Sleep is important when it comes to healthy function of the body, Not only does it improve mood, but it also slashes the risk of high blood pressure heart disease, obesity and diabetes developing.
But in the last ten years, the number of people with sleeping disorders has doubled.
Experts have said we should be getting between seven and eight hours sleep a night, but 70 per cent of us now get an hour’s less than that a night.
These hard facts will be revealed tonight on Channel 5’s How To Get A Good Night’s Sleep, with Eamonn Holmes and Ruth Langsford. So with the clocks going back this weekend, how can we make sure we get our forty winks?
Eamonn, with his busy TV schedule, rarely gets four hours of consecutive sleep a night.
But sleep coach, Nick Littlehales, who has worked with the likes of footballers Ryan Giggs and David Beckham, as well as the British cycling team, has a vital tip for Eamonn.
Nick believes that kipping for eight hours straight, known as monophonic sleep, is a myth.
He says: “We could learn a thing or two from our ancestors. As soon as we invented electric lights we brought the sun, the blue light, into our evening.
“So the the sun disappeared we kept the light on so we were able to be ore active in the evenings. So what happened is we stopped sleeping biphasically, like either at midday, early evening and nocturnally, and we just said ‘right, we’ll just do it one block at night.”
Biphasic sleep is when you break up your sleep into two blocks so a short night-time sleep would be off-set by a daytime nap like a siesta.”
Eamonn asks if getting four hours and then a nap is OK, to which Nick replies, “in principal it is”.
He adds: “How many people sleep eight hours a night, without waking up solidly, 365 days a year – have you ever met one?”
Instead, Nick recommends a polyphasic sleep programme where you get several blocks of sleep over 24 hours.
When he applied this to the British cycling team, he found they recovered much better.
Nick says: “Everybody’s now working in a much different way, with different hours, different schedules, 24 hours, so trying to just sleep at night in one block doesn’t work.”