Sometimes it feels as if there just aren’t enough hours in the day and it can be easy to burn the candle at both ends. Whether you’re working overtime in order to meet a deadline or exercising frequently, if you’re not getting the recommended 7-8 hours of sleep each night, you could be putting yourself at risk of some fairly serious health consequences including obesity, diabetes, heart disease, hypertension, and mood disorders like anxiety and depression.

In other words, sleep is essential for your health, fitness and well-being and should thus deserve to be considered when trying to improve your overall health. But how do we make sure to sleep better in an age that is filled with distraction and temptation? We have listed four simple steps that you can take in order to drastically improve your sleeping patterns

1. Consider cutting down on Caffeine

We all love our coffee, sometimes a little bit too much for our own good. Consider quitting coffee after 3pm and see if you find it easier to fall asleep. Studies have shown that caffeine stays in your body for about four to six hours. This means that if you have coffee after dinner, the caffeine will most likely still be in your system once you’ve decided to go to sleep.

2. Adopt a regular sleeping schedule

Your body needs to become habituated to going to bed and getting up at set times, whether it’s a weekday or weekend. It sounds like tough love, but if you force yourself to get up, say, at 6:30 am for a few days, regardless of how you slept the night before, and then to go to bed promptly at 10:30 pm, it can help you re-set your sleep pattern. It might be painful for a few days, but it will likely be worth it.

3. Workout on a weekly basis

Adding exercise to your daily regimen helps with all kinds of things that may interfere with your sleep, like anxiety and depression, but it also provides specific physiological boosts to sleep itself. Exercise strengthens circadian rhythms, and may stimulate longer periods of slow-wave sleep, the deepest and most restorative phase of sleep. Polls have found that people who exercise regularly, even if they don’t get any more sleep than non-exercisers, report a better quality of sleep.

4. Stop staring at the tablet / Smartphone before bed

If you want to read before bed, don’t use a smartphone, tablet or other light-emitting e-reader. Although all light slows down the production of melatonin, the hormone that helps us sleep, blue light from screens seems to be the most potent at doing this.