Americans don't get enough sleep. Here's some tactics on how to get more

How much sleep did you get? If it's less than six hours, you might want to rethink your nighttime choices. 

We are a country full of sleep-deprived people and it's taking its toll.

"If you sleep less than six hours, you're more likely to be overweight, you're more likely to be obese, you don't burn calories. Blood pressure goes up, stress levels go up because your internal monitor is basically telling you 'there must be something wrong with you. You're not sleeping the way you're supposed to. You're at war with yourself,'" said Kathy Yaremchuk, a Henry Flood sleep doctor.

Henry Ford sleep doctor Dr. Kathy Yaremchuk says the first mistake we make is to look at bedtime as a chore. 

"For us, it's like 'oh shoot we have to go to bed' and we're sad. We're like the 6-year-old that gets put to bed," said Yaremchuk. 

Once you start looking at sleep like a good dose of Vitamin Z, plan on getting it and make your bedroom right. That means no TV and ideally no phone. 

"The best sleep and the best thing for everybody is to make sure that it's a quiet cool room. We do sleep better when it's cool rather than when it's a really hot environment," said Yaremchuk. "And to get rid of any external stimuli that you might have so it doesn't keep, doesn't keep you worried, doesn't keep you mentally functioning at a high level." 

There are two big sleep problems: some can't fall asleep and then some can't stay asleep. But remember it's normal to wake up every 90 minutes.

The key is what you do after that. 

"Sleep cycles are 90 minutes and so every 90 minutes you have an arousal, you wake up, you roll over, you go back to sleep," said Yaremchuk. "Now if you have that 90 minutes, you wake up, you look at the clock and you say 'oh my gosh, I went to bed at 10 o'clock and now it's 11:30 and I have to get up at 4.'"

"So then you're fully alert, you've woken yourself up, you're doing mental math, and it's going to be hard for you to go back to sleep," she added.

So what do you do when you wake up? Learn how to self-soothe. Don't look at the phone. You need a mindnumbing activity to distract yourself.

Yaremchuk says you're aiming for 7 hours and 15 minutes of sleep.