Insomnia is often maintained by 'conditioned arousal,' where your brain learns to associate your bed with being awake (from working, watching TV, or worrying in it). To break this, if you're awake for 20 minutes, get out of bed until you're sleepy again to re-teach your brain that bed is only for sleep.

Melatonin is not a sedative; it's a hormone that signals to your brain that it's nighttime. Meta-analyses show it only reduces the time to fall asleep by about 3-4 minutes. Its primary effective uses are for managing jet lag or specific circadian rhythm disorders.

Contrary to their widespread use, both over-the-counter and prescription sleeping pills are deemed ineffective at best and harmful at worst by leading institutions like the American Academy of Sleep Medicine and the Cleveland Clinic. They do not provide quality sleep and should be avoided.

Bryan Johnson suggests focusing on a single metric: pre-sleep resting heart rate. Lowering it through specific habits (like eating 4 hours before bed) improves sleep quality, which in turn boosts your prefrontal cortex, enhancing willpower and alleviating mental health issues.

To combat stress and improve sleep, data scientist Penelope Lafoy takes short, five-minute walks between meetings without her phone. This practice trains the body to "down-regulate" and shift out of a high-alert state, which makes it easier to fall asleep and improves overall sleep quality.

The brain clears metabolic waste via the glymphatic system, which functions optimally during sleep-induced inactivity. Research indicates that sleeping on your right or left side, with your head slightly elevated, is the best position to facilitate this crucial cleanup process.

A prerequisite for falling asleep is shutting down proprioception—your awareness of body position. Performing slow, deliberate eye movements (side-to-side, circles) can trick your vestibular system into this state, helping a racing mind fall asleep.

The popular advice to take magnesium for sleep is often flawed. Most common forms of magnesium (like oxide or citrate) do not cross the blood-brain barrier. Since sleep is a brain process, these supplements are unlikely to have a direct effect unless an individual is clinically deficient.

The brain's glymphatic waste clearance system works best at night. Mark Burnett suggests taking his supplement in the evening and sleeping on an incline using a wedge pillow to physically assist this natural drainage process, potentially boosting the supplement's effects.