If I could give just one piece of sleep advice, it would not be about bedtime. It would be this: get up at roughly the same time every day, weekends included. It sounds joyless. It is the closest thing to a free fix that sleep offers.
Why the wake-up time matters most
Your body runs on an internal clock, and that clock takes its strongest cue from when you wake and see light. A consistent wake-up time anchors the whole system. It sets when you will feel sleepy that night, which means a steady morning quietly fixes your evenings too.
Bedtime is harder to control, because you cannot force sleep. But you can control when you get out of bed, and that single lever does most of the work.
The weekend problem
The instinct is to sleep in on Saturday and Sunday. The trouble is that a big lie-in shifts your clock later, so Sunday night you cannot sleep and Monday feels brutal. You give yourself a small dose of jet lag every weekend.
- Keep your wake-up within an hour of the weekday time
- Get daylight soon after rising, it sharpens the signal
- If you are tired, nap briefly rather than lying in for hours
- Let bedtime drift to suit you, but hold the morning steady
The pay-off
After a couple of weeks of a steady wake-up time, most people find they start to feel sleepy at a sensible hour and wake more easily, sometimes before the alarm. It is dull advice and it genuinely works, which is the story of most good sleep habits.