I have had trouble sleeping since at least highschool, with good nights of sleep happening rarely and only under certain not-always-reproducible conditions. Both I and friends regularly hunted for and read advice on how to improve your sleep, but nothing helped (not to my surprise, given the superficiality of the media analysis). Within the past few months, though, three easy changes have made excellent nights of sleep the norm.

(1) Falling asleep: To fall asleep easier, black out your room. No lights. Seriously, none. (also, an aspirin before bed time helps)

(2) Staying asleep: Buy a new bed. People and journalists–two different groups, natch–generally do not recommend you buy a new bed, because people don’t like to hear expensive solutions. But if you can’t sleep, you need a new bed. Mine cost a fortune, and I don’t regret it for a second.

(3) Waking up nicely: To ensure you feel good after falling asleep easily and staying asleep, switch out your annoying audible alarm clock and buy an alarm that wakes you up using light. It works. It rocks. It’s a life changer. Note that its effectiveness is significantly hampered if you don’t follow suggestion (1).