[12] Latex Mattress | [+] MANTIS TILLER

You don’t need to invest in a whole new mattress, however. Dr. Emsellem suggested just buying a topper — filled with memory or latex foam, feather or wool — to put over the existing mattress.

“Even for a king-size bed, it’s not going to bankrupt you,” she said.

One sleep aid I did buy years ago is a white noise machine, and I’ve found it invaluable. I purchased it when we lived in London and our apartment shared a wall with a noisy neighbor. The machine is straightforward — it has two settings, so basically it sounds either like a quiet vacuum cleaner or a slightly noisier one.

“The brain is always monitoring even while we sleep,” Mr. Wyatt said. “A car alarm, a dog barking, traffic, will disrupt sleep. If that’s the case, it may be a good time to make a modest investment in a noise generator. You don’t need eight different sounds with a rainforest, whales and waterfalls.”

Is it ever a good idea to resort to a sleeping pill?

“For short-term insomnia, such as one to two weeks, it’s perfectly appropriate to consider sleeping pills,” he said. But if insomnia is going on for months, you need to look deeper, he added.

All this advice is helpful for people who sleep poorly. The real problem, however, for most of us, is not that we can’t sleep, but we don’t.

Despite tales of high-powered executives who sleep only four hours a night, most adults need seven to nine hours, Dr. Emsellem said.

“Clinically, we see very few who sleep eight and a half to nine, but we do see an enormous number of exhausted people who sleep six hours or less,” she said.