Sleep Hygiene: The Complete Illustrated Guide (Free PDF)

Sleep hygiene is the setup that makes sleep easy: your room, your day, your evening.

Most guides give you a list of things to give up. Coffee, wine, your phone. That is the smaller half of it, and it is the half nobody keeps.

The bigger half is what you build. A room that is dark, cool and quiet. A day that starts with light and ends with a bedtime you defend. An evening that winds down instead of stopping dead. Set those up once and they work every night after.

Start with the room. It takes an hour and it is done. Then pick one change for your day and one for your evening. Leave the rest for later.

There is a free five-page PDF to go with this guide: a bedroom check, your day on one clock, the checklist, a seven-night sleep diary and a wind-down planner. You will find it at the top and bottom of this page.

One more thing, said up front rather than sprung on you at the end. We make hypnosis sessions for sleep at Intropi. This guide does not need the app, and it says plainly, later on, what a session can and cannot do.

Contents

• What makes you sleepy: two forces
• How much sleep you need, by age

Part 1: Set up the room

• Dark: blackout curtains, and covering the small lights
• Cool, with warm feet
• Quiet
• Comfortable: mattress, pillow, bedding
• Fresh air
• A room that means sleep
• Fix your room: free, cheap, worth paying for

Part 2: Set up the day

• One wake-up time, every day
• Daylight in the morning
• Move during the day
• Naps, done right

Part 3: Set up the evening

• Dim the house
• A warm bath or shower, one to two hours before bed
• Put tomorrow on paper
• A way to switch off
• Can hypnosis help you sleep?
• Go to bed sleepy, not just tired
• Put it together: your day on one clock

Part 4: What gets in the way

• Caffeine
• Alcohol
• Screens
• Nicotine, big late meals, hard late workouts
• What each habit is worth, side by side

Part 5: When the night goes wrong

• Can't fall asleep, or awake at 3am

Part 6: Different lives

• Children and teenagers
• Shift workers, new parents, older adults

Part 7: The rest

• When it isn't sleep hygiene
• Where a session fits
• Myths
• Questions

What makes you sleepy: two forces

Two things decide when sleep comes, and almost everything in this guide works on one or the other.

The first is sleep pressure. It builds from the moment you wake and keeps building all day. The longer you have been up, the heavier it gets. A nap lets some of it out. A lie-in means you start the next day with less of it.

The second is your body clock. It runs on roughly a day's cycle whether you sleep or not. It makes you alert through the morning, dips a little after lunch, gives you a second wind in the early evening, and then drops away as the night comes on. Light sets it. Morning light pulls it earlier; light late in the evening pushes it later.

Sleep comes easiest where the two agree: pressure high, clock falling. That is why a fixed wake time matters (it winds the clock), why daylight matters (it sets the clock), why a cool room matters (falling body temperature is part of the clock's night signal), and why an afternoon coffee costs you (it hides the pressure without removing it).

This is the two-process model of sleep regulation, first described by Borbély in 1982, and it is the map for everything that follows.

What sleep hygiene is not: a treatment. It is a set of inputs. Doing all of it well shifts the odds. It is not a therapy for insomnia, and this guide says where the line is.

How much sleep you need, by age

For healthy adults the recommendation is 7 hours or more a night, a floor rather than a target, set out in a 2015 consensus statement from the American Academy of Sleep Medicine and the Sleep Research Society.

Children need more at every stage, and their ranges cover a full day, naps included. The 2016 paediatric consensus from the same academy recommends:

• Babies aged 4 to 12 months: 12 to 16 hours, including naps
• Children aged 1 to 2 years: 11 to 14 hours, including naps
• Children aged 3 to 5 years: 10 to 13 hours, including naps
• Children aged 6 to 12 years: 9 to 12 hours
• Teenagers aged 13 to 18 years: 8 to 10 hours

For adults the National Sleep Foundation's 2015 consensus puts healthy adults at 7 to 9 hours and healthy older adults at 7 to 8 hours. These are recommendations, not measurements. Some people do well on less. Most people who think they do are wrong.

Plenty of us fall short. In the 2024 National Health Interview Survey, 30.5% of US adults aged 18 and over slept under 7 hours on average, a self-reported figure, which usually flatters the sleeper. And the shortfall is not where you would guess. The band sleeping least is US adults aged 50 to 64, at 34.5% under 7 hours in 2024. US adults aged 18 to 34 come in at 27.2% in 2024. Sleep gets worse through the middle of life and recovers after it.

Part 1: Set up the room

Dark: blackout curtains, and covering the small lights

A dark room is the cheapest change in this guide and the one most people skip.

Start with the window. Most light gets in round the edges of a curtain, not through it, so the fit matters as much as the fabric. A fitted blackout blind that sits inside the frame, or blackout curtains that overlap the wall on both sides, does what a heavy curtain cannot.

Where you cannot black the room out, a rented room, a summer morning, a partner reading, use an eye mask. In a 2023 study of healthy volunteers aged 18 to 35, wearing an eye mask overnight improved next-day learning and alertness across two short within-subject experiments run in 2018, 2019 and 2020.

Then the small lights. Standby dots, chargers, a glowing clock. Cover them or turn them away. It sounds fussy until you see what a little light does: in a 2022 lab study of 20 healthy young adults, one night with a moderate light of 100 lux left on raised heart rate during sleep and insulin resistance the next morning, compared with sleeping under 3 lux, one night, in a small group of 20 healthy young adults in 2022. A hundred lux is a dim lamp, not a bright room.

If you get up in the night, use a low, warm night-light rather than the main light.

Cool, with warm feet

Falling body temperature is part of the body's night signal, and a warm room fights it.

Heat costs you the deep sleep and the dream sleep that do most of the work. A 2012 review of studies on the thermal environment found that heat exposure increases time awake and cuts both slow-wave and REM sleep, with the size of the effect depending on bedding, clothing and humidity. Cold does less harm than heat, because a duvet fixes cold.

Cool means cooler than your daytime rooms, not cold. The range most often quoted is sixteen to nineteen degrees, and it is common advice rather than a measured threshold. Older adults may want it warmer: among 50 older adults aged at least 65 in greater Boston, in observational data collected from 2021 to 2023, sleep was most efficient with the bedroom between 20 to 25 °C in 2023, and warming the room from 25 to 30 °C went with a 5 to 10 percent drop in sleep efficiency across those 50 older adults in 2021 to 2023, an association with wide individual differences, not a rule.

Use layers you can push off rather than one heavy duvet. Cotton or linen breathes.

Warm feet help you drop off. Warming the skin at the extremities draws heat out of the core, which is the direction the body wants to go. In a small 2018 actigraphy trial of 6 young Korean men, wearing socks in bed cut the time to fall asleep by 7.5 minutes on average, across 6 young men in 2018, a tiny group and one worth trying at home for the price of a pair of socks. A hot-water bottle at the foot of the bed does the same job.

In a heatwave: curtains shut through the day, a fan at night, and a window open if the street is quiet and it is safe.

Quiet

Find the noise first. Traffic, a partner, the fridge, the boiler, a door that bangs. You cannot fix what you have not named.

Soft surfaces help more than you would think. Heavy curtains, a rug, books on a shelf, a strip along the gap under the door. None of it makes a room silent. Together it takes the edge off.

For noise you cannot control, earplugs. Foam expands to fill the ear canal; wax moulds to the outside of it. Try both, and keep the pair that stays in.

How quiet is quiet enough? The World Health Organization's 1999 guideline for people sleeping inside bedrooms is about 30 decibels as a continuous average, a guideline value, with single events such as a door slamming kept under 45 decibels inside the bedroom. For context, a whisper is about thirty, a fridge humming about forty, a conversation about sixty. The same organisation's 2009 night-noise guideline for Europe sets an outdoor target of 40 decibels as an annual average outside the window, a policy target for the general population rather than a limit for your bedroom.

A fan or steady background sound can cover sudden noises, and many people swear by it. Keep it low and steady, and do not expect it to fix sleep on its own: a 2021 review of 38 studies of continuous white noise and similar broadband noise found the quality of the evidence very low and the results inconsistent, from benefit to disruption.

Comfortable: mattress, pillow, bedding

The job of a mattress is to keep your spine level while you lie on your side, and to let you turn without waking.

Medium-firm suits most people. A 2015 review of 24 mattress trials in adults with and without back pain found that mattresses rated medium-firm, along with custom-inflated and self-adjusted designs, scored best for comfort, sleep quality and spinal alignment, with the caveat that "medium-firm" was a subjective label rather than a measured one.

A pillow fills the gap between your head and the mattress. Side sleepers need a thicker one, back sleepers a thinner one, and the test is simple: lying in your usual position, your neck should be straight, not bent up or dropped.

A mattress is due for replacing when it sags or dips, or when you notice you sleep better in other beds. In a 2009 before-and-after study of a convenience sample of healthy adults with minor sleep-related back pain and compromised sleep, new bedding improved both sleep quality and back pain over four weeks, in an uncontrolled design that cannot separate the new bed from the attention that came with it.

A weighted blanket helps some people settle. In a 2020 trial of 120 psychiatric outpatients with insomnia alongside depression, bipolar disorder, anxiety or ADHD, a weighted blanket reduced insomnia severity over four weeks. That is a specific group; it may or may not be you.

Fresh air

A shut bedroom with two people in it is stuffy by morning, and stuffy is not just a feeling.

Open a window a little, or leave the door ajar, if that is quiet and safe. If neither is possible, run a fan so the air moves. What you want is a way in and a way out.

The evidence here is small but pointed. In a 2016 field experiment in student dormitory rooms, run in 2012 and 2014, better ventilation cut the carbon dioxide in the room by roughly three quarters overnight, and the students slept more deeply and did better on a task the next morning. It was a small study of 14 students in the pilot and 16 in the main experiment, and ventilation changes more than carbon dioxide, so treat it as a strong hint rather than proof.

Advice about humidity is common and thin. A room that feels fresh is the target; a number is not.

A room that means sleep

Your body learns rooms. If the bed is where you work, watch, scroll and worry, it stops being a signal for sleep.

Keep the bed for sleep and sex. Work, television and the phone happen somewhere else, and the phone charges outside the room, or at least out of reach.

Turn the clock to the wall. Checking the time at three in the morning starts the arithmetic, and the arithmetic is what keeps you awake. In 2007 experiments with 30 good sleepers, 30 poor sleepers and 38 people with primary insomnia, those who monitored a clock at bedtime reported more pre-sleep worry and, in the insomnia group, took longer to fall asleep, in small experimental groups relying on what people reported.

None of this is folk wisdom. Keeping the bed for sleep is one of the core parts of CBT-I, the treatment the 2021 clinical guideline from the American Academy of Sleep Medicine recommends for adults with chronic insomnia. What works as a treatment for the people who struggle most is worth borrowing for the rest of us.

Fix your room: free, cheap, worth paying for

Everything above, sorted by what it costs.

Free, tonight. Turn the clock to the wall. Charge the phone outside the room. Put tape over the standby lights. Open the window a crack. Swap the heavy duvet for layers.

Under twenty pounds. An eye mask. Earplugs, foam and wax, to find the pair that stays in. Bed socks. A draught strip for the gap under the door.

Worth paying for. A blackout blind or curtains that seal at the edges. A fan. A pillow that fits how you sleep. A mattress, when yours sags.

Start with the free column tonight. Move across as you need to. The bedroom check in the free PDF is this list with tick boxes.

Part 2: Set up the day

One wake-up time, every day

Pick a wake-up time you can keep seven days a week, and keep the weekend within an hour of it.

Your wake-up time winds the body clock. A big weekend shift is a time-zone jump without the travel, which is why Monday morning feels like landing from somewhere.

Bedtime is the other half, and it is the one that decides how much sleep you get. In a 2016 study of 5,450 self-selected smartphone app users, a country's average bedtime, not its wake time, predicted how long people slept. Wake time is fixed for you by work and children. Bedtime moves, and bedtime is what you defend.

Regularity itself seems to matter. In a 2024 analysis of 60,977 UK Biobank participants who wore an accelerometer, the most regular sleepers, the top quintile, had a 20 to 48 percent lower risk of dying over the follow-up than the least regular quintile of UK Biobank participants in 2024, an observational association that cannot say regularity is the cause, and one where regularity predicted risk more strongly than duration did.

Set one wake-up time. Hold it. Let the bedtime come to meet it.

Daylight in the morning

Get outside within an hour or two of waking, even on a grey day.

Daylight is far brighter than it looks. Indoors feels bright because your eyes adjust; the numbers do not. In a 2026 review of typical light levels, an overcast day outdoors sits around 1000 to 5000 lux, direct sun at 32000 to 100000 lux, and a classroom or office at 300 to 500 lux, illustrative ranges that vary with the room and the weather. A grey morning walk gives your body clock several times more light than the best-lit desk.

That light is the clock's main cue. In the same 2016 smartphone study cited above, people who reported spending their days in outdoor light went to bed earlier and slept longer than those in indoor light, in a self-selected sample of app users.

If you cannot get out, work by a window. And keep the evening dim, which is the other half of the same rule.

Move during the day

Regular exercise helps sleep, modestly and reliably. A 2015 meta-analysis pooling 66 studies published up to 2013, across ages, sexes and fitness levels, found small to moderate improvements in sleep from both a single session and regular training, with results that varied by study and by which part of sleep was measured.

Do it at whatever time you will keep doing it. Evening exercise is fine for most people; the body of research on single evening sessions finds no harm to sleep as a rule. The one exception is a hard session that ends within about an hour of bed, when your core temperature and heart rate are still up. Leave that hour.

If you have the choice, a walk in the morning does two jobs: it is exercise and it is daylight.

Naps, done right

A nap is a small loan against tonight's sleep pressure. Keep it small and take it early.

Short: ten to twenty minutes, in the early afternoon. That keeps you in light sleep, so you wake clear. A long nap drops you into deep sleep, and waking from deep sleep is the grogginess that hangs around for an hour.

The best evidence for the short nap is a 2006 laboratory study of 24 healthy young adults after a restricted night, which compared afternoon naps of 5, 10, 20 and 30 minutes and found the 10 minutes nap gave the most alertness with the least grogginess, in young adults napping in the afternoon in a lab in 2006. Set an alarm and get up when it goes.

If you struggle to sleep at night, skip naps for now. You need all the pressure you can build by evening.

Part 3: Set up the evening

Dim the house

For the last hour or two before bed, turn the lights down and make them warmer. Lamps instead of ceiling lights. The kitchen spots off.

Light in the evening tells the body clock it is still day, and the clock answers by holding back melatonin, the hormone that opens the door to night. Ordinary room light is enough to do it. In a 2011 laboratory study of 116 healthy volunteers aged 18 to 30, exposure to room light of under 200 lux before bed, compared with dim light under 3 lux, shortened the night's melatonin release by about 90 minutes, in healthy volunteers aged 18 to 30 in 2011.

You do not need to sit in the dark. You need the house at nine to look different from the house at seven.

A warm bath or shower, one to two hours before bed

It sounds backwards: to cool down for sleep, warm up first.

A warm bath or shower brings blood to the skin, and when you get out that blood sheds heat quickly. The drop in core temperature that follows is the body's own night signal, arriving on cue. A 2019 review pooling 13 studies of a warm bath or shower before bed found that water at 40 to 42.5 °C, taken 1 to 2 hours before bedtime, went with falling asleep faster and better sleep quality, with benefits from as little as 10 minutes in the water, from a review and meta-analysis of a limited body of studies in 2019.

Warm, not hot. Timed to finish an hour or two before you want to be asleep. A shower does it as well as a bath.

Put tomorrow on paper

The list running in your head at midnight is the commonest reason a tired person cannot sleep.

Spend five minutes before bed writing down what tomorrow holds. Not a diary. A list. The point is that once it is written, it is kept, and the part of you that was holding it can put it down.

The best small test of this is a 2018 sleep-laboratory study of 57 healthy young adults: half wrote a to-do list for the coming days, half wrote about tasks they had already finished, each for 5 minutes, and the to-do list writers fell asleep faster, in a small study of 57 healthy young adults in 2018. The more specific the list, the bigger the effect.

Keep a notepad by the bed. Write the list, close it, and let tomorrow wait until morning.

A way to switch off

Pick one way of settling the mind and practise it, because the night you need it is not the night to learn it.

The options that hold up: slow breathing (in for four, hold for four, out for six); tensing and releasing each muscle group from the feet up; a body scan; a guided session that does the leading for you. Relaxation training of this kind is one of the recognised components of CBT-I in the 2021 clinical guideline for adults with chronic insomnia.

A guided session is the one we make, and the next section says plainly what it can and cannot do. Whichever you choose, use it tonight, and again tomorrow. It is the repetition that teaches the body what it means.

Can hypnosis help you sleep?

A session is a recorded voice that gives your attention something to follow instead of the day's replay. There is no swinging watch. You stay in control, you can stop it whenever you like, and most people simply drift off partway through.

The evidence is promising and thin, and both halves are true. A 2018 systematic review of 24 studies of hypnosis for sleep, published before 2017, found that 58.3 percent of those 24 studies reported a benefit for sleep, in a body of small studies of low methodological quality reviewed in 2018, so read that as a share of studies, not of people. The most interesting single result is a 2014 lab study of 70 healthy young women: for the highly suggestible women, a hypnotic suggestion to "sleep deeper" before a midday nap increased deep sleep by 81 percent, while the women who were low in suggestibility showed no such effect in that 2014 midday nap study.

What it is not: a treatment for insomnia or for any sleep disorder. That is CBT-I, and the last part of this guide says so.

Where it fits: as the guided option among the ways to switch off, for the minutes between getting into bed and going under.

Go to bed sleepy, not just tired

Tired and sleepy are different states, and going to bed on the wrong one is how a good evening ends in an hour of staring at the ceiling.

Tired is worn out and wide awake. The body is spent; the mind is still running. Sleepy is heavy eyelids, nodding, losing the thread of the page. That is the signal.

Go to bed on sleepy. If you are only tired, stay up a little longer in low light with something dull until the eyelids go. Getting into bed on time but wide awake teaches the body that bed is a place to lie awake, which is the opposite of the lesson you want.

This is a core rule of CBT-I, the treatment the 2021 clinical guideline recommends for adults with chronic insomnia. It works for everyone else too.

Put it together: your day on one clock

Everything from the day and the evening, on one dial.

Read it clockwise from the top. Wake at the same time, every day. Out into daylight within the first hour or two. The last large coffee before late morning. Exercise finished by early evening. The last big meal a couple of hours before bed. Lights down and a warm bath an hour or two before. Tomorrow's list on paper. Lights out at a time you defend, with the night's sleep as the long violet band that everything else is arranged around.

The times shown are one example built around an eleven o'clock bedtime. Slide the whole dial to fit yours. This clock is page two of the free PDF, and it prints on a single sheet.

Then the last hour, as a countdown. Sixty minutes out: lights down. Forty-five: a warm shower. Thirty: the list on paper. Fifteen: in bed, and if you use a session, session on.

Part 4: What gets in the way

Caffeine

This is the expensive one, and it is expensive much later in the day than people think.

In a 2025 trial of 23 healthy young men, 400 mg of caffeine, roughly a large coffee-shop coffee, taken 4 hours before bed cut total sleep by about 51 minutes, and took about half an hour of that from deep sleep, in 23 healthy young men in 2025, a precise result for that group and not yet measured in women, older adults or heavy habitual users. The authors' advice for a dose that size was to keep it more than 12 hours from bedtime. A 100 mg dose, a small cup, was fine at 4 hours in the same 23 healthy young men.

Twelve hours sounds extreme until you see why. Caffeine leaves the body slowly: in a 2001 pharmacology review the mean half-life in healthy individuals was about 5 hours, with a range of 1.5 to 9.5 hours between healthy individuals in that 2001 review, which is to say it varies a lot from person to person. At the average, a coffee at four in the afternoon is still more than a third present at eleven.

The rule that follows: the last large coffee before late morning, and if you are a slow clearer, earlier still. Tea, cola and energy drinks count.

Alcohol

Alcohol is the rule people break most confidently, because the first half of the promise is kept.

A drink shortens the time it takes to fall asleep and deepens the first half of the night. Then the second half comes apart: lighter sleep, more waking, less of the dream sleep that lives in the early hours. You remember the falling asleep, which went beautifully. You do not remember the four o'clock wake-up as the drink's doing.

That pattern is consistent across the research on alcohol and normal sleep in healthy volunteers, summarised by Ebrahim and colleagues in 2013 as a qualitative review rather than a pooled analysis, so it gives the shape of the night with confidence and the size of the effect with less.

If you drink, drink early, and expect the night to be shorter than it feels.

Screens

Screens lead every list, and the honest number is smaller than the list implies.

In a 2025 meta-analysis pooling 21 cohort studies with 548,338 participants, each extra hour of daily screen time went with about 3 to 5 minutes less sleep, an observational association rather than a proven cause, and a small one, across those 548,338 participants in 2025.

That is the light. The real cost is the scrolling, and it is not small: you meant to be asleep at eleven, and the phone found you an hour. The screen is not a light problem so much as a schedule problem, and a blue-light filter does nothing for a schedule.

The fix is upstream of the screen: the phone charges outside the room, and the wind-down hour has something better in it.

Nicotine, big late meals, hard late workouts

Three smaller ones, each with a distance from bed.

Nicotine is a stimulant, and a cigarette or a vape last thing pushes sleep away. There is no late enough; the nearer to bed, the worse.

A big meal close to bed means digesting when the body wants to be cooling. Finish the last large meal two to three hours before bed. A small snack later is fine, and going to bed hungry is its own problem.

A hard workout raises core temperature and heart rate, and both take time to come down. Give it about an hour. Gentle movement, a walk or stretching, is different and does no harm late.

What each habit is worth, side by side

Put the measured costs next to each other and they are not level. They are an order of magnitude apart.

Caffeine sits on its own. In that 2025 trial of 23 healthy young men, 400 mg taken 4 hours before bed cost about 51 minutes of total sleep, about half an hour of it deep sleep, and 9.5 percentage points of sleep efficiency, and the dose still measurably disrupted sleep at 8 hours before bed, in 23 healthy young men in 2025.

Screens are real and small: about 3 to 5 minutes of sleep per extra hour of screen time across 548,338 participants in the 2025 meta-analysis, an association rather than a cause.

Daylight length is in the same range. In a 2026 analysis of wearable data from 697 individuals contributing 185,143 nights across 49 countries, sleep fell by about 4.4 minutes for each extra hour of daylight, a firm result for the daylight effect from 697 individuals across 49 countries in 2026, roughly fourteen people per country, and no basis for ranking countries.

These come from different kinds of study on different people, so treat the order as solid and the exact minutes as indicative. The order is the point: one of these is worth reorganising your afternoon around. The rest are worth doing if they are easy.

Part 5: When the night goes wrong

Can't fall asleep, or awake at 3am

Lying there trying is the one thing that reliably does not work.

If you have been awake a while, roughly twenty minutes by feel and never by the clock, get up. Go to a dim room and do something dull: a paper book, a podcast you have heard before, folding laundry. Come back when the eyelids are heavy. Repeat if you have to.

It feels like giving up. It is the opposite: it stops the bed from becoming the place where you lie awake, which is the lesson your body is otherwise learning, night after night.

Do not check the time. The number starts the arithmetic, and the arithmetic is wakefulness. If this is you most nights, we wrote a whole post on why you cannot force yourself to sleep.

For adults with chronic insomnia, this rule is part of CBT-I, the treatment the 2021 clinical guideline recommends, and the same guideline gives a conditional recommendation against sleep hygiene on its own as a therapy for adults with chronic insomnia. If the nights are like this for months, that is the section after next.

Part 6: Different lives

Children and teenagers

The same setup, with more hours and an earlier clock, then a later one.

The hours are in the age table near the top: for children aged 6 to 12 years the 2016 consensus recommends 9 to 12 hours in a full day, and for teenagers aged 13 to 18 years 8 to 10 hours, recommended ranges rather than measurements. Younger children hit those numbers with a bedtime routine that is the same every night, in the same order, and with the screens out of the bedroom altogether.

Teenagers are a special case, and not because they are being difficult. Through puberty the body clock shifts later, so a teenager who cannot fall asleep at ten is often telling the truth. The shift is well described in a 2011 review of adolescent sleep as a delay in circadian timing, on top of the social pull of the evening. School starts do not move to match, so the weekend lie-in becomes the only place the hours can come from, which is the weekend shift from earlier in this guide.

What helps a teenager most is the same thing that helps you: morning light, a dim evening, the phone outside the room, and a wake time that does not swing.

Shift workers, new parents, older adults

Same rules, different hours.

Night shift. You sleep in daylight, so the room part of this guide is not optional. Blackout blind, eye mask, earplugs, phone on silent. Protect one fixed block of sleep at the same clock time each day, and treat it as the anchor everything else moves around. Sunglasses on the drive home keep the morning light from telling your clock it is time to get up.

New parents. Sleep when you can, in pieces. Keep the night feeds dim and quiet, with a low lamp rather than the main light, so the body reads them as night rather than as morning. Split the night with a partner where you can, so that one of you gets a longer run.

Older adults. Sleep gets lighter and earlier with age, and that is normal, not a fault. Morning light matters more now, and a warmer room may suit better than the usual advice: the cool room section has the measurement, from 50 older adults aged at least 65 in observational data from 2021 to 2023, that the most efficient sleep came with the bedroom between 20 to 25 °C for those older adults in 2023.

Part 7: The rest

When it isn't sleep hygiene

Some of this guide will not work for some readers, and it is worth saying who and why rather than leaving people to conclude they are broken.

If you have slept badly for months. If you fall asleep fine and wake at the same hour every night. If you are exhausted after a full night in bed. If you snore heavily or have been told you stop breathing. If the sleeplessness arrived with low mood or a persistent anxiety. Those are not hygiene problems, and a better bedtime routine will not fix them. See a GP.

Sleep hygiene is not a treatment. The American Academy of Sleep Medicine's 2021 clinical guideline for adults with chronic insomnia goes further than that: it gives a conditional recommendation against sleep hygiene as a stand-alone therapy for adults with chronic insomnia, and a strong recommendation for CBT-I.

CBT-I is cognitive behavioural therapy for insomnia: a structured course, usually a few weeks, that retrains when you go to bed, what the bed means, and what you do when you wake. It is not a list of tips. Ask your GP about it by name.

Where a session fits

Everything above gets the room, the day and the evening right. A session is for the last few minutes, after the lights are out, when the mind has nothing left to do but replay.

Intropi's sleep sessions are built for the moments they are named after: dropping off quickly, sleeping deeply, making the bedroom a cue, falling back asleep after a wake-up in the night, and sleeping around a shift pattern. Each one is a recorded voice to follow at your own pace, and each carries the artwork the app gives it.

They do not treat a sleep disorder, and this guide has said where that line is. What they do is give the minutes before sleep a shape, which for the very common problem of a mind that will not stop is often the part that was missing.

The app is free to start on both stores, and the seven-night sleep reset can be taken without installing anything.

Myths

A nightcap helps you sleep. It helps you fall asleep, then it wakes you in the second half of the night. See the alcohol section.

You can catch up at the weekend. A lie-in pays back some of the debt and moves your body clock at the same time. Monday morning is the bill.

Everyone needs eight hours. The recommendation for healthy adults is a range with a floor, not one number. Some need more, a few need less.

A blue-light filter fixes screens. The measured cost of the light is small. The cost of the scrolling is the bedtime it pushes back, and no filter touches that.

A warm room is cosy. A cool room with warm feet is what the body is asking for. Heat fragments the night.

Hypnosis is something done to you. A session is a recording you follow. You stay in control, you can stop it, and it does not treat insomnia.

If you cannot sleep, try harder. Effort is the one thing that reliably keeps you awake. Get up, dim the light, come back when you are sleepy.

Questions

How long until sleep hygiene works? The room works the first night. Habits that move the body clock, like a fixed wake time and morning light, take a week or two to settle.

What if I do all of this and still cannot sleep? Then it is probably not a hygiene problem. Read the section on when it isn't sleep hygiene, and see a GP.

Does hypnosis help you sleep? It can give the minutes before sleep a shape, and some small studies find a benefit. It is not a treatment for insomnia. The hypnosis section has the honest version.

Is it bad to read in bed? A paper book in low light is fine for most people. If you have trouble sleeping, keep the bed for sleep and read in a chair.

Should I take melatonin? That is a question for a pharmacist or GP, not a guide about habits.

Where is the PDF? At the top and bottom of this page: the bedroom check, your day on one clock, the checklist, a seven-night sleep diary and a wind-down planner.

Sources