and deeply believe in learning how to pull the tension out of our body, and I’ve learned to do it through yoga,” says Lisa Sanfilippo, author of Sleep Recovery. “It doesn’t have to be a long series of movements. It can just be your time to actually come back into your body.”

21. Don’t overthink it.

The rise of wearable technology has brought with it a flood of sleep data. You can track your sleep latency, your sleep efficiency, and your sleep need. For some, that’s not a good thing. “For the most anxious amongst us, that can actually be problematic when it becomes a reinforcing self-fulfilling prophecy where you have this device that’s constantly telling you how poorly you’ve been sleeping,” says Walker. The quantified self has actually led to a phenomenon sleep doctors call orthosomnia. “Orthosomnia is people obsessed with getting their sleep straight and becoming a little bit perfectionist about it, getting anxious when they can’t,” Walker says.

22. Prioritize sleep.

All these tips add up to one thing: If you want to know how to sleep better, start by prioritizing sleep. We’re working longer hours than ever and “nobody when they come home later wants to sacrifice time with friends, family, their significant other, or Netflix,” says Walker. The first thing to go? Sleep. If you want to get more rest, start by giving yourself the chance to get it.

Sleep is a $70 billion industry—we throw our money at a dreamier night’s rest, promise ourselves we’ll prioritize it, and then gripe when we’re still, inevitably, so tired. Despite our collective obsession with sleep, we seem totally unable to get more of it. In fact, we’re clocking fewer hours than ever. So, this month, we’re taking a look at what’s getting in the way—and what to do about it.

Macaela MacKenzie is a senior editor at Glamour.

Originally Appeared on Glamour