Disclaimer: This article is for informational purposes only and isn’t intended to diagnose, treat, or replace professional medical advice. If you experience persistent snoring or symptoms of sleep apnoea, please speak to a qualified healthcare professional.
This World Sleep Day is a reminder of how important good sleep is for our health and wellbeing.
The good news is that a few targeted changes to your habits and routines can make a real difference. Here are five evidence-informed tips for better sleep to help you feel more rested and break the cycle of restless nights.
One of the most powerful things you can do for your sleep is to get up at the same time every morning – regardless of how well (or how badly) you slept the night before. It might sound counterintuitive, especially after a rough night when every instinct tells you to lie in, but a consistent wake time is the anchor that holds your entire sleep system steady.
Here’s why it works: By waking at the same time each day, you protect what’s known as sleep pressure – the natural build-up of the drive to sleep that accumulates across the day. The longer you’ve been awake, the stronger that pressure becomes, and the more readily you’ll fall asleep and stay asleep when bedtime arrives¹. Disrupting this by sleeping in throws the system off balance, making it harder to fall asleep the following night and creating a cycle of poor sleep that compounds over time.
Anchor your wake time, and you lay the foundation for everything else.
Does your mind decide that 2am is the perfect time to revisit every unresolved concern, embarrassing memory, or item on your to-do list? You’re not alone.
The quiet darkness of night removes the distractions that keep our worries at bay during the day, leaving them free to surface with full force.
A simple but effective strategy is to carve out around 20 minutes in the early evening, before your wind-down routine begins, and deliberately spend that time writing down your worries, concerns, and any unfinished thoughts. Get them out of your head and onto paper.
By doing this, you signal to your brain that these thoughts have been acknowledged and don’t need to resurface at night². It creates a psychological boundary between the business of the day and the rest of the evening, allowing you to wind down more fully and approach bedtime with a calmer mind.
Lying in bed willing yourself to sleep while your thoughts spiral is one of the least effective things you can do. When we’re awake and alert in bed, our prefrontal cortex (the rational, calming part of the brain) disengages, leaving us more prone to catastrophic thinking and anxious spirals³. The longer we lie there, the more the bed itself becomes associated with wakefulness and anxiety rather than rest.
If you’ve been lying awake for what feels like 20 minutes or more, get up. The goal is to shift yourself out of that heightened, stimulated state. There are many ways to do this:
Once you feel calmer and sleepier, return to bed. Over time, this approach helps to rebuild the association between your bed and sleep – rather than between your bed and lying awake worrying.
Most people agree that checking the clock or their phone in the middle of the night isn’t helpful – and yet most people do it anyway. It’s one of those habits that’s easy to justify in the moment and surprisingly hard to break.
So let’s make it simple: Move your phone and clock to the other side of the room.
When you wake in the night, treat everything as “night time” until your alarm tells you otherwise. Checking the clock feeds anxiety – once you know it’s 3am and you’ve got four hours left, your mind immediately starts calculating and catastrophising.
And as for your phone, the alerts, the notifications, and the temptation to scroll just for a moment – all of it activates your brain in ways that make sleep harder to return to⁴. If you have an alarm set, you don’t need to check the time. Your phone will tell you when morning arrives. Until then, let the night be the night.
An evening spent reclined on the sofa, feet up, lights low, half-watching television while you drift in and out – it feels restorative, but it can quietly undermine your sleep. Reclining in dim light sends a powerful signal to your brain that it’s time to sleep. When that signal is acted on in the living room rather than the bedroom, it chips away at the sleep pressure you’ve been building all day.
Those short dozes on the sofa also interfere with your circadian rhythm – the internal biological clock that regulates when you feel sleepy and when you feel alert¹. When sleep pressure is partly spent before you get to bed, you’re more likely to fall into a lighter sleep, wake in the early hours, or find it harder to drift off in the first place.
The fix is straightforward: In the evening, keep your feet on the floor and stay awake. Then, when you genuinely feel sleepy (properly sleepy, not just tired), go to bed.
Save your sleep for where it counts.
Good sleep isn’t about perfection – it’s about consistency and understanding what your body needs.
These five tips for better sleep are not quick fixes but sustainable habits that, practised regularly, can genuinely transform how you sleep.
Start with one or two changes, build from there, and be patient with yourself. Restful nights are possible.
Dr. Maja Schaedel, Sleep Expert & Clinical Psychologist, Director of The Good Sleep Clinic
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