I usually use some #define and constants to make the calculation easy:
#define NANO_SECOND_MULTIPLIER 1000000 // 1 millisecond = 1,000,000 Nanoseconds
const long INTERVAL_MS = 500 * NANO_SECOND_MULTIPLIER;
Hence my code would look like this:
timespec sleepValue = {0};
sleepValue.tv_nsec = INTERVAL_MS;
nanosleep(&sleepValue, NULL);