A great night’s sleep is imperative for a healthy lifestyle, influencing aspects such as your diet, your mood, your ability to focus, your desire to exercise and ultimately, your health.
Getting a good night’s sleep isn’t rocket science – after all, what could be more natural than allowing your body to follow its natural rhythm? But sleep advice is often overcomplicated and, as a result, can feel overwhelming.
To cut through the noise, our resident sleep expert, Christabel Majendie, shares five simple steps you can start following today to improve your sleep.

Find a sleep schedule that works for you and stick to it
Sleep needs vary from person to person. While most adults thrive on 7–9 hours per night, some may need more—or less. Equally, not everyone is ready for sleep at the same time and not everyone is ready to wake up at the same time.
To identify your natural sleep pattern, go to bed when sleepy and wake naturally without an alarm for a week, then calculate the average sleep duration across the week. This is a good guide to how many hours you should aim for consistently, or your ‘sleep need’. If you started the week very tired and sleep derived, you will need to discount the first couple of days as you would likely have slept a bit more.
Observe the time you feel sleepy in the evening. Note that sleepiness is different to tiredness, and occurs when you start feeling like you will nod off and have increased yawning. This will reveal your optimal bedtime. Using your sleep need above, calculate your wake time, which should be close to when you wake without an alarm. If the timings don’t quite work for you, you can adjust both bedtime and wake time by the same amount, as long as this doesn’t lead to problems dropping off to sleep or significant struggles waking.
Once you’ve established your unique bedtime and wakeup time, establish a regular sleep schedule based on these findings and stick to it—even on weekends. Consistency is key!
Wind down
Pinpointing your unique sleep schedule is just the first step to better rest. Once you've found your ideal bedtime, set a recurring alarm on your phone about an hour beforehand. This alarm will remind you to begin your nightly wind-down routine—stopping all tasks and choosing behaviours that help you to relax before getting ready for bed.
Make turning off this alarm the last time you stare at a screen before bed. Screens emit stimulating blue light that can interfere with your circadian rhythm, making it harder to fall asleep. Even with night mode on or blue light filters, most things we do on a screen are stimulating and not conducive to sleep. Alternative ways to relax might be reading a book, listening to something, taking a bath or shower, meditation or talking to someone. Do these things mainly out of bed to keep your bed for sleep.
Another important factor in improving sleep quality is managing your evening eating habits. Try to avoid eating within two hours of bedtime, as this can lead to indigestion, increase the risk of acid reflux, and disrupt the body's natural overnight fasting process, which supports metabolic health. However, if you are hungry before going to bed, this can interfere with sleep so choose something to eat that balances fats and proteins with slow-releasing carbohydrates e.g. some nuts or yogurt with an apple or banana.

Maximise daytime light exposure
We need bright light exposure during the day for melatonin production later in the evening, a hormone involved in sleep regulation. The best source of bright light is natural daylight, even on a cloudy day. Unfortunately, many of us spend the majority of our time indoors, depriving our bodies of this essential stimulus.
This can make us feel tired during the day and struggle to sleep at night. Aim to get as much natural daylight as possible by spending more time outside. Since exercise improves the quality of your sleep, combining light exposure with exercise is ideal.
Try taking a walk or going for a run in the morning or at lunchtime. Walking or cycling to and from work is also a good option to factor daylight exposure into your daily routine.
Cut down on alcohol & caffeine
There is no denying that alcohol is disruptive to sleep. Although it can help send you into a deep sleep initially, alcohol tends to fragment your sleep so you wake several times in the night or early in the morning and find you cannot return to sleep. In addition, alcohol suppresses REM sleep (rapid eye movement sleep), which is critical for memory, learning, and emotional regulation, so alcohol can leave you feeling groggy and irritable the next day.
So to improve your sleep quality, aim to cut down on alcohol consumption, and ideally stop drinking in the last couple of hours before bed so your body has a chance to metabolise it before sleep.
Similarly, too much caffeine can affect your sleep. Around five hours after drinking your last cup of coffee of the day, about half the caffeine is still in your system. This is why people often stop drinking coffee after lunchtime so that by the time they go to bed, the stimulating effects have worn off. So as with alcohol, think about the timing and quantity of your coffee consumption and stop earlier in the day for the best chance of a good night’s sleep.

Create a sleep-conducive environment
With the exception of sex, your bedroom should be used almost exclusively for sleeping. Ditch the TV and any other daytime activities that you do in bed such as eating, drinking tea, working or playing games on laptops, iPads and phones. If you do these things in bed, you will weaken the associations your brain makes between the bedroom and sleep. Instead, the bedroom may become associated with wakefulness.
In addition, aim to make your bedroom as comfortable as possible. Use pillows that suit your sleeping position to prevent putting a strain on your neck or back. Consider investing in a new mattress if yours is old, lumpy or too hard/soft for your personal preference. Use the right bedding for the time of year and use materials made from natural fibres as these are far better at regulating body temperature.