There’s this old Dunkin Donuts commercial where an alarm buzzes at an ungodly hour of the morning. A man opens his eyes and says, “Time to make the donuts,” before dragging himself out of bed and to work in a haze. Those 30 seconds perfectly encapsulate how I feel most days—wake up groggy, work all day, fall into bed for a restless night of sleep. Rinse and repeat.
Recently, sleep has been anything but refreshing. I’m anxious when I crawl into bed. When I’m not well-rested, I’m useless the next day, fighting brain fog and an unproductive malaise. My mind spirals as I worry that I won’t be able to string together a few consecutive hours of sleep, making it hard to relax and actually fall asleep. When I wake up, my muscles and joints are cranky in a way that’s different from the aftermath of a good workout or even age.
According to a recent Gallup poll, more than half of Americans say they need more sleep, especially women. Most people in the poll also said they were stressed, which creates a vicious cycle, making it harder to sleep.
What Is Sleepmaxxing?
For anyone who has experienced a bad night of sleep—or a series of them—there’s a desperate feeling when you just want some shuteye. These days, people are trading simple bedtime routines for “sleepmaxxing,” the trend of elaborate practices and hacks that have taken over social media and promise to maximize and optimize sleep.
There’s mouth tape to promote breathing through the nose, white noise and blue light blockers to minimize sleep-disrupting stimulus, supplements to spur melatonin production, and sleep wearables to track your sleep. There’s specialized pillows, sheets, and mattresses to create a bedroom haven. There’s a “sleepy girl mocktail,” tart cherry juice swirled with magnesium powder and topped off with a splash of prebiotic soda or seltzer. Some influencers swear by an elaborate beauty routine, too.
The idea behind sleepmaxxing—getting sufficient, good quality sleep—isn’t new, says Aruna Rao, assistant professor of neurology at Johns Hopkins Medicine. “People are finally realizing the importance of a good night’s sleep. There are so many positive, downstream effects,” she says, on physical health, mood, memory, cognitive function, and athletic performance.
Having covered health and fitness for over a decade, I knew a full night of sleep is crucial for my health and recovery from workouts. On average, I clocked seven hours of sleep, within the range recommended by the National Institute of Health. But I always equated more sleep with good sleep, that the reason I didn’t feel refreshed in the morning was because I went to bed too late. Or, maybe my body just needed more zzzs now that I was older. Even though I knew I woke up more during the night than I used to—and had a harder time falling back asleep once I did—I didn’t think about the quality of my sleep. I didn’t look forward to sleeping anymore because I anticipated a night of tossing and turning.
“If you wake up feeling tired—no matter how many hours of sleep you get—the problem is the quality of sleep. It’s analogous to leaving your favorite restaurant feeling hungry,” says Rafael Pelayo, clinical professor at Stanford University’s Sleep Medicine division and author of the book How to Sleep. “You want to optimize all of your sleep, the number of hours and quality. You want to go to bed feeling safe and comfortable.”
Both Rao and Pelayo said that most of the practices—like not eating or drinking close to bedtime, keeping the lights dim, using blackout curtains or an eye mask, keeping the room cool—are benign, but there’s no one-size-fits-all solution. “Does everyone need melatonin or magnesium? I don’t think so,” Rao says. And if your sleep doesn’t improve, see a board-certified sleep doctor.
I Tried Sleepmaxxing
Would sleepmaxxing help me finally get a restful night of sleep? I decided to go all-in on sleep for a month to find out. But first, I had to figure out what habits and conditions in my apartment might be interfering with my sleep.
The most obvious problem was my bedroom. It’s not necessarily a sanctuary conducive for sleep. I don’t have blackout or heavy curtains or blinds. Even in the dead of night, a good amount of light seeps in from the street. I also live off a busy street in New York City, and it’s not unusual to hear (and feel) the rumble of a truck nearby.
While I try to go to sleep at 10 P.M., when I actually kept track, I realized that my bedtime was all over the place. I partly blame my son, who’s a senior in high school and up late doing his homework, studying, or binging TV. Knowing that he’s leaving home soon, I want to stay up with him. When I do head to bed, I’m often on my phone, mindlessly scrolling social media or reading a book.
Caffeine doesn’t seem to be a problem. I drink coffee in the morning and sometimes black tea in the afternoon. I drink alcohol occasionally, but much less than I used to. But I do nap. I always have—a 17-minute power nap when a bad headache makes it nearly impossible to work.
I knew that if I intended to stick with a sleepmaxxing routine for more than a week, I needed to keep it simple. To start, I committed to a consistent sleep-wake schedule—10 P.M. to 6 A.M.—that’s in line with my natural bedtime and rise time. While I could go to bed earlier in order to sleep more hours, my internal clock might not be ready, Rao says, and that could lead to lying in bed restless.
I cut out alcohol in the evenings, which studies have found to be associated with poor sleep quality. “A lot of things can be sedating but they don’t promote a good night’s sleep,” Pelayo says. “You may fall asleep faster initially after drinking alcohol, but you wake up more often during the night and don’t feel great the next day.”
Instead, two hours before bed, I sipped on a sleepy girl mocktail. “Tart cherries are a natural source of melatonin, a hormone that plays a critical role in regulating our sleep-wake cycle,” says Melanie Sulaver, a registered dietitian based in Ann Arbor, Michigan. Sulaver advises drinking the mocktail one to two hours before bed to allow time for melatonin levels to rise.
When it comes to magnesium, it promotes relaxation and is involved in the production of melatonin, according to Abby Chan, registered dietitian and co-owner of Evolve Flagstaff. Research has found a relationship between magnesium supplementation and sleep quality, but Chan warns that most studies are conducted with small populations and have mixed results.
An hour before bed, I closed my laptop and put away my phone, swapping scrolling for reading a physical book in bed with the lights dim.
Since I wasn’t going to install blackout curtains, the next best thing was an eye mask to block out the ambient light. While colder temperatures are technically better for sleeping, according to experts, winter in New York City has been chillier than usual this winter. I added a weighted blanket on top of a duvet, hoping that the extra warmth and weight would help me relax, let go, and snooze.
The first night, I couldn’t fall asleep. The combination of the eye mask and weighted blanket made me feel claustrophobic. Even after I got rid of both, I still woke up several times during the night. But by the third night, I started to settle into a routine. The mocktail was a nice replacement for an evening drink. I also noticed that my legs felt more relaxed instead of restless. “The antioxidants in tart cherry juice can help with sore muscles and electrolytes help with a little extra hydration,” Sulaver says.
The eye mask, however, was revelatory, once I got used to it. I fell asleep faster and didn’t wake up as often in the middle of the night. When I did, I fell back asleep easier because I wasn’t awakened by the light or tempted to check my phone.
When I woke up, I’d check my sleep stats in Apple Health and write down my sleep routine from the previous night and how I felt when I woke up. That’s when it got interesting.
In an effort to optimize my sleep, sleep became a problem I needed to fix. On mornings I woke up groggy, I began to overthink what I did “correctly” and what I did “wrong.” When I stayed up later than normal whether because I was catching up with a friend on the West Coast, had a glass of wine at dinner, or worked in the evening because of an impending deadline, I blamed myself for not following my sleep rules perfectly. When I realized that I “broke the rules,” I often said screw it and told myself that tonight didn’t count. I figured that I wasn’t going to sleep well anyways so why bother with the rest of my routine?
There’s a term for this obsession with perfect sleep: orthosomnia. In pursuit of perfection, people are over-relying on sleep wearables and data tracking, which in turn can cause more anxiety around sleep. A recent study found that stressing about sleep before bedtime influenced total sleep time and insomnia symptoms.
But sleep isn’t a problem to be fixed or controlled. “Sleeping is the ultimate in giving up control. It can’t be gamed,” Pelayo says. Sleep isn’t always going to be perfect either. As humans, we have some flexibility in terms of our sleep needs. Sleep habits can also evolve as needed. Halfway through the month, some of the practices that worked well, like the eye mask, started to bother me. At first, I was nervous that sleeping without it would mean the return of multiple wakeups per night, but it didn’t.
At the end of the month, my average nightly sleep increased about half an hour, but sleepmaxxing didn’t revolutionize my sleep. I still woke up many mornings not feeling 100 percent rested.
The experiment did make me think about sleep more purposefully. I don’t approach it haphazardly anymore, as something that just happens to me at the end of the day. Instead, intentionally preparing for sleep has created a buffer zone at the end of my day. I’m no longer rushing from work to dinner to helping my kids’ with homework straight to bed. It gives my body and mind time to unwind, and I’ve noticed that I’m more relaxed and settled before bed.
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