Sleep hygiene is important for getting good rest and vivid dreams. Many factors contribute to a good night's sleep. Getting 6-8 hours is only part of it. The temperature of your room, the light levels, and how much you eat and exercise during the day all have an effect on how you sleep. If you have trouble getting rest at night, here are some tips that can maximize your sleep hygiene.

One thing to say up front, because most articles like this one leave it out. Sleep hygiene works well as general upkeep for ordinary sleep, and it is not a treatment for clinical insomnia. A review of the evidence found that while individual recommendations each have support behind them, sleep hygiene delivered as a package has repeatedly underperformed as a treatment in sleep clinics.^[1] If you have been sleeping badly most nights for three months or more, the treatment with the evidence behind it is CBT-I, which the American College of Physicians recommends as the first-line treatment for chronic insomnia, ahead of medication.^[2] Ask your doctor about it rather than working harder at the list below.

For everyone else, this is the list.

One more note on the bedroom: the principle behind "only sleep and sex in bed" is a real clinical technique called stimulus control. The logic is that if you spend hours in bed awake, scrolling, working, worrying, your brain learns that bed is a place for being awake. Keeping the bed for sleep re-teaches the opposite association. It's one of the better-supported behavioural components, which is why it survives inside CBT-I.^[3]

Tips for Sleep Hygiene:#

Avoid screentime before bed#

The numbers here are more dramatic than people expect, and it isn't only screens. Researchers compared people spending their pre-bed hours in ordinary room light against dim light. Room light delayed the onset of melatonin in 99% of participants and shortened the window during which the body produced it by about 90 minutes. Light during the usual hours of sleep suppressed melatonin by more than half in most trials.^[4] That's a normally lit living room, not a phone.

Screens add to it. In a controlled study, people who read on a light-emitting e-reader before bed took longer to fall asleep, felt less sleepy in the evening, secreted less melatonin, had their body clock shifted later, and were less alert the next morning than people reading a printed book.^[5] The cost carries into the following day, which is the part most people don't connect.

So: dim the room, not just the phone. Use softer lamps in the evening, consider blackout curtains, and try to stop scrolling an hour or two before bed. That way your brain gets the signal that it's time to produce melatonin.

Try cooler temperatures#

We like being snug and warm, but cooler is better, and the research is clearer about the direction than about a magic number. Reviews of thermal environment and sleep find that heat is the reliable disruptor: too warm and you get more wakefulness, less deep sleep and less REM. Cold turns out to be much more forgiving, because a duvet solves it. Once you have bedding, mild cold barely touches your sleep stages, while heat has nowhere to go.^[6]

You'll see 65°F / 18°C quoted everywhere as "the optimal temperature". Treat it as a sensible starting point rather than a finding: commonly cited guidance sits in a range of roughly 60-67°F (15.5-19.5°C), and the right number for you depends on your bedding, your bedclothes and your own body. The practical version is simpler than the number. Err cool, keep the duvet, and if you're waking up warm in the night that's the variable to change first.

Consistent sleep schedule#

Irregular sleep patterns affect performance significantly. Try to wake up and go to sleep at the same time, or very close. This allows your body to get into a natural rhythm of feeling tired and awake.

This may be the single most underrated item on the list. Researchers calculated a Sleep Regularity Index from over 10 million hours of accelerometer data across nearly 61,000 UK Biobank participants, then followed them for years. People with the most regular sleep timing had a 20-48% lower risk of all-cause mortality than the least regular, and regularity turned out to be a stronger predictor than sleep duration.^[7]

Read that again, because it inverts the usual advice. How consistent your sleep is may matter more than how much of it you get. If you can only fix one thing, fix the schedule, and start with a fixed wake time, which anchors everything else.

Relax your senses#

Relaxation and our senses play a role in winding down. Aromatherapy is the one with actual trials behind it, though modest ones: a systematic review found 15 quantitative studies, including 11 randomised controlled trials, on inhaled essential oils and sleep. Most reported a positive effect, lavender was by far the most studied, and no adverse events were reported.^[8] The reviewers were clear that the studies are small and the methods need strengthening, so file this under "cheap, pleasant, low-risk, probably helps a bit" rather than under treatment.

Spraying lavender on your pillow or running a diffuser also creates a mental cue that ties your brain to being sleepy, which may be doing as much work as the chemistry. Smelling scents while asleep can also help trigger lucidity while dreaming when you recognize the smell in your sleep. We can still smell while we are dreaming and our subconscious picks up on a lot of our environment.

Mental and physical clarity#

Keep your room tidy and organized. Your space directly reflects your mental space and will help your tranquility if the items in your room are minimal. If you work in your bedroom, try to always keep it nice and clean at the very least. It helps start your day on a clean note and sets the stage for a good day. Your subconscious mind picks up on way more than you think!

Don't toss and turn in the bed#

On nights when you can't sleep, it's best to get out of bed. This seems counterproductive, and it's actually a formal clinical technique: stimulus control, one of the best-supported behavioural treatments for insomnia and a core component of CBT-I. We want the bed to be mentally associated with sleepiness and calmness. Ask yourself, ‘what is this energy calling me to do?’. Get out of bed and partake in a calming activity. Maybe journal, read, meditate and stretch, but don't stay in bed tossing and turning. When you begin to feel sleepy, return to bed. This teaches your brain that the bed is not for anything other than sleeping and sex.

Morning hygiene#

Morning hygiene is equally as important as sleep hygiene. The way you wake up sets the stage for your day. Wake up on a bad note and the whole day is stressful. Here are some good tips for your morning routine.

Wake up peacefully#

Use a soothing alarm, and wake up slowly. This is good for your mental health and dream recall. Try a bird chirping or something peaceful.

Hydrate#

While you sleep, your body dehydrates itself so make sure you drink water when you wake up to improve circulation and get your energy going. Hot tea works too to promote metabolism and clear out your teeth and reduce acne.

Use your energy#

Energy in motion is the healthiest energy: get enough exercise throughout the day. A meta-analysis of 66 studies found that regular exercise produces small improvements in total sleep time and sleep efficiency, small-to-medium improvements in how quickly you fall asleep, and a moderate improvement in subjective sleep quality.^[9] Effects varied by age, sex, baseline fitness, and the type and timing of exercise, so expect to find your own combination.

Note the honest size of this. Exercise reliably helps and it isn't a transformation, which is a good reason to treat it as one habit among several rather than the fix. You don't need 5am runs; ten minutes of walking or yoga counts, and it's a better morning wake-up than an extra coffee.

Feed your brain#

Eat a nutritious breakfast. I'm sure you know breakfast is the most important meal of the day. You can even eat something quick and easy on the go like fruit, a bagel or a smoothie. Time isn't a good enough excuse this is your body and your health we are talking about here. If you have a family make this a peaceful time to connect and bond and talk about your intentions for the day.

Dream Journal#

Record your dream immediately upon awakening. A dedicated dream journal app makes this effortless, capturing your dream the moment you wake. If you get up , and check your phone, the dream will likely evaporate. Do it before you get out of bed or move around, even if you think it disappeared, it probably hasn't. Lay there and focus on anything you can remember, even if it's just one person or place. Go over your dream signs, how are you feeling when you wake up? Focus on it for a moment and it will likely come back to you, but be careful not to fall back asleep.

Starting your day off on a good note makes a lot of difference in creativity and productivity. Going to sleep at a consistent time every night can make it easier to fall asleep. Building a bedtime routine is an easy way to help yourself stick with a consistent bedtime. Although bedtime routines themselves have not been widely studied, initial research suggests they may help improve sleep. Habits don’t build in a day, so don’t be discouraged if you fall off track or it takes a while to do your routine consistently. Don’t feel like you have to do everything at once. Try to start small with three steps in your routine first, then add more over time as you get used to them.