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about possibly losing sleep and “play it safe” by spending more time in bed on weekends, your efforts during the workweek will be undone. You will not get the benefits of having spent less time in bed on weeknights—that is, increased deep sleep—because your sleep drive will be weakened by your weekend behavior. Consider this: if you follow a diet during the week but overeat on the weekends, will you lose much weight, if any?
    Following a strict schedule is the fastest road to results, but if you still do not feel ready to make such a change, you can take it more slowly and adjust your expectations for how quickly the strategy will work. Remember the basic rules for limiting your time in bed from earlier in this chapter: do not go to bed early, and do not sleep in to try to make up for lost sleep.
    Extend the Time You Spend in Bed
    Once your sleep has improved significantly and you are feeling very sleepy during the day, you may want to experiment with slowly extending the time you spend in bed. Here are some rules that can guide you in making this determination. A “significant sleep improvement” may be identified in several ways. One way is to ask yourself, Am I now satisfied with the quality of my sleep? A second way is to compare your sleep with that of someone who does not have sleep problems. Someone without sleep problems tends to fall asleep within thirty minutes of going to bed and spends less than thirty minutes awake in the middle of the night. This means that for a person without sleep problems, the percentage of time spent asleep is around 85–90 percent of the time spent in bed. If your overall average percentage is 90 percent or greater—that is, you are asleep for almost the entire time that you are in bed—extend your time in bed over the next week by fifteen minutes each night. It is your choice as to whether to set your alarm for fifteen minutes later or go to bed fifteen minutes earlier. Similarly, if it used to take you more than thirty minutes to fall asleep before you began restricting your time in bed, but now you fall asleep much more quickly (say within an average of fifteen minutes or less), give yourself fifteen more minutes.
    Importantly, you should also extend your time in bed if you experience considerable sleepiness during the day and are concerned about your safety. This may happen, for example, if you based your new time in bed on an underestimation of how long you sleep, thus limiting your sleep most nights and not just your time in bed. However, do not confuse sleepiness with fatigue. You may be tired but not sleepy; that is, you are not dozing off unintentionally when inactive.
    Summary
    This chapter went into detail as to how you can build a stronger drive for deep sleep. It emphasized the importance of limiting your time spent in bed. It also highlighted the helpfulness of increasing your activity during the day, eliminating naps and dozing, and being careful with caffeine. Following our guidelines for limiting your time in bed can quickly increase your sleep drive to help you fall asleep within thirty minutes and spend less time awake during the night. Succumbing to the urge to go to bed early or sleep in will reduce the effectiveness of this strategy. Remember the following tips:
     
Sometimes your mind is awake because your body is not yet ready for sleep.
You can create a readiness for deep sleep by limiting the amount of time you spend in bed to match the amount of sleep you can currently produce.
Any attempt to make up for lost sleep will backfire, because it prevents your body from making up for lost sleep naturally.

Chapter 3
    Find and Set a Proper Sleep Schedule
    I n chapter 1, you learned that if your sleep schedule does not match your body clock, you will not have the quality of sleep you desire. If your mind is too active when you are trying to sleep, the reason could be that you are trying to sleep at a time when your body clock is promoting alertness. This