6 Little Things Sleep Doctors Actually Do Every Day for Better Shut-Eye

Bookmark this list for when you could use some snooze support.

March 24, 2025

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If you’ve ever struggled with sleep (read: if you’re a human), you can probably rattle off at least a few pieces of sage sleep advice: Quit the caffeine in the evening. Turn your bedroom into a snooze-inducing sanctuary. Perfect a nighttime routine that quiets your mind. And for the love of melatonin, keep your eyes away from your blue-light-emitting devices before bed. These tips are popular because they work—but they can also feel like a laundry list. And according to sleep doctors, it might not actually be necessary for you to do all of these things all of the time to secure the restful shut-eye you so desperately want and need.

In reality, sleep is an individual and variable thing. Everything from your health to your work schedule to your family life and stress levels can factor into how well you are (or aren’t) snoozing. In turn, the habits that let you get the best possible sleep can change considerably over time, Jennifer Martin, PhD, spokesperson for the American Academy of Sleep Medicine and professor of medicine at the David Geffen School of Medicine at University of California Los Angeles, tells SELF. For example, Dr. Martin says she’s always preferred a morning workout to kick off her day and help her rest easier in the evening, but when her kids were teenagers coming home at 10 p.m. from sports practice, she often stayed up late to hang with them…and bypassed her early a.m. sweat to get enough sleep. “What works for you now might not be what worked for you in the past,” she says.

To get a sense of what a well-oiled sleep routine actually looks like, we asked five sleep doctors about the habits they prioritize (and what they let fall by the wayside). Read on for an inside look at how these experts fit good sleep advice into their current realities.

1. They honor their internal clocks.

Dr. Martin is a true-blue morning person—she generally wakes up around 6 a.m. and functions best when she front-loads her day. So she makes a point to avoid late-night activities whenever possible, since otherwise she’ll wind up shortchanging herself on sleep when she inevitably still wakes up at the crack of dawn. To align her schedule with her body clock and get a full night’s rest, she aims to get into bed by 10 p.m. every day. “The math in my head is that I really look forward to waking up feeling fully rested, and so, in order for me to do that, I go to bed early,” she says.

Maybe your circadian rhythm is oriented differently, and you find evenings to be your most productive window—so instead, you push your wakeup time back, so you can stay up into the wee hours without sacrificing z’s. Whichever way you roll, listening to your body and scheduling your sleep accordingly (to the extent that you can, of course, with family and work obligations) can pay dividends. Not only does it help ensure that you regularly notch your optimal seven to nine hours of shut-eye, but also it keeps essential body functions like digestion and hormone regulation chugging along smoothly. As Jade Wu, PhD, a board-certified behavioral sleep medicine specialist and author of Hello Sleep, previously told SELF: “The body functions best when it runs consistently on a rhythm.” It’s the reason why Brandon Peters, MD, a board-certified neurologist, sleep-medicine specialist, and author of The Sleep Apnea Hypothesis, also tells SELF he especially prioritizes going to bed and getting up at the same time nearly every day.

2. They make it a habit to get some morning sunlight.

Practically every expert we spoke to noted their affinity for catching morning rays. And not just by gazing out a window: Dr. Peters says he walks to work multiple days a week. For Rebecca Robbins, PhD, a sleep scientist at Brigham and Women’s Hospital and sleep expert at Oura Ring, it’s a quick pop outside for a stroll around the block, and she usually takes her kids and dog along too. And Shelby Harris, PsyD, a sleep psychologist and the author of The Women’s Guide to Overcoming Insomnia, says she positioned her desk directly in front of a window so she can get light first-thing (and throughout the day).

Bathing your eyes in morning light isn’t just a pleasant way to start your day…and maybe even an awe-inducing one, if you’re lucky enough to glimpse the sunrise. The light exposure acts as a powerful signal to your circadian rhythm, telling your brain it’s time for wakefulness so it pumps the brakes on melatonin (a hormone linked with sleep). This syncs your body clock with the natural cycle of the day, which also ensures your brain will restart its melatonin production on schedule, around sunset, so you can drift off easily that night.

Hence why the dimness of winter can make you feel groggy all day and struggle to doze off at your bedtime: You’re not getting that consistent hit of morning sun. It’s the reason Angela Holliday-Bell, MD, a board-certified physician and sleep specialist, tells SELF she often uses a light therapy box or light therapy glasses to simulate natural morning light in the darker months. These very bright devices can emit upwards of 10,000 lux, designed to mimic a sunny day and help with symptoms of seasonal affective disorder (SAD). But even a less-intense option for morning light, like a sunrise alarm clock, may be a sleep-regulating addition when getting some real sun isn’t possible.

3. They go easy on the alcohol at night…most of the time.

While Dr. Martin says she used to “get away with having a couple glasses of wine late into the evening and still sleep fine,” that isn’t quite the case for her anymore. More than one boozy drink at night, and any semblance of good slumber eludes her: She’ll find herself waking up multiple times and unable to fall back asleep. That’s because while alcohol might initially make you drowsy, it also interferes with your ability to enter the deepest, most restorative stages of sleep.

That’s not to say she never drinks. If it’s her birthday or another special occasion, she says she won’t keep herself from a couple of cocktails. Dr. Peters is also “not strict about avoiding alcohol late,” he says. But he concedes he’s also less sensitive to outside influences on sleep—he’ll even have caffeine in the late evening every once in a while. And Dr. Harris says she makes alcohol at night “the exception, not the norm.”

All to say, you may want to follow Dr. Martin’s lead on limiting the hard stuff the majority of the time if you notice it impacts your sleep or leaves you really tired the next day—but having a late-night drink every now and then might not be the biggest sleep-wrecker for you.

4. They set aside dedicated time to unwind before bed.

Nope, GURWM (get unready with me) isn’t just a TikTok thing. Several of the sleep docs we spoke with have a nightly ritual around prepping their body and brain for snoozing. They all look a little bit different but generally include disconnecting from work obligations and tech and engaging in some kind of soothing wind-down activity.

Dr. Holliday-Bell dims the lights, plays some soft music, and does her skin care routine; whereas Dr. Robbins takes a warm bath, puts on her pajamas, and then sits cross-legged on the floor to do a couple breathing exercises, which she says “help to calm my busy mind and serve as a buffer between the stress of my day and my sleep.” Nearly every expert pointed to reading a few pages of a book—a physical one, to avoid the sleep-inhibiting glare of a screen—as a method for powering down. And Dr. Holliday-Bell even has her phone set to automatically turn on “Do Not Disturb” an hour before her bedtime so she won’t be interrupted by a call or be tempted to check any notifications.

It’s not just the calming nature of these nighttime activities that may help you transition from the hectic energy of the day into sleep mode (though that’s a part of it). Over time, the consistency of a nightly routine can also condition your brain to associate your bedtime ritual with sleep, making it that much easier to doze off once you’re under the covers.

5. They plan a morning they look forward to.

For Dr. Martin, winding down with a nighttime ritual is actually less important for her overall sleep than kicking off her day with a consistent morning routine. You’ll remember she’s an early bird—so by the time it’s 9 or 10 p.m., she’s usually yawning and ready to nod off even without the help of a soothing ritual. A big part of what keeps her on this schedule is getting out of bed early, when her body naturally wakes her up, and diving into her morning ritual: making a cup of coffee that she loves, spending some time with her cat, and then getting in a workout (be it a swim, a yoga class, or a bike ride). The more ritualistic she is about her mornings, she says, the better sleep she clocks at night—even when she winds up working or scrolling on her phone up until 15 minutes before bed.

6. They actually prioritize sleep.

This one won’t come as a surprise, but all the experts we spoke with make a point of setting aside ample time for good sleep every night. They just know too much about the importance of consistent high-quality shut-eye—and the damage sleep deprivation can wreak on everything from your mood to your metabolism, immune system, and cognition, for starters—to ever really brush it off. As Dr. Martin puts it, “I just know that I’m nicer, smarter, and more capable after a good night’s rest…and aren’t we all?”

It’s the reason she flat-out avoids overnight and early-morning flights, for one, and structures her life around snoozing early to protect her morning workout. It’s why Dr. Peters reserves a full hour before bed each night to page through a book and avoids looking at his phone in bed. And why Dr. Harris gets in some movement on a daily basis—not just for all the regular good-health reasons but because of the sleep-supportive upsides of exercise.

When you rank sleep high on your list of personal priorities, it gets easier to achieve. And what these experts’ different habits prove is that there’s no one right way to do that. So if you’re struggling to snooze, try these various tactics on for size. You can keep what fits and leave the rest. And ultimately, do your best not to overthink it, Dr. Harris says. That can have the opposite effect you’re going for. And it’s not worth, well, losing sleep over losing sleep.