Wake up to the bigger picture of how to get a better night’s sleep

When trying to form a healthy habit, being aware usually helps. So it’s easy to understand why sleep tracking devices, which claim to reveal what happened while users were off the clock, have become so popular among those seeking better rest. These promise to monitor not only how long you’ve slept, but also the depth and quality of your sleep. They even provide insight into how energized you should expect to feel the next day.

Most sleep scientists warn that the data recorded by these devices is unreliable, but putting aside whether or not we can trust the information they provide, focusing too hard on the numbers can make people worry about their sleep quality. This obsessive approach to optimizing rest, which has been subjected to orthosomnia, only tends to make matters worse. In other words, data overload can keep you up at night.

There’s another reason to avoid such laser-focusing on what’s happening while the lights are off if you’re hoping for more shut-eye: you’re missing the bigger picture. Good sleep is fundamental to our long-term health, but as we explore in our special issue, starting with “The New Science of Sleep: How to Sleep Better Regardless of Your Lifestyle,” good sleep isn’t just created in the bedroom.

Take diet for example. A growing body of evidence suggests that a healthy gut microbiome leads to better sleep and vice versa (see “The Surprising Relationship Between Your Microbiome and Sleeping Well”), so if you want to sleep better, what you eat matters.

It would also be remiss to expect our sleep needs to be the same every night or identical to anyone else’s. We are increasingly learning that our needs are both individual (see “Why your chronotype is key to figuring out how much sleep you need”) and variable due to factors such as our age and fluctuations in hormones (see “A better understanding of our hormones). and sleep could improve both”).

So while the way we approach actual hours of sleep can obviously improve it (for personal tips from the experts, see “What Nine Sleep Scientists Do to Get Their Best Night’s Sleep”), all of this suggests we can lighten up on the pressure to create the perfect bedtime conditions and recognize that it is not just our unconscious clocks that define good sleep. What we do during our waking day can also make a big difference.