#12: Melatonin

If you pull together all of the recent scientific studies on sleep and melatonin... we've discovered that melatonin only increases the speed with which you fall asleep by 3.9 minutes and only increases the quality of your sleep, or what we call your sleep efficiency, by just 2.2%.

One study published several years ago examined over 30 different suppliers of melatonin. Relative to what was stated on the bottle, concentrations in each one of the pills ranged from 83% less than that listed to 478% more than what was stated on the bottle.

As a tip, try to dim down half of the lights in your home in the last hour before bed, and also stay away from those screens. And you'll be surprised at how sleepy this can make you feel.

The problem, however, is that, in some ways, we are a dark-deprived society in this modern era. And many of us get too much artificial light exposure in the evening, which can impact our natural melatonin levels.

Melatonin helps schedule the timing of your sleep, but melatonin does not significantly change the quantity or the quality of your sleep.