How to fix your sleep schedule

Where to start: your wake-up time

Start with getting up, not going to bed. You can’t make yourself fall asleep, but you can get up when the alarm goes off, and morning is what sets your internal clock for the day. Choose a time you can realistically keep and hold it seven days a week.

Here’s why regularity gets so much attention. In a study of 60,977 people wearing accelerometers, more regular sleep was linked to a 20–48% lower risk of death, and regularity predicted that risk more strongly than sleep duration did [1]. That’s an association, not proof of cause. Among college students, irregular sleepers also ran on a later body clock: their melatonin started rising about 2.5 hours later than in regular sleepers [2].

A big gap between weekdays and weekends is a bit like changing time zones every week. Researchers call it social jetlag and link it to lower well-being and to more caffeine, nicotine and alcohol [3]. If you’re wondering what to aim for, here’s how many hours of sleep you need.

Light in the morning, dark at night

Light is the main signal your internal clock runs on. In one experiment, a week of camping with only natural light shifted people’s body clocks earlier and brought them in line with the sun, and night owls shifted the most [4].

Ordinary indoor lighting matters more than you might think. In a study of 116 volunteers, room light before bed delayed the start of melatonin production in nearly everyone and cut its duration by about 90 minutes [5].

An international expert group has proposed a simple pattern: more light during the day, less in the evening and almost none at night [6]. In practice, that looks like this:

• Morning: go outside or stand by a window soon after you get up.
• Daytime: work near a window and step outside when you can, even briefly.
• Evening: 2–3 hours before bed, dim the lights and turn down your screen brightness.
• Night: make the room as dark as you can, with blackout curtains or a sleep mask.

Caffeine, alcohol, exercise and a warm shower

A 7-day plan to fix your sleep schedule

1. Day 1. Pick your wake-up time and start a sleep journal: what time you fell asleep, how many times you woke up and your energy level on a scale of 1–10.
2. Day 2. Add morning light right after you get up.
3. Day 3. Move your last coffee to the first half of the day.
4. Day 4. Start dimming the lights 2 hours before bed.
5. Day 5. Keep your phone out of bed.
6. Day 6. Add a short wind-down, such as a meditation for sleep or a few minutes of slow breathing.
7. Day 7. Look back through your journal and decide what to keep.

If your schedule is far off, say you’re falling asleep at 3am, don’t aim for 11pm tonight. Move both your wake-up time and bedtime 30 minutes earlier, hold them for a few days, then move them again. That gives your body time to adjust.

A bad night doesn’t reset your progress. If you do wake up at 3am, get up at your usual time anyway.

When habits aren’t enough

Once a sleep problem turns chronic, good habits alone may not solve it. The American Academy of Sleep Medicine advises against using sleep hygiene as the only treatment for chronic insomnia and gives its strongest recommendation to cognitive behavioral therapy [12].

One part of that therapy is called sleep restriction. In a trial published in The Lancet (642 people), it lowered insomnia severity at 6 months more than sleep hygiene advice alone: 10.9 points versus 13.9 [13]. Nurses delivered it, though. It needs professional support, so don’t try cutting your time in bed sharply on your own.

Seven days with Sleep Reset

Sleep Reset lays all of this out day by day. The week opens with syncing your circadian rhythms, moves through the body, attention, the nervous system and deep sleep, and closes with habits that stay with you long after. There are 3 audio practices a day: morning, afternoon and before bed. If your sleep slips again after a flight, a vacation or a stressful stretch, you can go through the program again.