Most of us have had nights where we knew we needed to be asleep at a certain time so we could get up early. But instead, we got busy or distracted and didn’t get to sleep on time.

It can take the average American 10 to 20 minutes to fall asleep. According to the Sleep Foundation, adults between 18 and 64 need seven to nine hours of sleep. However, 35.2% of US adults report sleeping an average fewer than seven hours per night.

These are simple practices that can become daily habits once you become used to including them.

For more help getting better sleep, check out our story on how to fall asleep in 10 minutes or less and our list of six natural aids for insomnia.

How to train yourself to go to sleep early

Below are some tips for training yourself to go to sleep earlier, which can become part of your nightly routine with practice.

Make small changes every night

It can be hard to just simply decide to go to bed a full two to three hours earlier. That might require more juggling of your schedule, or your body might not even be used to sleeping at that time.

Instead, try to go to sleep 15 to 20 minutes before your usual bedtime. That way it won’t significantly throw your normal sleep schedule off. Try sleeping at that earlier time for a few nights to a week. Then adjust going to bed 15 minutes

It’s a widely understood fact of life that not everything turns out the way you’d expect. No one knows this better, perhaps, than contestants on the popular competition show The Great British Bake Off, known in the US as The Great British Baking Show. Every week, they take a dramatic, sugar-filled journey across the uncertain and sometimes tumultuous expansion between what they planned to bake and how it turned out.

Cake sink. Buttercream icing splits. Isomalt shatters. Occasionally, someone forgets to turn on the oven, losing valuable time. But even if the sponge is “claggy” or “stodgy” (or god forbid, ends up on the floor before it makes it to a judge’s plate), there’s a perfectly executed version of the creation that viewers at home can ooh and aah at anyway.

That’s thanks to Tom Hovey, whose appetite-triggering illustrations have become a signature element of the show over the years. They’re presented on screen in a digital notebook on a mock worktop, as if the bakers had sketched them themselves.

“That points to why the illustrations are sometimes, a lot of the times, better than what it turns out in the tent, because it’s what they intended to create, not what they actually created,” Hovey said via Zoom from his studio in Newport , South Wales. GBBO’s 13th season is halfway through on Netflix. It’s already seen structurally questionable masks made of cookies; black pudding on pizza; and a coconut sponge that tasted “a bit like tanning lotion.”