How to Stop Sabotaging Your Sleep

Step one: fake the sunset

Photo by Ahmet Ali Ağır on Unsplash

Co-authored with Jake Knapp

According to a 2016 study by the University of Michigan, Americans spend around eight hours in bed every night, as do folks in Britain, France, and Canada. But despite what seems like a decent amount of time in bed, most of us still don’t get enough sleep. What the heck? Sleep quality is more important than quantity, and our world is full of barriers to getting good sleep — from screens to schedules to caffeine.

When you don’t take care of your body, your brain can’t do its job. If you’ve ever felt slow and uninspired after a big lunch or invigorated and clearheaded after exercising, you know what I mean. If you want energy for your brain, you need to take care of your body. And that means prioritizing sleep.

For our prehistoric ancestors, bedtime would have marked the end of an hours-long process to remove mental stimuli gradually and shift into sleep. Their evenings followed a predictable rhythm: They slept in the dark, and they never lay awake fretting over email.

Sleeping late on weekends is basically like giving yourself jet lag.

We, on the other hand, have a very different bedtime ritual that generally involves some sort of screen. But…