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Between jobs, school, kids, and other physical and mental tolls on our time and energy, we could all use better, more restful sleep. There’s no question that good shut-eye is important for our health. Research has linked poor sleep with imbalanced sugar levels and metabolism and with elevated risk of cardiovascular issues and neurological conditions, including dementia. And slumbering bodies are very fickle: sleep quality can be easily thrown off by any number of environmental disturbances or emotional or physical stressors.

We’re channeling some of the most helpful science-backed tips and findings that sleep experts have shared with us this year—so hopefully we feel more refreshed and reenergized in 2025.

Short Daytime Naps Sharpen the Mind

If you’re feeling sluggish in the middle of the day, a short snooze could be the refresher the brain needs. Growing evidence suggests that daytime power naps can actually give a boost to critical thinking skills, memory, productivity, and mood. As Science of Health columnist Lydia Denworth reports, there is a science to napping effectively.

It’s best to keep napping sessions 20 to 30 minutes long and before 5 P.M., for those who are regularly awake during daytime hours. That’s enough time to get in a cycle of “light sleep,” which is easier to wake up in, while avoiding disruptions to regular sleep at night. But note that regularly taking very long naps could be a sign of an underlying health issue.

Staying in Bed All Day, or “Bed Rotting,” Can Worsen Sleep

“Bed rotting,” or opting to stay in bed for prolonged periods of time, is one of social media’s favorite mental health trends. Conditions or disabilities may cause people to remain in bed, but bed rotting is seen as a kind of elective counterculture to “productive” activities—the opposite of working, exercising or studying. People who bed rot often claim that they feel rejuvenated after hours or even days during which they stay in bed, only leaving to go to the bathroom or get food.

But experts say this behavior can throw off the body’s internal clock, or circadian rhythm, which controls sleep-wake cycles. This could alter someone’s sleep drive (making them feel restless when they should be normally asleep) and sleep cues (making them less likely to associate their bed with sleepy times). To get out of a bed rotting cycle, experts say to first evaluate the reason why you feel the need for that kind of mental recharge. Then try to consistently wake up early in your sleep-wake cycle, no matter what time you went to sleep, and get natural light for an hour upon waking, if possible.

The “Sleepy Girl Mocktail” Reminded Us Magnesium Is Important for Sleep

The “sleepy girl mocktail,” a concoction of cherry juice, seltzer, and magnesium, was another trend that took off this year. People on TikTok touted that the homemade sip helped them slip into slumber more easily. But evidence that it works is up in the air. That said, one of the ingredients, magnesium, has been shown to play a role in sleep. The mineral can help relax muscles and affect pathways in the brain that stabilize mood and anxiety. Magnesium supplements can be found at local drugstores—but some types can act as a laxative that can disrupt sleep.

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Have you ever wondered what visiting Phuket, the Thai island beloved by celebrities, felt like before throngs of tourists transformed its fishing villages and isolated beaches into a world-renowned destination? The Cambodian island of Koh Rong, in the Gulf of Thailand, has just started down that development path. A 40-minute ferry ride from the coastal port of Sihanoukville, it still has rustic charm aplenty for explorers who like their island adventures a little on the wild side. Like Phuket, Koh Rong is the quintessential tropical island, complete with palm trees, white sand beaches, and jungle waterfalls. In fact, several seasons of the global “Survivor” franchise have filmed there over the years.

Paved roads and electricity have appeared only recently, so you can happily zip around the island from beach to beach on rented scooters without the traffic risks you’d face in Thailand. But if your party is large enough to, well, have a party, then renting a traditional long boat, which comes with a captain, to tour the more remote beaches is a decadent, day-long must-do. Visitors rave that Sok San Beach is the prettiest they’ve seen anywhere in the world. Whether you’re on a gap-year backpacking tour or a romantic anniversary trip, there’s a beach shack with your name on it at day’s end, though it’s up to you and your budget whether it will be a bungalow on stilts over a river in a real fishing village or a villa at a resort.

Touristy (in a good way) Koh Touch beach is a burgeoning backpacker-circuit party mecca lined with beachfront bars and hotels where you can sun, swim, dance ride a zip line, kayak, or even sail a catamaran without ever needing to don shoes or put down your beer can. Did you really do the limbo under a flaming pole at the Nest Beach Club’s Saturday night “Nestival” rager last night? Apparently so! Local nightclubs can keep going until the wee hours, so you might want to pack the ibuprofen and plan to spend Sunday lounging in a hammock strung between two palm trees.

Just up the beach, a favorite place to stay is the Tree House Bungalows. Its thatched or wood-slatted beach shacks sit high up on stilts, tucked into the jungle along the beach. Grab a loaner snorkel and mask and wade right on into the pristine waters for some float time with the fishes.

For more wildlife and less nightlife, you can find a more serene scene by seeking out a bungalow at the less-developed north end of the island, where you can canoodle the day away in one of the many signature swing sets built for two. If you’re ready to go off grid, you can go for a thatched-hut dorm bed or private bungalow in Sangkat village’s Coconut Beach, where daylight filters through the wood slat walls, waking you in time for just another day in paradise. The Lonely Beach Resort also offers solar-powered thatched cottages called “bird’s nests” right on the beach. From there, you can trek through the jungle to a quaint Khmer fishing village.

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The LEO

It’s different!

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Radio Play (feat.jacques Schwarz-Bart & Cecile McLorin Salvant)

Leon Parker

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When Purple’s partner first told her about the FIRE movement — which stands for Financial Independence, Retire Early — in 2013, she wasn’t convinced. 

“The first thing I said was, ‘What do I even do with all that time? Why would I want to retire early?’” she says. “I was like, ‘I just need to find my dream job, and then I’ll be happy to work for another 40 years.’”

But in October 2020, Purple retired at just 30 years old with $540,000 in savings, according to documents reviewed by CNBC Make It. She goes by Purple online and in the media to maintain her privacy.

In 2014, she got the dream job she mentioned — but it didn’t bring the satisfaction she thought it would. So the next year, she revisited the FIRE idea and started calculating. 

She estimated she could live on roughly $20,000 a year in retirement and would need $500,000 set aside upfront based on the 4% rule, which contends that you can safely withdraw 4% of your portfolio per year to cover your expenses without running out of money. Purple figured if she could boost her income and reduce her spending, she could reasonably retire in 10 years — a goal she hit five years early.

So far, she’s enjoying the freedom to spend her days however she likes and has no problem filling her time. “I’m very good at doing nothing and relaxing and finding new random hobbies,” she says.

Purple wishes she had gotten on board with FIRE when her partner first told her about it. Otherwise, “I don’t have any regrets in retirement,” she says. Her partner hit his FIRE number of $777,000 in November 2023, but he plans to keep working for a few more years to help support some of his loved ones.

Here are the three major moves Purple made to be able to retire early.

1. Job-hopping to maximize her income

Before Purple officially started her FIRE journey, she was making $48,000 a year working in advertising and living in New York City, leaving her virtually ”$0 after rent,” she says. When she decided to increase her income, she knew the best way to do it was through job-hopping.

“In my experience, [job-hopping] has been the only way I can get significant raises and even promotions,” she says.

She also learned early in her career that it doesn’t always pay off to be blindly loyal to a company; it won’t necessarily earn you a raise or promotion. As a result, Purple got very comfortable leaving jobs and companies she felt didn’t meet her financial or psychological needs.

That mindset paid off. Five years and as many jobs later, Purple had more than doubled her salary. As of 2017, at age 28, she earned nearly $107,000 a year. By the time she was getting ready to retire in 2020, her final salary was $114,230.

2. Cutting her spending

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Marie Maynard Daly should have received a Nobel Prize. She was the first Black woman in the country to earn a Ph.D. in chemistry, and in the 1950s and 1960s, she discovered the critical relationship between high cholesterol, high blood pressure and clogged arteries, and how this could cause heart attacks, strokes, and other medical issues. This was a huge discovery in medicine, paving the way for the development of statins, which millions of Americans are still prescribed each year to reduce their risk of heart attack.

Such a discovery easily embodies Alfred Nobel’s legacy to award the Nobel Prizes to those who “conferred the greatest benefit to humankind.” And later research on cholesterol metabolism and regulation did earn several other scientists Nobels. So why didn’t Daly, who made the initial connections, win this prestigious award during her lifetime?

We think it’s because the Nobel Committees, whose selection process is notoriously secretive, place emphasis on the way scientists reference one another’s work as grounds for how important that work is. Typically, Nobel Prize–winning research is referenced more than 1,000 times before the scientists who conducted that research win. These references, known as citations, are a proxy for scientific importance but leave room for bias.

Despite their own discoveries leaning heavily on Daly’s initial findings, neither Konrad Bloch and Feodor Lynen, who won the Nobel in Physiology or Medicine in 1964, nor Michael Brown and Joseph Goldstein, who won that award in 1985, mentioned her in their awards speeches. As those researchers and others made discoveries and published findings, they rarely referenced her work at all. Without such references and credit deserved, Daly and other Black scientists have not been awarded Nobels they could have rightfully earned—and instead have been suppressed, even erased, from the historical record of science.

We believe the Nobel Committees need to recognize that, whether overtly or subconsciously, scientists can and do show gender and racial bias when they recognize people as leaders in their fields. While there have been 17 Black Nobel laureates in peace, literature and economics, a Black scientist still has never won a Nobel in physiology/medicine, physics, or chemistry. Asking the question “Why have Black scientists not been awarded?” is a first step toward acknowledging the contributions that Black scientists have made throughout history.

As current and future Black doctors and scientists, we are disheartened by reports that the published research of Black scientists is referenced far less often than that of their white peers. In the hierarchy of publications, the first author of a paper is typically the scientist who has done much of the experimental work it describes, while the last author is usually the scientist who has overseen the research program or the individual project—typically a very senior scientist. In studying who cites whom in neuroscience research papers, neuroscientist Maxwell A. Bertolero and others discovered that papers with white first and last authors were cited 5.4 percent more than expected, while papers with first and last authors of color were cited 9.3 percent less than expected. Inspired by this study, Fengyuan Liu, Talal Rahwan, and Bedoor AlShebli, all at New York University Abu Dhabi, asked a similar question but looked deeper into four racial categories and several scientific fields. They found that Black scientists’ research is significantly undercited compared with similar research published by scientists of other races.

With such studies revealing that Black scientists’ research is often not recognized, we have been intently investigating how this difference in citation numbers could be diminishing the paradigm-shifting discoveries made by Black scientists. It is clear that the number of times a scientist’s research is referencedis important to the Nobel Committees that select each prize. The more cited you are, the more impact your work appears to have on your field. But how can this be an objective measure when citations are affected by such underlying biases? Collating all that we’ve read, it is also clear that the use of citations as a proxy for the importance of a scientific discovery unintentionally ignores the contributions of Black scientists, who are already less likely to be cited regardless of the true impact of their research. And this emphasis on citations over true impact explains scenarios such as that of Marie Maynard Daly, whose research was foundational to work that received two Nobel Prizes but whose name was not deemed worthy of such recognition. It also explains why the major scientific discoveries made by other Black scientists, such as Percy Lavon Julian, Katherine Johnson, and Charles Drew, to name a few, have been overlooked by awarding bodies and the field as a whole. This is a further reflection of systemic inequities in education, mentorship, funding, and recognition, all of which have been described and explored, not just in the U.S. but around the world.

Recognizing the biases in the criteria used by the Nobel Committees, and broader biases woven into academic fields when it comes to underciting Black scientists, is the first step toward creating more equal measures of scientific impact. Further addressing this underlying bias in the Nobel Committees selection process and beyond will not just help the work of Black scientists gain well-deserved recognition; it will also enrich science and society as a whole. This is not about representation; it’s about scientific innovation and progress, especially with research indicating that scientists from minority backgrounds are highly innovative.

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