pantsfarm

I’ve been playing around on this website Quora a bit and one of the questions I answered there was for this question. I’m copying it here for my own sake.

What are the best sleep habits?

In a very broad sense the best sleep habits are the ones you can maintain.

The number of hours will vary from person to person, and naps or snoozes are “okay” in the sense that they can do wonders for alertness and wakefulness but may also be decidedly “not-okay” in terms of fitting in to one’s life (i.e., I cannot easily duck out for 30-60 minutes from work which is in my personal experience about how long I tend to nap for).

Regularity is an important element of sleeping that will keep you well rested and getting the most out of the hours you do sleep. Sleeping the entire weekend then having erratic and fitful sleep habits through the week is not something I’d encourage anybody to do because it’ll wear you down. The consequences of being insufficiently rested I assume anybody looking at this question is already personally familiar with.

Sleeping in a dark room is supposed to improve quality of sleep. Anecdotally if you spend a lot of time in bed not-sleeping (watching TV, using a computer [note also that these are both bright lights which could throw off your sleeping cycles], etc) you may find it harder to fall asleep when you want to as well.

Other things you can do to improve quality of sleep in this regard are to make sure that the place you are sleeping is comfortable (get a mattress that isn’t terrible, adjust the temperature to what suits you) and free of things that are going to disturb your sleep (besides light, noise is another thing to consider).

If you have the flexibility to test out your sleep schedule you could just stop using alarms of any sort for a while. Sleep when you’re tired and wake up whenever you do. You might find that you naturally gravitate towards being asleep and awake at certain times and this knowledge will help you to better structure your schedule to take advantage of that. In general though if you’re feeling tired during the day you would probably do well to get more sleep at night.