Calming the Chaos: What Anxeity is?: Sleep Week: Your journey begins now

Life Kit — Tools to help you get it together.

This newsletter is reported by Life Kit producer Clare Marie Schneider.

Welcome to Life Kit’s Guide to Better Sleep

Kicking off a week of science-backed strategies to improve your sleep.

Getting enough sleep is a wonderful thing. It improves our memory and brain performance, enhances our physical health and makes us more attentive to the people around us. Overall, it gives us a better shot at being our best selves.

But putting pressure on ourselves to get the best sleep ever, every night of our lives, can make it harder to do. “If we make people anxious about sleep, they definitely won’t sleep,” says Allison Harvey, a professor and clinical psychologist at the University of California, Berkeley.

Becky Harlan/NPR

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That’s why Harvey wants us to shift our mindset on sleep. It’s a “flexible system,” she says. It won’t look the same every night or throughout every stage of our lives. So you may need a different approach depending on your needs, whether you're stressed from the day or having difficulty putting the phone away before bed.

Life Kit has a toolbox of strategies from researchers, psychologists and physicians to help you sleep better, deeper and longer.

Over the next week, you’ll receive three emails from us on sleep, along with tips you can try that very night.

A preview of what you’ll get in your inbox

Bedtime routines to help your brain unwind. In this email, we’ll share wind-down activities to help you release your day and prepare you for sleep. We’ll explain how to create a to-do list that won’t stress you out, the importance of light and temperature at bedtime, and how to calculate your “sleep opportunity.”

Lifestyle and sleep. This newsletter will cover diet, exercise and substances like alcohol and caffeine, which can all impact the quality of your rest. Plus, can common sleep supplements help you doze off more quickly?

Setting realistic expectations about nightly screen time. Sleep experts discuss the use of electronic devices before bed. How does the light affect our sleep? What about the content we consume? They also discuss the consequences of “sleep displacement.”

A quick note: These newsletters can help you optimize your sleep, but if you think you have an underlying sleep disorder like insomnia or sleep apnea, talk to your primary care provider about referring you to a sleep specialist.

Sleep well and see you soon,
Clare Marie

P.S. We’d love to hear from you as you go through this sleep journey. Email us at lifekit@npr.org if you have thoughts or questions.