Your entire day’s productivity revolves around many factors. One of the most important factors is getting a good night’s sleep. Here are some simple, yet essential steps to getting that sleep.

1. Establish a Sleeping Habit. Don’t binge sleep. Skimping on sleep during the week and power sleeping through the weekend doesn’t work and results in you feeling more fatigued. Establish a habit, try to go to bed at the same time throughout the week and get the same total hours of sleep each night. Aim for between 7 and 8 hours a night. There are studies though that suggest sleeping multiples of 1.5 hours. R.E.M sleep cycles are 1.5 hours so 7.5 hours is a good balance.

2. Avoid caffeine, smoking and alcohol before bed. As tempting as a nightcap before bed is, avoid it. All three of these are stimulants and get the body, and brain, pumping. This is not something you want when you are trying to relax enough to fall and stay asleep.

3. Avoid TV. Television has long been used as a crutch to avoid thinking about problems. Watching it is a mind numbing experience that easily lets you avoid dealing with the stresses of the day and the tediousness of planning tomorrow. As pleasurable and necessary as that is at times, doing it just before bed will rob you of a good night’s sleep. You will lie there with all those “problems” running through your head.

4. Make your To-Do list before bed. In conjunction with point 3 if you don’t make your “plan” for the following day, before bed, chances are your brain will be doing it will you are in bed. Your goal is to leave the brain with as little to do, once you’ve gone to bed, as is possible.

5. Exercise regularly and avoid exercise. The body needs to expend its excess energy and needs to feel healthy. Exercise will do this for you but not if you are doing it in the 4 hours before bed. You can’t be expected to achieve a restful enough state to fall asleep if your adrenaline levels are peaking or you are coming down from an exercise “high.”

6. Don’t eat. Eating before bed is not only unhealthy and lends to weight gain but impedes a good nght’s sleep. You are forcing your body to work over time to digest without and physical activity to help. Don’t eat in the 3-4 hours before you go to bed to give your body the time it needs to fully digest.

7. Take a bath. Our Moms knew what they were doing when they gave us a nightly bath just before bed. A warm bath relaxes the muscles, slows down our metabolism and makes us drowsy. Your body tends to fall asleep when there is a drop in body temperature. Having a warm bath artificially raises your body temperature so that the resulting drop tells your body it’s time to sleep. Take a warm bath as opposed to a hot one. A hot bath will raise your temperature for a longer period of time making it harder to sleep within the next couple of hours.

8. Buy a new bed. Experts say that a bed should last no more than 10 years and that’s if you bought something of quality to start. Lumpy, uneven beds will cause you to toss and turn to try and get comfortable. Not only will a new bed decrease sleep disruption it will also help avoid potential spine damage.

9. Seek medical attention. If you’ve tried everything and still aren’t falling asleep or are sleeping poorly go see your doctor. There maybe an underlying medical reason for the problem. At the very least, you can get a prescription for a sleep aide as a short term solution.

Getting a good night’s sleep helps make you a healthier, happier more productive person and should be a top priority so “get sleeping”.