Sleep is the most underrated activity that affects physical well-being, energy level, mood, memory and thinking skills — for people of any age. Good sleep puts you in charge of your emotions, your actions and reactions, your productivity, your entire day.

However, much of what you hear about sleep is wrong or misguided. Pharmaceutical companies and others who make money off the myths want you to think we’re all sleep-deprived zombies, that snoring is always a bad sign, that older people can’t sleep well, and that drugs or expensive devices are the best and only solutions.

In my new book, Make Sleep Your Superpower: A Guide to Greater Health, Happiness & Productivity, I debunk these and other common sleep myths and misconceptions, explain how sleep works and how much we really need, and what happens when we don’t get enough. I then lay out 20 practical, science-based strategies for falling asleep faster, sleeping more soundly, and sleeping efficiently — especially in the most restorative and rejuvenating stages of sleep, when your brain and body carry out most of the repair work necessary to allow you to be at the top of your game the next day.

Here is Chapter 1...

Good Sleep Doesn’t Just Happen

“What’s like a perfect day for you?” David Letterman asked Julia Louis-Dreyfus, the comedian and star of Seinfeld and Veep, in an interview for his Netflix show. Her reply came without hesitation. “A perfect day, let’s just say, just starts with a good night’s sleep.”

Pinning down the best strategy to cultivate a good night of sleep starts with being honest about the ways in which we sabotage it — the chronic conditions that intrude on our health along with the stupid things we do, knowingly or otherwise, the kryptonite that radioactively permeates our waking hours, eroding our superpower all through the night.

Whether you struggle to fall asleep, stay asleep or get the quality of sleep that supports perfect days, here’s some great news:

You don’t have to take lousy sleep lying down.

Get your head straight

Mountains of scientific evidence reveal numerous effective ways in which anyone can achieve longer and more restorative sleep, leading to a better and more productive and fulfilling life. And there is no age limit on the possibilities: Poor sleep is not inevitable, no matter what’s going on in your life or how old you are.

But you need to get your head straight about something first:

The mind-body connection has tremendous power. Everything you think or feel, do or don’t do throughout the day, can affect sleep quality, which in turn affects everything the next day. So why not put a little effort into something so profoundly important?

We work our tails off to get good grades or be successful at work. We put tons of time and energy into friendships, romance or parenting, or improving at a sport or hobby. Yet we view sleep as something that just happens at the end of all that, rather than an act integral to the success of those endeavors and therefore worth improving.

A lot of us have room for improvement. Some 32.5% of U.S. adults don’t get the recommended minimum of seven hours of sleep nightly, according to the most recent federal data from 2019. The figure among teens is a frightening 77.9%. Some 70 million Americans (4.7%) are thought to have diagnosable insomnia or some other formal medical sleep disorder. The number who deal with occasional insomnia is much higher, perhaps half the adult population. Exact figures are elusive, in part because most people never seek a diagnosis for insomnia nor depend on physicians to help with sleep problems.

Canadians sleep a bit longer than Americans. Both are outdone by people in New Zealand, the leader, and Australia, Britain and the Nordic countries. Spain, Italy, China, Mexico and Japan are among the countries where people manage on considerably less. Average sleep time around the world, by country, differs by about 80 minutes a night. The variations are rooted in many factors you might imagine, like cultural differences and daylight hours, but also lesser-known variables like outdoor temperatures and suburban light pollution.

Here’s one of the many mysteries of sleep: How much people say they get doesn’t always square with how they feel during the day. Though people in the U.K. self-report getting more sleep than Americans, insomnia is still thought to affect a third of the U.K. population. Sleep duration, as well as time spent in bed, don’t always equate to sleep efficiency and effectiveness.

What do you know?

To improve sleep, you might need to let go of some myths, misconceptions and misguided cultural norms. Let’s see how much you really know about some of the more obscure but important factors behind a good night’s sleep. True or false:

• Dreams are a sign of poor sleep quality.
• Normal human body temperature is 98.6 degrees Fahrenheit (37 Celsius).
• Bedtime doesn’t matter, as long as you get seven or eight hours of sleep.
• Our ancient ancestors slept a lot more than people today.
• Melatonin taken right before bedtime is a good sleep aid.
• Office lighting is about as bright as a cloudy day outside.
• A glass or two of wine a day is good for you.

Feeling good about your sleep knowledge? If you thought any of these were facts, you are in good company. These popular misconceptions are behind much of the bungled advice and routine errant beliefs that generate the kryptonite exerting its vile force over your superpower.

The stupid things we do

In some ways, sleep has become a dangerously marginalized practice in modern Western society, even demonized. We learn from an early age to get up and get going, with school starting long before the brain and body are rested and ready.

College students brag about pulling all-nighters. Entrepreneurs and tech-company employees evangelize their four-hour sleep schedules. Maximizing productivity, we’re led to believe, should be strived for at all costs, requiring that we minimize sleep, not “waste time” on such an idle activity.

We accept lack of sleep as the norm.

Smart people do stupid things to sabotage their sleep every day, shorting themselves on quantity but also — and this is a really big deal — unwittingly gutting the restorative stages of sleep that make it a superpower.

People spend countless hours sitting indoors, cheating their internal clock out of necessary physical activity and natural daylight. They pack around heaps of stress and anxiety that flood the brain and body with anti-sleep chemicals. Perhaps they have one too many adult beverages in the evening, ensuring fitful and fragmented sleep that annihilates the restorative promise of deep sleep and robs them of the dreams so necessary to emotional stability. Mentally exhausted and physically damaged, they then get sucked into the erroneous belief that sleeping pills will help.

I asked Ari Shechter, PhD, an assistant professor in the Center for Behavioral Cardiovascular Health at Columbia University Medical Center, what keeps us up at night, beyond obvious things like lack of exercise and poor diet.

“So many things can disrupt our ability to fall and stay asleep,” Shechter said, “including things like caffeine, alcohol, certain medications, but also things like stress, engaging in arousing activities before bedtime, room temperature, noise levels, daytime napping, and irregularity of bedtimes.”

Pile on the effect of 24/7 connectivity, and many people behave dangerously like shift workers these days.

“Many more of us are no longer working from nine to five. We take our work home and sometimes work late at night,” said David Earnest, PhD, a researcher at Texas A&M University College of Medicine who has studied the negative effects of shift work. “Even those of us who do work regular schedules have a tendency to stay up late on the weekends, producing what is known as ‘social jet lag,’ which similarly unwinds our body clocks so they no longer keep accurate time. All this can lead to the same effects on human health as shift work.”

Making sleep a priority

Sleep deprivation, defined simply by the experts as not getting enough sleep, can come to feel routine. Rather than passively accepting bad sleep as the norm, we should, as individuals and a society, prioritize sleep as a critical human activity to be mastered for best results, for the betterment of all.

Right after air, water and food, sleep belongs in any hierarchy of needs for a person who hopes to thrive.

“Sleep is essentially the foundation of health,” Michele Lastella, PhD, a sleep researcher and senior lecturer at Central Queensland University in Adelaide, Australia, said in an email. “All you need to do is imagine or recall nights where you have had little or disrupted sleep, and then reflect on your general mood, motivation, and zest for life the next morning. Little sleep, little zest.”

You can overcome at least some if not all the major challenges that thwart good sleep. Even a few smart tactics may do the trick for you. Perhaps even just one, depending on what’s keeping you up at night. Stacking multiple helpful behaviors together, and putting some intention into a serious sleep strategy — working toward it like you do everything else good in life — will build the strength and resilience of your emerging superpower.