Most adults need 7 to 9 hours of sleep, and most short-term sleep problems improve with changes to routine rather than medication. Insomnia means difficulty falling asleep, staying asleep, or waking too early, with a knock-on effect on the following day.
What actually improves sleep?
- A fixed wake-up time, including at weekends. This anchors the body clock more effectively than a fixed bedtime.
- Get out of bed if you cannot sleep. After about 20 minutes awake, get up, do something quiet in dim light, and return when sleepy. Lying awake trains the brain to associate bed with being awake.
- Keep the bedroom dark, quiet and cool.
- Stop caffeine after early afternoon. It has a half-life of about 5 hours, so an afternoon coffee is still active at bedtime.
- Avoid alcohol as a sleep aid. It shortens the time to fall asleep but fragments the second half of the night.
- Daylight and movement during the day, particularly in the morning.
What about screens before bed?
Both the light and the content matter. The more useful change for most people is not the device itself but stopping stimulating activity — work email, news, social media — in the hour before bed.
Should I nap?
If you nap, keep it under 30 minutes and before mid-afternoon. Long or late naps reduce the sleep pressure that helps you fall asleep at night.
Do I need sleeping tablets?
Usually not. Sleeping tablets can help briefly in specific situations, but tolerance and dependence develop quickly and they do not address the cause. The most effective treatment for long-term insomnia is cognitive behavioural therapy for insomnia (CBT-I), which outperforms medication over time.
When should I see a doctor?
See a doctor if poor sleep has lasted more than a few weeks and affects your daily functioning, if you snore loudly and stop breathing or gasp in your sleep, if you fall asleep involuntarily during the day, or if low mood, anxiety or pain is keeping you awake. Sleep problems are also a common early feature of depression and anxiety, both of which are treatable.
