How to Get a Good Night’s Sleep When You’re Stressed

Sleep is a fickle thing. Even when you're perfectly relaxed, it can sometimes be hard to get your brain to turn off. Adding stress to that equation only makes it worse: Every business card you wish you'd handed out and unchecked line on your to-do list can reduce the quality of your sleep. Before you know it, you're staring at the clock at 4 a.m., calculating exactly how many hours of sleep you'd get if you managed to fall asleep that instant. Poor sleep leads to more stress, which leads to worse sleep, so it's important to break that cycle as soon as possible. According to the Mayo Clinic, humans need between seven and nine hours of uninterrupted sleep. The average adult only gets about six and a half, so odds are good you could stand to catch a few more Z's.

Set a Bedtime
One of the easiest ways to get yourself to sleep well is to make it a habit. Use your morning routine to figure out your evening: If you wake up at 7 a.m., and you want to get nine hours of sleep, you should be going to bed by 9:45 p.m. (giving yourself 15 minutes to fall asleep). If you don't want to do the math, there are calculators you can use that let you know what time you need to go to bed to wake up refreshed. You can also build a routine by doing the same things before bed every night. Be sure whatever activities are part of your pre-bed routine encourage sleep. 

No Screens
As tempting as it is to check your email or Facebook notifications one last time, banish cellphones from your bedroom. If you use your phone to wake yourself up in the morning, invest in an alarm clock instead. Cut down on screen usage at night, ideally looking at no screens an hour before you head to bed. The blue light from screens disrupts your brain's ability to feel tired. Checking screens also leads to reading texts and emails that might send your brain running through stressful lines of thought. Ditching laptops, cellphones, and television before bed will stop those sources of stress before they start. 

Fall Asleep and Stay Asleep
Waking up during the night? Odds are something is catching your attention while you're in the lighter part of your sleep cycle. The answer to sleeping through the night is eliminating whatever distractions are keeping you up. If you find yourself going to the bathroom during the night, try cutting off your fluid intake a couple of hours before bed. You can get dark curtains to block out light from outside, and wear ear plugs if you have noisy pets or neighbors. If your alarm clock has a light that shows the time, figure out how to disable it or turn the alarm clock around so you can't see it. Checking the time when you wake up is a surefire way to go from half-awake to all the way up, so remove the opportunity.