Sleep hygiene tips: what good sleep hygiene looks like

Good sleep hygiene means the everyday habits and bedroom setup that make sleep come easier. The sleep hygiene tips that matter most are simple: get up at the same time every day, stop caffeine by mid-afternoon, keep your bedroom dark and cool, and spend the last hour before bed winding down away from bright screens. You don't have to do all of it at once. Start with your wake time and that last hour, because those two shape the rest of the night.

What is sleep hygiene?

The name sounds clinical, but sleep hygiene just means your sleep habits: when you go to bed and get up, what you eat and drink late in the day, what your bedroom is like, and what you do in the hour before the light goes off.

Your body runs on an internal clock that takes its cues from light, darkness and routine. Steady cues make sleep easier. Mixed signals make it harder: coffee at 4 p.m., a bright screen at midnight, sleeping until noon on Saturday and then lying awake Sunday night.

So improving your sleep hygiene is mostly about finding what's working against you. Think back to your last three bad nights. What happened in the two hours before bed? What time did you get up the next morning? The pattern usually points to one or two habits worth changing first.

Sleep hygiene tips you can start tonight

Most sleep hygiene advice comes down to the list below, which follows the healthy sleep habits guidance from the National Institutes of Health. If you want to know how to get a good night's rest without overhauling your life, start here.

1. Give yourself enough time in bed. Sleep is usually the first thing a busy week squeezes out. Experts recommend 7 to 9 hours a night for adults, so if you're up at 6:30, lights out around 10:30 gives you 8.
2. Get up at the same time every day. Weekends too. The NIH suggests keeping the gap between weeknights and weekends to about an hour, because staying up late and sleeping in can throw off your body clock. You can't make yourself sleepy, but you can set an alarm.
3. Stop caffeine early. Caffeine's effects can last up to 8 hours, so a 4 p.m. latte can still be in play at midnight. Count tea, soda, energy drinks and chocolate too. Going to bed at 11? Make your last cup around 3.
4. Keep alcohol and big meals away from bedtime. Finish heavy meals a few hours before bed (a light snack is fine), and skip the nightcap. The NIH lists alcohol and nicotine before bed as things to avoid.
5. Get outside and move during the day. Time outdoors every day and regular activity are both on the NIH list. Save hard workouts for earlier in the day.
6. Keep naps short and early. Adults should nap for no more than 20 minutes. If you have trouble falling asleep at night, skip the nap or take it earlier in the afternoon.

Don't try all six this week. Pick the two that match your worst nights, stick with them for two weeks, then look at what changed. The best sleep hygiene is the version you'll still be doing next month.

A bedroom and bedtime that help you sleep

The NIH's short version for the room is quiet, cool and dark, with a dim night light if you need one. In practice that might mean:

• Blackout curtains or an eye mask, and tape over glowing standby lights.
• A fan or steady background noise if traffic or a snoring partner wakes you.
• The clock turned away from you. Checking the time at 2 a.m. turns into math about how many hours are left, and the math keeps you up.

Then make the bed mean sleep. If you work, scroll, eat and watch shows in bed, your brain learns that bed is a place to be awake. Move those to a chair or the couch. This is called stimulus control, and it comes up again in the insomnia section below.

For bedtime, count back from your wake time. Up at 6:30 and need about 8 hours? Be in bed around 10:30 and start winding down at 9:30. Then go to bed when you're sleepy, not just tired. Sleepy is heavy eyelids, yawning, reading the same line twice. Tired is drained but wired: you lie down and your mind starts running. If you're tired but not sleepy, stay up a little longer doing something calm.

A wind-down routine for the hour before bed

Your brain doesn't have an off switch. It needs a ramp. The NIH suggests using the hour before bed as quiet time, away from intense exercise and bright light from screens. That's your wind-down time. Do roughly the same things in the same order each night, so the routine itself starts to signal that sleep is coming.

Here's a wind-down routine for sleep you can borrow and adjust:

1. 60 minutes before bed: Close out tomorrow. Write a short to-do list, set out what you need for the morning, and plug your phone in somewhere that isn't your nightstand.
2. 45 minutes: Lights down. Switch from overhead lights to a lamp or two.
3. 30 minutes: A warm shower or bath, which is on the NIH list too.
4. 20 minutes: Something calm and low stakes. A paper book, gentle stretching, music, a puzzle, a few lines in a journal.
5. Lights out: A slow breathing exercise in bed. 4-7-8 breathing is an easy one: in through your nose for 4, hold for 7, out through your mouth for 8. Repeat it four times.

How to wind down when your mind won't cooperate: don't fight the thoughts during the breathing. Notice them, then go back to counting. If that's a nightly struggle, here's how to meditate when your mind won't stop thinking.

Putting your phone down before bed

Is using your phone before bed bad? For most people, yes, for two reasons. The first is light. In a 2015 study comparing a light-emitting e-reader with a printed book, people who read on the screen in the hours before bed took longer to fall asleep, released less melatonin (the hormone that rises in the evening and helps bring on sleep), had their body clocks shift later and were less alert the next morning. A phone is the same kind of bright screen, held a foot from your face.

The second reason is what's on it. A paper book doesn't buzz. Your phone has your messages, your inbox, the news and a feed with no bottom, and any one of them can wake your brain right back up.

How long before bed should you get off your phone? About an hour, which lines up with the NIH's advice to keep that last hour quiet and away from bright screens. If an hour feels impossible, start with 20 minutes and move it earlier by 10 minutes each week.

How to stop using your phone before bed:

• Charge it outside the bedroom. A cheap alarm clock removes the "but it's my alarm" excuse.
• Set your phone's bedtime or do-not-disturb schedule to start when your wind-down starts, not when you get into bed.
• Put something else where the phone used to go. If a book is on the nightstand, that's what you'll reach for.

What to do before bed instead of your phone: read something on paper, write tomorrow's list, stretch on the floor for ten minutes, take a shower, listen to music or a podcast with the screen face down, do a crossword, or talk to whoever you live with.

When good habits aren't enough: the worries that keep you up

You can get every habit right and still lie there replaying a conversation or running through tomorrow. Here's how to tell which problem you have. If you're wide awake at bedtime with nothing much on your mind, look at habits first: caffeine, naps, evening light, a drifting schedule. If you're sleepy right up until your head hits the pillow and then your thoughts take off, it's the worries, and they need somewhere to go before bed.

• Give worries a slot earlier in the evening. Fifteen minutes after dinner, write down what's bothering you and one next step for each. "Rent is due" becomes "check the account Friday morning and move money from savings." A worry with a plan is easier to put down at 11 p.m.
• Write tomorrow's list. Unfinished tasks are one of the biggest culprits. Here's why work thoughts show up at night, and a 5-minute list that helps.
• Talk it out before you lie down. Saying a worry to a partner, a friend or an AI chat turns a loop into words, and words are easier to set down. Typing it to an AI works a lot like journaling, except something asks a useful question back. Do it early in your wind-down hour so the phone can go away after. If the idea feels odd, here's whether it's weird to talk to AI about your feelings.
• Park 3 a.m. thoughts on paper. Keep a pad by the bed. Two or three words, then the pen goes down. It's on the list now, and the list can wait for morning.

Sleep hygiene when you have insomnia

If you've had trouble sleeping for a while, you've probably tried most of the above and found it doesn't fix things on its own. That matches the research. The American Academy of Sleep Medicine's 2021 guideline on treating chronic insomnia suggests doctors not use sleep hygiene by itself as the treatment. It strongly recommends cognitive behavioral therapy for insomnia (CBT-I), and it also suggests three of CBT-I's building blocks as treatments on their own:

• Stimulus control. Rebuilding the link between bed and sleep. Go to bed only when sleepy, use the bed only for sleep and sex, get up if you can't sleep, and keep one wake time.
• Sleep restriction. For a while, you cut your time in bed down to roughly the hours you're actually sleeping, then add time back as your sleep gets more solid. It's harder than it sounds, so it's best done with a doctor or sleep clinic guiding you.
• Relaxation. Slow breathing, or tensing and releasing one muscle group at a time. Practice in the daytime too, so it feels familiar at night.

Sleep hygiene still matters if you're an insomniac. It just plays defense. It's hard for any technique to win against a 5 p.m. energy drink.

If you can't sleep tonight:

1. If you've been lying there long enough to get frustrated, get up. Go somewhere dim, do something dull until you feel sleepy, then go back to bed.
2. Don't check the time. Turn the clock around before you lie down.
3. Get up at your usual time tomorrow, even after a bad night, and skip the long nap. Being a little sleepy tomorrow evening works in your favor.

If poor sleep has been most nights for a month or more, or it's wearing down your days, tell your doctor and ask about CBT-I. It's common and very treatable.

Sleep hygiene for teens

Sleep hygiene for teenagers is the same list with two twists. Teens need more sleep than adults, and their body clocks run later. The same NIH guidance puts teens 13 to 18 at 8 to 10 hours a day, and the NIH also notes that it's natural for many teens to prefer later bedtimes and later mornings than adults. A 15-year-old who isn't sleepy at 10 p.m. isn't being difficult. Their clock is set later, and school still starts early.

Phones make the gap wider. A 2015 review of 67 studies found screen time was linked to worse sleep in school-age children and adolescents in 90% of the studies, mostly shorter sleep and later bedtimes. The authors are clear that this doesn't prove screens are the cause, but they still advise young people to cut back on screens, especially before and during bedtime hours.

What helps:

• Phones charge in the kitchen, for everyone. A house rule feels fair. A rule for the teen alone feels like a punishment.
• Keep weekend wake-ups close to weekday ones. Sleeping until 1 p.m. on Sunday makes Sunday night a lost cause. Aim for within about an hour, or as close as you can get.
• Watch the after-school caffeine. An energy drink or iced coffee at 4 p.m. can still be working at bedtime.

If you're a parent, ask instead of lecturing. Something like: "You seem wiped out on Mondays. Want to try phones charging in the kitchen this week, all of us, and see if it helps?" A habit they agreed to has a better shot than one they were handed.

Find a calmer bedtime with Moodu

Before you change anything, it helps to know which habits are actually costing you sleep. Moodu has a quick Sleep check for that: a short look at your own sleep before you choose what to work on.

Then there's Sleep Serenity, its guided conversation for rough nights. It opens with: "Rough nights lately? Tell me what bedtime usually looks like for you and we'll find a calmer routine." From there it helps you spot what's working against you, like the late coffee or the phone in bed, and build a wind-down you'll actually keep. You can type, or tap the mic and talk it through. Use it early in your wind-down hour, then put the phone away.

Chats are encrypted before they're saved and never used for ads. Moodu is $39.99 a year after a 3-day free trial, or $4.99 a week.