Does this sound familiar? It occurs to you that you should probably head to bed, but then again peeling yourself off the couch seems like too big an obstacle to overcome. So you watch something mediocre on TV for another hour and a half until you have no choice but to roll sideways off the coach and crawl to your bedroom.

Or, you’re busy catching up on work, lose track of time, and before you know it you have to be up in five hours. You know you’ll be exhausted, but you’ll just slam an extra cup of coffee before that presentation tomorrow morning, right?

Most of us know that sleep is important (major understatement). If we don’t get enough hours of quality Zzz’s, our mood, mental agility and physical ability suffer greatly.

By the way, if you’re not sure how much sleep the average adult needs, what ‘sleep debt’ is and how it works, or the top ways to improve the quality of your sleep, click here to read a concise article on all those things and more. Sleep is basic and would be in chapter one of a operating manual for being human. Make sure you’re in the know!

Knowing about sleep and actually getting to bed on time day in and day out are two different things. And therein lies the problem when it comes to getting more sleep.

The trouble is that allocating more time for sleep can feel like the ultimate trade-off. Most of us already don’t have enough time to do everything we want to do. Even if you have the best intentions, it’s too easy to push your bedtime back an hour or two in the moment when you’re occupied with something else.

In the long-term, this is a terrible strategy that will leave you operating at a fraction of your potential.

The key to getting more sleep is to make it easier to go to bed than to postpone your planned bed time. Here’s one technique that’s worked for multiple clients. Watch the video and test it yourself. Let me know how it goes.