6 ways to build your sleep skills right now

Happy Earth Week! To celebrate, take an awe walk, practice a rock meditation, watch these amazing men rescue seals, go meatless for a day or commit to one sustainable practice (like a reusable water bottle or toilet paper made from bamboo). The planet will thank you for it.

Welcome back to One Day Better, where we explore small steps that can help make today just a little better than yesterday. This newsletter is free and reader supported so please share it with a friend. This week, I’m writing about:

• 6 ways to boost your sleep skills

• An awkward swap that’s good for your brain

• New science about scent and friendship

• More joy scrolling!

Let’s get started!

6 tips to support your sleep

We tend to think of sleep as a time to shut down. But for the brain, it’s the time when it does its most important, high-performance work.

During sleep, your brain is hitting “save” on your day, filing away all that you’ve learned and experienced. It’s processing emotions and sorting through stress. It’s also doing a deep clean. As you sleep, your brain flushes out waste and byproducts — basically taking out the neural trash that builds up while you’re awake.

Here are 6 things you can do to boost your sleep before your head hits the pillow.

Eat magnesium-rich foods. Magnesium is a vital mineral that supports everything from muscle relaxation to nerve function — and it plays a key role in promoting restful sleep. You can boost your magnesium intake naturally through certain foods. Pumpkin seeds are the clear winner when it comes to magnesium. Other magnesium-rich foods include leafy greens (spinach; Swiss chard), nuts (almonds; cashews), legumes (black beans; lentils), whole grains (quinoa; brown rice), and even dark chocolate. These magnesium-rich foods help regulate melatonin production and support the calming neurotransmitter GABA. Observational studies show links between higher magnesium intake and improved sleep quality — like falling asleep faster and sleeping more deeply. My personal preference is to increase magnesium intake naturally through foods, but if you’re interested in supplements, the Wall Street Journal recently wrote about them. Here’s the free article.

Try tart cherry juice. Tart cherry juice is a natural source of melatonin, the hormone that helps regulate your sleep-wake cycle, and tryptophan, which can also support sleep. Some studies suggest that drinking it in the evening may help you fall asleep faster and improve sleep duration — especially for people with insomnia. Plus, it’s rich in antioxidants, so it also supports recovery and reduces inflammation. The Sleep Foundation has more on the topic.

Set a bedtime alarm instead of a morning alarm. Most of us set alarms to wake up, but the real game-changer is setting one to go to bed. I have scheduled my iPhone to give me a gentle chime at 10:30 p.m. to remind me to start winding down. (To set a reminder using the Bedtime feature in the iPhone Health app, open Health, go to Browse > Sleep > Full Schedule & Options, and set your bedtime and wake-up times.

Go to sleep before 1 a.m., even if you’re a night owl. A Stanford study in Psychiatry Research, ominously titled "Perils of the Nighttime," examined how individuals' sleep preferences (chronotypes) and actual sleep behaviors influence mental health. Analyzing data from over 73,000 adults, researchers found that those who consistently went to bed after 1 a.m. had a higher risk of developing depression or anxiety, regardless of their natural inclination toward being night owls. The takeaway: Go to bed before 1 a.m. most of the time.

Wear a sleep mask. Even low levels of light — like the glow from a hallway or nightlight — can disrupt your sleep more than you might expect. Research shows that it can elevate your heart rate, interfere with deeper stages of sleep and even impact how your body processes insulin. In older adults, nighttime light exposure has also been linked to higher risks of conditions like obesity, diabetes and high blood pressure. A simple sleep mask can help block out that light. If you want to go deeper, read this column on sleep masks by Washington Post Brain Matters columnist Richard Sima.

Feed your microbiome: Good sleep doesn’t just start in your brain — it might actually begin in your gut. Scientists are discovering that our gut microbiome — the community of bacteria in our digestive system — can actually affect how well we sleep. To dig deeper, researchers tracked people’s sleep using wearable devices and collected samples of their gut bacteria. They also looked at immune system markers and did cognitive tests to see how all these things might be connected. They found that people with more diverse gut bacteria tended to sleep better — they had higher sleep efficiency, more total sleep time and fewer wake-ups during the night. Amazingly, specific types of gut bacteria were tied to better sleep, stronger immune responses and sharper thinking. So how do you start feeding your microbiome? One easy way to do that is by eating more fermented and fiber-rich foods, which feed the good bacteria and help keep your gut in balance. Fermented foods include yogurt with live cultures, kefir, sauerkraut, kimchi, miso, tempeh and kombucha. (If you have a favorite fermented food recipe, please share it!) You can also eat fiber-rich foods to support the good bacteria in your gut, including bananas, oats, asparagus, apples, legumes, leeks and garlic.

An awkward switch that works out your brain

I’ve started brushing my teeth and holding my coffee cup with my left hand (I’m right-handed). Research suggests that using your non-dominant hand for daily tasks can stimulate brain plasticity by encouraging new neural connections, especially between the brain's hemispheres. In another study, researchers asked right-handed people to train their left hand to use chopsticks over a six-week period. Brain scans showed that after training, using the left hand led to changes in how the brain was activated — a sign that the brain was adapting and learning the new motor skill.

Follow Your Nose: The Surprising Science of Friendship Chemistry

A new Cornell University study found that unconscious scent preferences may play a key role in how women form potential friendships. In “speed-friending” sessions, women who clicked during conversation were also more likely to prefer the scent of each other’s 12-hours-worn T-shirts — even without realizing scent was influencing their impression. The findings suggest we may be subtly guided by personal scent preferences when deciding who we feel drawn to, even in platonic relationships. This echoes earlier sweaty T-shirt research where people tended to prefer the scent of romantic partners with different immune system profiles.

The takeaway? The study doesn’t offer a way to change your friend-making chemistry, but it does give scientific weight to a familiar feeling — that instant click or disconnect when meeting someone new. It might be that your brain is picking up scent cues and shaping those gut reactions long before you consciously know why. If you want to go deeper, the Cornell Chronicle has a nice summary of the research.

Joy scroll with me!

Here’s my weekly roundup of good news and links to counteract the gloom.

Good-ish news about gum: Better oral health, less heartburn, improved cognition and less stress are some of the benefits of gum chewing, according to an article in the New York Times. . There were some downsides to gum chewing too — jaw troubles, digestive issues and microplastic exposure, but it was an interesting story and had a robust comment section. Bonus: It was written by one of my favorite writers, Melinda Wenner Moyer, who also has a substack on parenting and on life that you should check out.

The Book of Alchemy: Years ago, a journalism professor emailed me about a talented young writer he knew. I checked out her blog and that was the beginning of “Life, Interrupted,” a wonderful New York Times series I created with Suleika Jaouad, who chronicled — in both writing and video — her life as a young cancer patient. The series was awarded an Emmy, and Suleika went on to write the best-seller, “Between Two Kingdoms.” She has a new book out this week called “The Book of Alchemy,” she describes as “a guide to the art of journaling — and a meditation on the central questions of life.” You can learn more about it in this NYT story and on her substack The Isolation Journals, which offers advice, essays and writing prompts to a community of more than 200,000 people. Suleika is a beautiful writer and all around great human, so please support her!

What happened to Myrtle? Spoiler alert, this story — about a pet tortoise lost during a tornado — has a happy ending. Read the gift link here.

Clean your house, live longer: “Doing everyday chores and activities a bit more briskly might lead to big gains in health and longevity, a new study shows. That means you could tweak how you clean your house, climb stairs or run for the bus and get some of the benefits of exercise without a trip to the gym,” reports Gretchen Reynolds in the Washington Post. Read more at the gift link here.

Seal chasers: In case you missed it at the top of this newsletter, watch this amazing video of volunteers at Ocean Conservation Namibia rescuing entangled seal pups. It’s a nice reminder that there are some amazing people doing good things in this world.

Tariffs 101: This may not feel like joy scrolling, but I truly love the economics lessons I get from husband and wife economists Justin Wolfers and Betsey Stevenson. (They are also super nice people in real life.) You can find them both @JustinWolfers on TikTok. Justin shares wisdom about bunny suit economics while Betsey has thoughts on banana slicers.

Walk a mile with YouTube. I like this home walking workout that takes just 15 minutes and is easy to follow. Try it and tell me what you think.

Back to the future with Coldplay: I’m a little late to this video of Coldplay singing “Fix You” in Glastonbury last year. Hearing the entire crowd sing is moving, but the best moment is an appearance by Michael J. Fox, who has Parkinson’s and plays the guitar solo around the 2:50 mark. Chris Martin later says (around 5:05) that Fox’s guitar-playing Marty McFly inspired him to be in a band.

Thanks for reading, and see you next week. Let’s keep the conversation going! Send me your comments and ideas. Drop a note in our subscriber chat or message me directly on Substack!

Every week, the One Day Better newsletter celebrates the power of small steps. If you enjoyed reading, please share it with a friend. This newsletter is free and reader-supported. If you’d like to support my work, you can make a contribution here.

Tara Parker-Pope is an Emmy Award–winning journalist who shared in the Pulitzer Prize for Public Service for coverage of the COVID-19 pandemic. Learn more at taraparkerpope.com