Humans need sleep like food. Much as with recipes, there are many elements that make for good, joyous sleep. Just as a checklist won’t make you a great chef, this checklist may not give make you a great sleeper. But every little bit helps.

1. My sleep place is as cool, comfy, dark, safe as I can make it.

Sleep has a gazillion variables. Control the ones you can.
Why cool? Most humans don’t sleep well about 75 degrees Fahrenheit. There are reasons the New South didn’t exist until air conditioning.
Comfortable-do you really need that $10,000 mattress? Maybe, if you’re selling them. Most people agree: they like a bed that’s welcoming and feels right.
Dark – humans did not evolve with electric lights. Even with your eyes closed, tiny amounts of light can alert you. We’re built to sleep at night, move in the day.
Safe – Soldiers can tell you how hard it is to sleep in unsafe places. One of the basic needs of people is safety. For sleep this means keeping distractions down; more on this later.

2. Don’t pay too much attention to sleep apps.

Sleep is not a performance sport. There are no Olympic judges giving you 9.2 out of 10 for sleep position. Sleep quality is about how you feel, not an accelerometer on your wrist.
And when you’re studying your sleep record and see you slept 7 hours 22 minutes on Monday night but only 5 hours 48 minutes on Tuesday night, you might get worried. So sleep apps have now become a new cause of psychophysiologic insomnia – worrying about sleep so much you don’t sleep.
Plus as most sleep researchers can tell you, the data they provide is often not even close to right.
The truth is sleep restoration is subjective. There are nights you don’t sleep much and feel great. There are other nights, as the ill can tell you, when they sleep a lot, and don’t feel rested at all.
When it comes to sleep, first listen to what your body tells you is good sleep.

3. Sleep in line with your body clock.

Some folks are night people: they feel excited when midnight comes. Others are larks:  they like waking at 5 or 6 AM or earlier, when owls must be dragged by two or more family members from their beds.
Yet since the Industrial Revolution, work doesn’t care much about clocks. Machines don’t sleep. Why should you?
This has led to new American model of sleep – the “lie down and die model.” Which means “I watch the news crime stories just before I go to bed, fall instantly into sleep, never wake to go to the bathroom, have great, refreshing dreams, and jump out of the bed at at 7 fully restored.”
The “lie down and die model” can be found primarily on shopping channels and sleeping pills advertisements.
So what is your inner body clock, and how much sleep do you really need? Try this fantasy: you get a vacation that lasts for weeks. After many days your chronic sleep deficit is overcome. You recognize the times you want to go to bed and wake up.
Since most of us will never get a vacation like that, try to imagine what your body Wants. When does it like to sleep? Wake up?
Then make the best trade offs you can.

4. Rest and get calm before you sleep.

The world’s blowing up, the kids are crazy, even my cat is nuts, and you want me to feel relaxed?
Yes, I do, at least before you go to sleep. What sleep docs call “arousal” denies sleep. One of the most common types of insomnia (it’s a very long list) is psychophysiological insomnia – worrying so much about sleep you don’t sleep.
What does work is a program – your personal sleep ritual. You do stuff so regularly, so automatically, your body just has to sleep.
You turn down the bed. Put out your clothes for the next day. Floss and brush your teeth. Read books that aren’t boring, but transporting, bringing your mind to a pleasant, contented place. Kiss your spouse, turn off the lights, and slumber: (Sex before sleep? In studies this works better for males than most females. But it can prove a very good idea.)

5. Keep the lights down before sleep, off during sleep, get light way up when you wake.

Light sets human blocks. Morning light shifts your inner clock earlier. Night light makes your inner clock later.
And light at night is just not right. All you need is 30-60 seconds looking at your boss’s text on your cellphone, and melatonin, the hormone of darkness, goes kaput. Your brain thinks your cellphone is pumping out sunlight. Humans evolved to move in the day, sleep at night. Machines don’t care.
People selling you stuff care a lot. Sleepless people buy stuff. What else is there to do when you’re up at night?
Recognize your brain has a light meter inside. Light resets your inner clocks. Lots of folks find lowering the lights before sleep time calms them and helps them sleep. Ask the people on the International Space Station. They know.

6. Keep awakening agents to a minimum.

What keeps people up at night? There’s caffeine. Cellphones are also somewhat controllable. Small children, older children, noisy neighbors, dogs, cats, and parakeets, less so.
When sleep docs told people their animals might keep them up, the backlash was immediate. That was before they asked dogs (cats were unavailable for comment.)
Small kids develop body clocks around 4-6 months, but growing kids still find monsters in the closets. Older children go to bed later than they will when younger or older. Motorcyclists don’t know they can make themselves deaf, but many I’ve met don’t care till it’s too late.
Dogs and cats? At least they like to sleep more than we do, sadly not at the same times.

7. Get your body in the best shape you can to sleep.

Who are the best sleepers in America? Generally, it’s athletes. Lots of physical activity brings on more deep sleep, more growth hormone, more brain cell growth. Lots of people sleep better if they walk in the morning.
Sleep is about rest and restoration. If you want to restore your body and brain, avoid dementia, heart disease, cancer and a growing waistline, move when you can.
And exercise is helpful in preventing arthritis and many other illnesses. Pain is the most common cause of insomnia in the world. How much physical pain we experience is often pure luck. But moving more might make us a little luckier.

A last note: try to avoid sleeping pills. The sleeping pill industry knows that pills do not produce normal human sleep. But they can knock you out.
Even if people don’t think they do, many get habituated to sleeping pills. For them, pill = sleep.
That’s not the equation you want. Sleep should be as natural as breathing, no pill required. And getting off sleeping pills ranges from extremely difficult to much work to why didn’t I do this before?

So, now you’ve done your checklist. Remember that sleep is giving you a renewed body every time you wake. You’ve got reorganized nerve cells, rebuilt muscles and tendons, lovely new skin. And in dreams you can do what you wanted in the day, but couldn’t.
Sleep should be fun. Check it out.