1. Yes. But not to close to bed time (1-2 hours before you need to sleep) 2. More like 1-2 hours, hard but do it and you’ll notice the difference. Also leave your phone in the kitchen. Even having it in your bedroom stimulates your mind. “I won’t look at it” isn’t enough to convince your brain you won’t. 3. Absolutely. No noise above 36db though and you can train yourself off white noise machines. Ear plugs are good if you live in the city. Generally any noise is bad. 4. Diet. If you do drink alcohol you won’t sleep well, which is a trade off you may make on a Friday. No caffeine after 13:00 (it takes 12 hours to metabolise) 5. Regular routine. Same things. Every day and in the same order. Make a wind down routine and stick to it. This is the biggest one by far.

And if you can’t fall asleep, get out of bed and do something else (nothing involving bright lights) but saying in bed while you can’t sleep breaks the accociative behaviour of bed being for sleep. Don’t watch TV in bed. Don’t eat in bed. Your bed is for sleep and sex. If you still struggle to fall back asleep you can try creative free form writing. Sounds like sudo science but it’s proven to work. Get up. Get a pen and paper and write down a narrative. What ever comes into your mind for 30mins, or, until you feel sleepy. Then go back to bed. Often we fail to fall asleep because we are thinking about work, our partners, friends, a cute dog we saw. Creative writing is a technique used by sleep experts for chronic sleep disorders and has shown its self to work in multiple studies. Sleep.io is great if you really struggle with sleep. It’s a CBT based programme to hell yok sleep and it genuinely works.