The New Yorker: There are a number of simple ways to improve sleep quality, including purchasing a new mattress, paying attention to your sleep position, and reducing nighttime light exposure.
Warm up for bedtime by practicing your optimal sleep position, whether that’s on your back, side, or stomach. We highly recommend preparing your body to withstand the grueling inactivity that, in some cases, can last all night.
Invest in a mattress that is the correct firmness for you. As you’ll recall from our article in the esteemed sleep-science journal Sleep: Everyone Else Finds It So Easy, firmness is measured on a scale from one to sixteen thousand. Finding your perfect mattress is a lifelong pursuit. You might even enjoy a water bed! But probably not.
Reduce your nighttime exposure to blue light. It is a powerful force that humans have unleashed into this world and, as of this writing, have no hope of containing. We suggest wearing filtration goggles. After many years of study, we have determined that they come in many fun frames and almost certainly do something.
If you have successfully gone to sleep after looking at screens for three hours, how did you do that and would you be willing to come to our science lab for some tests?
Exercising during the day is a great way to exhaust yourself. But, if you exercise after 7:30 p.m., you may accidentally rev up your system too much.
I am a retired commercial photographer and used to need to know a lot about light. With the advent of CFL (compact fluorescent lights) and now LED (light emitting diode) lights, virtually all of these now have a color temperature written on them and/or on the package. What is a color temperature? It is the color of the light emanating from a black body radiator (think carbon or even coal) slowly heated until it starts to glow and measuring the temperature and comparing that to the color of the light at a range of temperatures using the Kelvin (or absolute) scale. To keep it simple, buy a LED light bulb with a color temperature of 3000K and another one between 5000 or 6000k and look at them turned on beside each other. By themselves our brains will tell us that they are both white, but side by side we will see a real difference. The 5000K (or 6000K) light will be similar to the light outside in the middle of the day with a mixture of sun light and blue sky. The 3000K light mimics the early morning light or the evening light before it gets dark. Putting 5000 or 6000K light at an area you want to work in will actually help productivity and keeping 3000K lights in and around your sleeping area will allow you to get to sleep more easily.