How To Get The Sleep You Need

Science-backed strategies for superior slumber

- Samantha Rideout and Corey Whelan

Mary Ladd was cursed with a spouse who could sleep through anything. “My insomnia was so lonely, because I could hear him sleeping in bed next to me,” says the 45-year-old San Francisco writer and mother of one. “The fact that he could sleep through the night—and I couldn’t—reminded me that my eyeballs were dry and tired.” Part of her problem, she knew, was that she had some bad habits: too much great San Francisco coffee, for one. But some of it felt out of her control. A breast cancer survivor with an elderly mother, Ladd found that her worries would inevitably stampede through her mind at bedtime. “Ironically, my mom’s death brought some relief” to her insomnia, Ladd says. “I had been worrying so much about her.”

Is there anything worse than desperately needing sleep and not being able to get it? It’s not just a matter of feeling tired; over the long run, sleep deprivation can contribute to depression, obesity, diabetes, stroke, heart attack, Alzheimer’s disease, and cancer. “The silent sleep-loss epidemic is the greatest public health challenge we face in the 21st century,” argues Matthew Walker, PhD, of the University of California, Berkeley, in his new book, Why We Sleep. “Scientists such as myself have even started lobbying doctors to start ‘prescribing’ sleep.”

Unfortunately, telling patients to sleep more doesn’t mean they’ll be able to do it. Nor does repeating the hard-to-follow advice they’ve heard a million times: Exercise more, stick to a sleep schedule, avoid caffeine in the evening. As a result, a full third of adults report that they fail to get the recommended seven to nine hours a night on a regular basis.