INSOMNIA REMEDIES

Not being able to sleep can ruin your whole day. Insomnia takes many forms: tossing and turning, racing mind, obsessively reviewing the day's events, night noises that keep you awake. (You may be interested in a short test that can tell you whether "Are You Getting Enough Sleep?"

Before you reach for that prescription or over-the-counter sleeping pill, you should know that there are things you can do. Below are some tricks that can help you sleep well — technically referred to as "sleep hygiene."

• Use the sun to set your biological clock. Turns out letting the sun shine on your face for about 10 minutes first thing in the morning and at sundown helps set your brain's sense of time — and can help you sleep.
• Only use your bed for sleeping and sex. Avoid watching TV, paying bills, office work, or reading in bed. You want your mind and body to associate bed only with sleep.
• Sleep only when you feel sleepy. This helps reduce the time you are awake in bed.
• If you don't fall asleep within 15 minutes, get up and do something boring until you feel sleepy. Sit quietly in the dark or read the ingredients on your cereal box. But don't expose yourself to bright light. Light is a cue to your brain that it's time to wake up.
• Don't take naps during the day. This helps make sure that you're sleepy at bedtime. If you absolutely must nap during the day, make sure you sleep less than an hour and do it before 3 pm.
• Set the same bedtime and rise time every day. Do this 7 days a week — even on weekends, holidays, and vacation. A regular sleep cycle helps regulate your mind and body for easy sleep.
• Don't exercise for at least 4 hours before bedtime. Regular exercise does help you sleep well, but exercising later than the early afternoon raises your metabolism — making it harder to fall asleep.
• Create your own sleep rituals. This will give your body cues that it's time to rest. Try listening to music, do some light reading for 15 minutes, have a cup of herbal, caffeine-free tea, do relaxation exercises.
• Avoid alcohol, caffeine, and nicotine at least 6 hours before bed. Caffeine and nicotine are stimulants and interfere with falling asleep. And lookout for hidden caffeine in prescription and non-prescription medications, coca, chocolate, soda, coffee, and black and green tea. Alcohol may help you sleep in the beginning, but it tends to cause broken sleep, waking you up in the middle of the night.
• Eat a light snack before bed. If your stomach is too empty, this can keep you awake. But a heavy meal before bedtime can cause discomfort that keeps you awake, too. Milk products and turkey are rich in tryptophan, which naturally eases you into sleep. Turns out the old wives' tale about warm milk before bed has a basis in fact!
• Try a hot bath about an hour-and-a-half before bed. This will raise your body temperature, but when your body temperature falls after the bath, this is a cue for your body to get ready for sleep.
• Throw off the covers for 15 minutes. Along the lines of the last suggestion, turns out that chilling your body for a little while before you close your eyes can help put you to sleep.
• Make sure your bed and bedroom have the right prescription for sleep. There should be no light: Consider getting blackout shades or a sleep mask. Cooler rooms are more conducive to sleep than hot rooms. If noise is a problem, get one of the popular "white noise machines" that synthesize forest or ocean sounds.

Want to test your sleep IQ? Take the "Sleep Hygiene Test."