Sleep is such a natural part of our lives that many people assume they inherently know how to do it correctly. But in order to achieve all the benefits of good sleep—better health, maximum alertness, and improved mood—you probably need to learn some new techniques… and you definitely need to practice.

Sleep is an important component of your overall health and well-being, and is essential when you're recovering from an illness, according to sleep experts. That's why Vicks® has partnered with renowned leaders in the field of sleep study and has used the time-proven principles taught by Franklin Covey to develop "The 7 Sleeping Habits of Highly Effective People." This will help you understand why sleep is so important—in particular how it impacts your alertness, your productivity, your mood, and especially your health. It also sets forth specific habits that you should learn to make sure you get the most out of your time spent asleep. After following them, you'll experience an amazing improvement in the quality of your sleep… and of your life.

1. Be proactive.

Being proactive means accepting responsibility for your own behavior, and making choices based on what you value. When it comes to sleep, this means being responsible for the amount of sleep you need to get, and avoiding accumulating sleep debt.

It's important to realize that you've probably been getting inadequate sleep for a long period of time. Before you can return to a fully rested, alert state, you must pay off your accumulated sleep debt, sleep experts say. Missed sleep is cumulative; missing one hour of sleep a night for six nights in a row has the same effect as pulling an all-nighter. The more sleep you miss, the worse you'll feel. Once you've erased your debt and are starting with a clean slate, you can proactively avoid accumulating sleep debt in the future. Your sleep debt can't be wiped out with just one good night's sleep. You must have a plan for adding hours to your "sleep bank account," consciously thinking about how and when to make up for missed sleep. Experts suggest these tips for catching up on lost Z's:

• Start by establishing and sticking to a regular sleep schedule that meets your sleep needs. Keep in mind that your body typically needs one hour of sleep for every two hours you're awake. After four to six weeks following a good sleep schedule, your body will return to equilibrium.
• Trying to replace lost sleep all at once, or by sleeping longer on the weekends, only throws your normal sleep-wake cycle even more off-balance. However, if a few late nights leave you with an overwhelming urge to get additional sleep, be sure to do so by going to bed earlier instead of sleeping in later—this way your normal waking time remains the same so you can fall asleep the following night.
• A cold or the flu can make it difficult to sleep, meaning you could add hours to your sleep deficit. An over-the-counter product such as NyQuil®, which offers multi-symptom relief of your major cold symptoms so you can sleep more easily, can help you avoid adding to your sleep debt while you're ill.

2. Begin with the end in mind.

This habit is about identifying the kind of future you want to have and the results you want to get. If your own health and well-being are important to you, and if you want to be the most energetic person you can be, you need to establish healthy sleep habits.

Picture yourself after five, 10, or 20 years of neglecting your physical well-being. Picture the results of poor sleep habits, of restless nights and groggy mornings. Children aren't the only ones who need to stick to a specific bedtime, according to sleep experts. Adults should follow a daily routine that gives them the amount of sleep they need to achieve optimum alertness every day. Following a sleep schedule sets and stabilizes your sleep-wake biological clock, conditioning your body so that you fall asleep more easily at bedtime. It's important to follow this schedule all week, even on the weekend. Experts offer this advice for setting and stabilizing your inner sleep-wake cycle:

• Stick to your sleep schedule every day, seven days a week. Within six weeks, the hours you spend in bed will begin to synchronize with the sleepy phase of your biological clock, and the hours you spend out of bed will correspond to the time you feel most alert.
• Avoid staying up and sleeping in later than usual on the weekends. This can lead to Sunday night insomnia, throwing off your sleep pattern for the week ahead.
• If you take naps, they should be part of your daily sleep routine. Inconsistent napping will throw off your nighttime sleep cycle.

When you have a cold or the flu, disrupted nighttime sleep and long naps during the day can disrupt your normal sleep-wake cycle, meaning that as you get better you'll just have to readjust your schedule. NyQuil relieves your major cold symptoms so you can sleep more easily and feel more restored after nighttime sleep than if you leave your symptoms untreated.

3. Put first things first.

This is the habit of personal leadership—organizing and executing your life around your values and priorities. For healthy sleep, this can be as simple as planning ahead to create an atmosphere that is conducive to a peaceful night's rest.

Effective people put first things first, and there's a time every day when sleep should come first. The first step to getting a restful night's sleep is nurturing an environment in your bedroom that is conducive to restorative, fulfilling sleep, experts advise. Your bedroom should be a sleep sanctuary. You'll be able to relax and fall asleep more easily if you condition yourself to associate the bedroom with rest and sleep. Using your bedroom for stressful activities such as paying bills, doing office work, or watching violent television programs can inhibit your ability to relax when it's time to go to bed. Additionally, the old cliché "don't go to bed angry" is particularly true, whether you're arguing with your spouse or upset about happenings at work. Here are some easy ways to turn your bedroom into an oasis of calm:

• At bedtime, make the room dark and keep it cool, but not so cold that you wake up shivering in the middle of the night.
• Make sure sounds are at a low level and consistent, or eliminated completely.
• Invest in a good quality mattress, pillows, and bedsheets—your comfort in bed affects the quality of your sleep.
• If you can't fall asleep in your oasis, it's best to leave your bed for a while and go to another room to read or listen to some calm music. Try to return to your sleep sanctuary 15 to 20 minutes later.

When you're ill, do your daytime resting in another part of the house. At bedtime, you can make a change of scenery that tells your body it's time to get a lengthy block of nocturnal sleep. Additionally, it is important to relieve symptoms, such as a persistent cough, that are particularly disruptive to sleep. Medications that specifically address your symptoms, such as NyQuil Cough, will help relieve your cough so you can rest more easily.

4. Think win-win.

By putting yourself in a frame of mind that seeks mutual benefit and mutual respect, you can recognize the impact sleep can have on both you personally and those around you.

It's become almost a badge of honor to admit that you're getting by on four or five hours of sleep at night, but sleep deprivation is nothing to be proud of. By missing sleep, you're cheating yourself and those around you out of a more alert, more productive, more effective you, experts say. As you lose sleep, everyone else loses the benefit of you. That's called lose-lose. By contrast, when you get the rest you need, that's a win-win. The negative impact of sleep deprivation on your performance in your professional and personal life can be surprising:

• Even mild sleep deprivation impacts your mood, affecting the way you do your job, interact with your coworkers, and treat your spouse, kids, and other family members.
• According to The Wall Street Journal, the financial toll of lack of sleep is more than $70 billion annually from lost productivity, accidents, and healthcare costs as a result of workers' inability to adjust to late-night work schedules.
• A National Sleep Foundation poll of workers found that one-third reported that lack of sleep affects their concentration and 50 percent say that it affects the quality of their work.
• Lack of sleep can be dangerous—at least 100,000 automobile accidents each year are due to drivers falling asleep at the wheel.
• The effects of lack of sleep are magnified when you're ill. When they're sick, many people go through the motions of their daily lives in a haze of nasal congestion, headache, and fever. But to help yourself get better, you need to give your body a break and get lots of rest. The irony of cold and flu is that symptoms disrupt sleep, while the body craves more of it to get better. Adjust your sleep schedule and give your body as much rest as it needs. Some people sleep as many as 14 to 18 hours a day when they're ill! When you have a cold or the flu, taking a product such as NyQuil relieves your major cold/flu symptoms, meaning you'll wake up feeling more restored.

5. Seek first to understand… and then to be understood.

This habit is about listening, learning, and truly understanding a situation before taking action. When it comes to sleep, this means listening to the experts, those around you, and your own body, and then determining how much sleep you really need.

Martha Stewart, Thomas Edison, and Bill Clinton all said they got less than five hours of sleep each night, while Albert Einstein, Calvin Coolidge, and Ronald Reagan said they each needed 10 or more. The point is each individual's sleep needs are different, experts say. The vast majority of people need a bare minimum of eight hours of sleep, and ideally as many as 10 hours for optimum performance. But precious few are spending that much time beneath the sheets. According to sleep experts, the national average for adults is just under 7 hours of sleep each night, and one-third of adults get 6.5 hours or less. You should know exactly how much sleep YOUR body needs to perform at its optimal level. From there, you can take steps to get that amount of sleep on a regular basis. How can you tell if you're getting enough sleep?

Ask yourself these simple questions:

• Do you need an alarm clock to wake up?
• Do you find it hard to get out of bed in the morning?
• Are you tired during the day?
• Do you fall asleep the minute your head hits the pillow?

If you answered yes to any of these questions, you're probably not getting enough sleep. Where to start? As a rule of thumb, experts suggest that most people need at least 60 to 90 minutes more sleep than they are currently getting. Adding just an hour of sleep each night can increase alertness by 25 percent.

6. Synergize.

This is the habit of creative cooperation, of finding and capitalizing on the people and resources that can help you succeed. This means seeking the help of others—your doctor and your family—and following the sleep habits that are necessary to your well-being.

Sleep is as important to your overall health and quality of life as exercise and good nutrition. Combined with other good lifestyle habits, sleep can help you stay healthy, according to sleep experts. Sleep even can contribute to a longer life. If you're sleep-deprived, you also have a greater chance of coming down with colds, the flu, and respiratory tract infections. Here are some ways you can incorporate sleep into your overall plan for health and well-being:

• Much as you strive toward specific nutritional and fitness goals, you should understand what your sleep needs are and set a goal to meet them.
• If you're having trouble sleeping or are concerned about the amount of sleep you're getting, particularly if your problems last longer than three weeks, make an appointment to discuss your situation with your physician. If necessary, he or she can refer you to an accredited sleep clinic.

When you are sick, don't be sick AND tired. If you're sick or feel a cold coming on, make an effort to increase the amount of sleep you're getting. A product such as NyQuil can relieve symptoms that make it difficult to sleep, so you can get the sleep you need to feel better.

7. Sharpen the saw.

Habit 7 is about constantly renewing yourself… and one of the best ways to “refresh” is to improve your sleep.

When it comes to rejuvenating sleep, quality and quantity count. Successful sleepers take steps to "sharpen" the sleep they get. The most important, valuable sleep you can get takes place in one continuous block. Fragmented, restless nights can leave you feeling drowsy and have devastating daytime consequences. But it can be difficult to achieve continuous sleep that allows you to enter the deeper, more restorative sleep phases. So how do you maximize the sleep that you get?

• Limit your time in bed to what you need, and no longer, to deepen sleep—don't allow yourself to doze off and on for several hours.
• Stick to a regular bedtime schedule to help train your body so it knows when it's time to sleep… and when it's time to wake up.
• Avoid lengthy naps during the day to help you have deeper, longer nocturnal sleep.

Sleep touches every aspect of our lives, from our health to how we interact with others. By following “The 7 Sleeping Habits of Highly Effective People,” we hope you can sleep your way to a more productive life!