The scheduling algorithm is a fundamental design problem to allocate resources amongst different entities in distributive wireless sensor networks (WSNs). These sensor nodes have limited power and non-replenishable energy resources. In WSNs, the duty cycling mechanism is commonly used to save energy due to idle listening. On the other hand, a fixed duty cycling mechanism increases transmission latency in WSNs. Therefore, in order to ensure the prolonged network-life of WSNs, the medium access control (MAC) protocol should be tackled in an efficient manner to improve energy efficiency by minimizing idle listening, maximizing sleep duration, and eliminating data collision. This paper proposes a practical Adaptive Sleep Efficient Hybrid Medium Access Control (AEH-MAC) algorithm in which the key idea is to dynamically adjust nodes� sleep time to improve the scheduling in WSNs. The AEH-MAC allows nodes to adjust sleep time dynamically according to the traffic load and coordinate wakeup time with neighbour nodes. A series of short taken packets are transmitted to wake the receiver, and a prediction field is introduced in the ACK packets (GRANT/RELEASE) to reduce the waiting time of the source node. In the proposed algorithm, each node maps a conflict-free time slot for itself up to two-hop neighbouring nodes. The simulation results show that the AEH-MAC algorithm achieves high performance in terms of runtime, number of rounds, energy consumption, and slot reservation. © 2017, The Author(s).