Day 22: Get More Quality Sleep | A Meaningful Existence

Sleep is one of the most powerful things you can do for your health, mood and focus, and one of the first things we sacrifice when life gets busy. Today's challenge is to set yourself up for a genuinely good night's sleep.

How much do you need?

In 2015, the American Academy of Sleep Medicine and the Sleep Research Society published a consensus recommendation that adults should sleep seven or more hours a night on a regular basis to support optimal health. Some people need more. Teenagers and children need considerably more than adults.

Regularly sleeping less than you need is linked with a range of health problems and makes it harder to concentrate, regulate emotions and make good decisions.

Tonight's plan

Choose a bedtime. Count back seven and a half to eight hours from when you need to get up, and aim to be in bed by then. Set an alarm on your phone as a reminder to start winding down.

Watch the caffeine. Caffeine can stay in your system for many hours. Many sleep experts suggest avoiding it from early afternoon onwards.

Go easy on alcohol. It may help you fall asleep, but it tends to disrupt sleep later in the night.

Dim the lights. In the last hour before bed, turn down bright lights and, if you can, put screens away. If you do use a phone or tablet, turn the brightness down.

Wind down. Choose a calming routine: a warm shower, light reading, gentle stretching, listening to quiet music or writing tomorrow's to-do list so it's out of your head.

Make the bedroom sleep-friendly. Cool, dark and quiet is the general advice. Blackout curtains, an eye mask, earplugs or a fan can all help.

If you can't sleep

Lying awake and worrying about not sleeping makes things worse. If you've been awake for what feels like twenty minutes or so, many sleep specialists suggest getting up, going to another room and doing something quiet in dim light until you feel sleepy, then returning to bed.

Consistency matters

Going to bed and waking up at roughly the same time every day, including weekends, helps regulate your body clock. A big lie-in at the weekend can leave you feeling jet-lagged on Monday.

When to get help

If you regularly struggle to fall or stay asleep, snore loudly, stop breathing during sleep (a partner may notice) or feel exhausted despite enough time in bed, talk to a doctor. Conditions such as insomnia and sleep apnoea are common and treatable. For chronic insomnia, a structured approach called cognitive behavioural therapy for insomnia (CBT-I) is widely recommended as a first-line treatment.

Naps

A short nap of twenty minutes or so in the early afternoon can be refreshing. Longer or later naps may make it harder to sleep at night.

Today's challenge

Plan tonight for at least seven hours of sleep: set a bedtime, stop caffeine after early afternoon, dim lights and screens an hour before bed, and make your bedroom cool, dark and quiet. Tomorrow morning, note how you feel.

Related: wake up earlier and 7 ways you can relax right now. Tomorrow: be creative today.

Sources and further reading

Questions people ask

Do sleep trackers help?

They can show patterns, like late bedtimes or short nights, but their estimates of sleep stages aren't always accurate. If watching the data makes you anxious, put the tracker away and go by how rested you feel.