If you often toss and turn for 30 to 60 minutes or more before finally falling asleep, you may be tempted to use prescription sleeping pills.

Problem: These make it even harder to reconnect with your normal sleep cycle, robbing you of the most restorative type of sleep.

Better: Try natural strategies that support normal sleep patterns…

Go to bed earlier. This may seem counterintuitive, as if you would only lie awake even longer than you already do. But for many people, the body’s biochemically preprogrammed bedtime falls between 9:00 pm and 10:00 pm. If you stay up until midnight, your body may secrete stress hormones to cope with the demands of being awake when it wants to be asleep — and this interferes with your body clock.

Best: Move up your bedtime by an hour… give yourself several weeks to adjust… then advance your bedtime again until you’re regularly hitting the hay before 10:00 pm.

Exercise at the right time. Don’t try to exhaust yourself with strenuous workouts, especially in the evening — this raises adrenaline levels and makes sleep more elusive.

Instead: Exercise for at least 30 minutes every morning. This reduces the stress hormone cortisol, helping to reset your biochemical clock.

Get wet. Hydrotherapy — especially close to bedtime — calms the nervous system by acting on sensory receptors in the skin. Typically it is most effective to take a half-hour bath in water that’s the same temperature as the skin. However, some people respond better to a hot bath… others feel more relaxed after a “contrast shower,” first using hot water, then cold.

Adopt a pro-sleep diet. Eliminate all stimulant foods (caffeine, sweets, monosodium glutamate) from your diet. Magnesium calms the nervous system, so eat more magnesium-rich foods (black beans, pumpkin seeds, salmon, spinach)… and/or take 200 mg to 300 mg of supplemental magnesium twice daily. Do not skip meals — when hungry, the body secretes stress hormones that can interfere with sleep. Avoid eating too close to bedtime — a full stomach distracts the body from normal sleep physiology.

Try nutraceuticals. Certain supplements help balance brain chemicals.

Recommended: At bedtime, take 500 mg to 1,000 mg of gamma-aminobutyric acid (GABA), a calming brain chemical. Another option is to take a bedtime dose of 50 mg to 100 mg of 5-hydroxytryptophan (5-HTP), a natural compound that relaxes by balancing levels of the brain chemical serotonin. GABA and 5-HTP can be used separately or together for as long as needed. Both are sold in health-food stores and rarely have side effects at these doses.