Sleep is the first supplement

Every supplement on this site works better on top of good sleep, and none of them make up for bad sleep. So we start here.

The American Academy of Sleep Medicine and the Sleep Research Society reviewed the evidence and set a clear floor: adults should regularly sleep seven or more hours a night. Regularly getting less is linked with worse health and worse performance, both physical and mental.

Keep the schedule boring

Going to bed and waking up at roughly the same time every day, weekends included, is one of the most consistently recommended sleep habits. Your body clock runs on routine. A big weekend shift works like flying a few time zones and back.

Watch the caffeine clock

In a controlled study, 400 mg of caffeine taken even six hours before bed cut total sleep time by more than an hour, and people did not notice how much it hurt their sleep. If you train late, keep stimulants early. That is why our Pre-Training label says not within 8 hours of bed.

Light is a signal

Researchers at Harvard compared reading on a light-emitting tablet to reading a printed book before bed. The tablet readers took longer to fall asleep, made less melatonin and felt less alert the next morning. Dim the lights and put the screen down for the last stretch of the evening.

The short list

• Aim for seven or more hours, every night.
• Same bedtime and wake time, seven days a week.
• Caffeine early in the day only.
• Dark, cool, quiet room.
• Screens down and lights low before bed.

If you snore loudly, wake up gasping, or feel exhausted no matter how long you sleep, talk to a doctor. Those can be signs of a sleep disorder that habits alone will not fix.