Sleep hygiene

Sleep hygiene is the unglamorous list, and most of it is genuinely worth doing. A consistent wake time, seven days a week, because rise time anchors the body clock harder than bedtime does. Bright light early, dim light late. Caffeine finished well before the afternoon is out, since it lingers for hours after you stop noticing it. Alcohol earlier or not at all, because it shortens how long you take to fall asleep and then fragments the back half of the night. A bedroom that is dark, cool and quiet. A wind-down that gives the day somewhere to end other than in bed.

Some of it carries more weight than the rest. Wake time and light exposure act directly on the circadian rhythm, which is the machinery everything else sits on top of. The remainder, blue light limits included, are adjustments at the margin, worth doing without expecting any one of them to transform a night. Room noise is in the same category: white, pink and brown noise will not make you a better sleeper, but it will stop the street outside making you a worse one.

What sleep hygiene can and cannot do

This is the part usually left out. Sleep hygiene is a floor, not a treatment. If your nights are broadly fine and you want them a little better, tightening these habits will often do it. If you have had months of lying awake, or your sleep latency runs past an hour most nights, hygiene advice on its own has a poor record, and being told to try harder at it is its own kind of frustrating. Chronic insomnia has a first-line treatment that clinicians point to, cognitive behavioural therapy for insomnia, and getting to it is a conversation with a doctor rather than a longer checklist.

The other honest caveat is that habits move slowly. Nothing here works on the first night, and the timing pieces need a week or two of repetition before the body clock follows. If yours has drifted, how to fix your sleep schedule is the step-by-step version, including how far to shift things at a time.