For context, this is what I looked like without any makeup before I started the experiment. My beauty routine consisted of cleansing with Simple's micellar water , exfoliating with a honey-cinnamon scrub, and moisturizing with Belif's Aqua Bomb . I followed that trio with an acne-spot treatment where needed, and Nuori's eye cream At this point, I was sleeping roughly five to six hours a night during the week, but my weekends could vary wildly, depending on the day's schedule. I was dealing with stress around planning a trip to Chicago and trying to get all my work done in time. Suffice it to say, my skin was not happy, and it was showing up in the form of dark circles and pimples that weren't going away. If there was ever a good time to try my sleep experiment, this was it.I headed to Chicago for my vacation, where I found sleeping nine hours a night to be a piece of cake. Sometimes, I even hit 10! But when I got back to NYC three days later, I realized it wasn't going to be so easy. For one thing, I live on the Upper East Side, a neighborhood notorious for nighttime construction. When I would crash into bed at 1 or 2 a.m., I would be so exhausted that I could fall asleep despite the sound of jackhammers. On my nine-hour plan, that didn't work.So I set about making my space as sleep-inducing as possible. I played my Naturespace music just a little louder, sprayed lavender room spray, and bought a new pillow (this is an area to splurge a little). I also made a habit of reading (currently, Heather Havrilesky's How to Be A Person In the World ) instead of staring at my phone screen before bed. All these small changes added up to make unwinding at the end of the day a calming, almost meditative, routine.Still, I didn’t always hit the magic number nine. A few nights, I woke up at 4 a.m. to jackhammers, punched my pillows in frustration, and fell asleep 10 minutes later; others, I ended up stressing out about my experiment to the point at which I couldn’t fall asleep for hours. But for the most part, I felt less exhausted, more productive during the day, and trained my body to start waking up after eight-and-a-half hours, before my alarm.