After months of waking up and feeling like I hadn’t really slept, I downloaded an app that records sleep patterns. The results were disquieting — and not just because it seems I sleep talk non-stop, and hearing that back was pretty creepy, but also because it transpired that while I was spending seven hours in bed on average, I was only achieving around four-and-a-half hours of sleep, with a mere one-hour-and-fifteen-minutes of all-important deep sleep.
I’m not the only Brit who’s not getting what they need in the sleep department. A YouGov survey found that 13 per cent of us are tired pretty much all the time. I am told by Dr Guy Meadows, co-founder and clinical lead of Sleep School, that this daytime drowsiness is only one of the symptoms of being sleep-deprived, so the percentage of those of us sleeping too little is in all likelihood higher.
