Getting a good night’s sleep means creating an environment conducive to relaxation, sufficient physical activity and a regular sleep schedule. Create the ideal conditions for good rest by starting a 4-week challenge for better sleep. Plan bedtimes, adapt your environment and set up rituals. Take up a challenge that will make your nights more peaceful.

Week 1 – Take stock of your sleeping habits

For the first 7 days, do not change your habits; write down the following information every day:
● What time did you have dinner, and what did you eat?
● What did you do in the hour before you went to sleep? Don’t be afraid to go into detail: showering,
facials, checking email, preparing breakfast for the next day – it all matters.
● What time did you turn off the light?
● Did you fall asleep right away?
● Were you active during the day (number of steps, length of your sports sessions: try to find numerical
indicators)
● Did you wake up during the night? For what reason?
● In the morning, evaluate the quality of your sleep on a scale of 1 to 10

On the last day of the week, collect your data in a table and look for relationships between what you eat, your
physical activity, bedtime rituals, and sleep quality. From there, try to define a basic routine with the patterns
that worked best for you:
● Time of dinner and the gap between mealtime and bedtime
● Number of hours of sleep
● Level of physical activity during the day
● Things to do or avoid before going to sleep
You now have the routine for your second week of the challenge, which will consist of implementing your new
basic routine into your daily life while continuing to record the quality of your sleep.

Week 2 – Change your environment to make it conducive to rest

During this second week, while following your basic routine, your mind is free to work on improving your sleeping environment. Draw up a plan of attack with concrete solutions to the problems you encounter, for
example:
● You systematically hit snooze on your alarm, which causes you to lose a few precious minutes of rest and increases your stress level: use a connected watch, which will always alert you at the best time in the defined time range.
● You leave the shutters open so that you wake up naturally with daylight, but at night, city lighting bothers you: consider automating the opening of your shutters if they are electric or invest in a sunrise simulator.
● You dwell on the problems of the day and what you have to do the next day, which prevents you from falling asleep: put a notebook on your bedside table to write down what’s bothering you and free your mind.
● You get up to drink: place a bottle of water next to the bed to prevent it from waking you up for good and drink before going to bed.
● Falling asleep with the TV on or in front of your smartphone: set a bedtime alarm, not when you intend to fall asleep, but when your sleep ritual begins. The first step in this ritual is to turn off the screens. At
first, do this for 5 minutes before you try to go to sleep, then gradually increase the time. Your goal? No more screens 30 minutes before bedtime.
Don’t implement any of the solutions you have studied yet; list your ideas. How did your week 2 go? Did you sleep better?

Week 3 – Develop your new evening ritual

Set up your new sleeping environment with the solutions you found the week before while continuing your basic routine. Prepare for the next part of your challenge by creating a table that has 2 columns:
● On the left, put your current sleep routine with step-by-step details and timetables, from dinner to bedtime, along with an activity score for the day.
● On the right, put your ideal scenario: the one you want to adopt soon, with a few extra nudges to make sleep easier, such as eating dinner an hour earlier, reducing fat and sugar intake in the evening, practising self-massage, meditating, taking a walk after eating or doing a bit of exercise during the day, reading a few pages of a novel instead of watching TV, adopting a more stable sleep schedule, leaving yourself time to eat breakfast and get ready in the morning, and suchlike. To ensure your success, don’t add too many things at once.
Allow 5 to 7 spaces between the two columns: the next week will be devoted to progressing towards your ideal scenario without rushing. If, for example, you go to bed at midnight now and you want to go to bed at 11 pm at the end of the challenge, move the time forward by 10 minutes each night while also shifting your mealtime to match.

Week 4 – Adjust your routine and establish it in your life for good

You are now ready to take action: for this last week of the challenge, progress towards your ideal scenario step by step! Persevere and don’t get discouraged if you make a mistake: you learn from your mistakes every time, which leads to new solutions. You have developed an unstoppable sleep ritual in four weeks: your own. A word of advice: stick to the same sleeping hours at the weekend and on holidays to retain the benefits.

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