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Your Brain Is Fried and Your Sleep Is Broken, But There’s a New Way to Fix That

People are hacking their sleep through the five senses, and it’s working.

By Maha Haq | Reviewed by Ysolt Usigan

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At this point, most people have already tried the obvious sleep fixes, and there are too many to keep track of. Cutting caffeine earlier, putting their phone away, maybe cycling through melatonin or magnesium for a bit before quietly abandoning it. Sleep is still inconsistent, still fragile, and still easy to derail. Some sleep-desperate folks (like myself) are changing their approach.

Not everyone wants to eat or take something orally right before bed, especially if you already brushed your teeth for the night—so people are focusing on what they can control, like light, sound, temperature, and the small signals that tell your brain it’s time to shut things down. There’s not really a single solution, but there are sensory variables you can remove that keep sleep from happening in the first place.

This adjustment shows up pretty clearly in what people are actually buying right now. It’s not flashy. It’s not complicated. But it’s consistent. Here are some Amazon selections based on our five senses to soothe them to sleep.

SENSE OF SIGHT: Out of Sight, Out of Mind

Eyelids are your natural curtains, but that doesn’t cut it if you’re sleeping in a bright room. Even small amounts of light from streetlights or the early morning sun can be one of the biggest sleep disruptors, and can pull you out of deeper sleep cycles. Here are some different approaches with the same goal: make your environment as close to pitch black as possible.

You can enhance your natural curtains (eyelids) by covering them up with a sleep mask. Contoured sleep masks create a seal around your eyes without putting pressure on them, making them wearable all night. The MZOO Luxury Sleep Mask has almost 100,000 reviews with a 4.6 star rating on Amazon, and that’s more than enough data for me to give it a go. They also have their older model that is slightly smaller and cheaper.

MZOO Luxury Sleep Mask (opens in a new window)

(older version) MZOO Luxury Sleep Mask (opens in a new window)

And if you don’t want to wear anything on your face, then get actual blackout curtains. This is my preference because you can set it and forget it, and I swear they work perfectly for me. Just make sure you’re getting curtains with the correct measurements that fit your windows. So whip out your measuring tape and find the right........

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