Insomnia is very common in modern society, affecting approximately one third of the general population. Developing safe and effective sedative-hypnotic medication is a basic need for people’s health and an attractive goal for pharmaceutical companies. Although many research Methods are available, animal experiments are still used regularly to discover, verify, and evaluate sedative-hypnotic drugs that include open field test, pentobarbital subthreshold/threshold dose-induced righting reflex test, insomnia animal model, and electroencephalogram (EEG). Among these, the open field test is used to evaluate the sedative effect of drugs through observations of autonomic activities. The sleep indexes generated in the pentobarbital-induced righting reflex, such as sleep latency and sleep time, are used to preliminarily reveal the hypnotic effects. Some kinds of stress paradigms or medications could induce insomnia for a period of time, and thus they are used to estimate the effect of drugs on improving insomnia. EEG, which is the gold standard, can reflect the adjustment effect of drugs on sleep structure and further screen the test drug’ s ability to restore physiological sleep. Therefore, this paper reviews commonly used screening method to provide references for the research and development of sedative-hypnotic drugs.