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The other technique is sleep restriction therapy. The idea here is that you allow people to sleep a little and once they’ve managed that, you allow them to sleep a little more, building up very gradually until they can sleep the whole night through.

For example, if you spend eight hours in bed but only manage to sleep for six, then six hours becomes... See more

The first is to teach your brain that when you go to bed, only one thing happens, which is that you fall asleep.

If your brain knows that getting into bed could mean any one of all sorts of other things – scrolling through social media, doing some online shopping, watching a film, checking emails, listening to a podcast – then the bed loses its abil... See more

More than 20 large-scale studies, tracking millions of people over many years, have all reported the same thing: the shorter someone sleeps, the shorter their life.

The average night’s sleep in the UK is six hours 49 minutes – and the consequences of regularly getting less than seven hours sleep are enough to give anyone nightmares.

More than half of UK adults (51 per cent) aren’t getting enough sleep, with a third struggling with insomnia and 74 per cent reporting a decline in the quality of sleep over the past year.

In fact, along with cardio and resistance exercise (any form of weight-bearing exercise) there is a third form of workout we should all be doing called ‘neuromotor exercise’.

Neuromotor exercise is anything that requires you to move while also having to think, and it’s extremely good for our brains. Yoga, Pilates and tai chi come under this umbrella... See more

The reason this works mathematically is that both US and UK national guidelines recommend 150 minutes of moderate intensity exercise a week, which in walking terms ‘is about 3 miles an hour’.

‘Every mile is around 2,000 steps,’ says Dr Kraus. ‘So if we are telling people to do two and a half hours of moderate intensity physical activity a week at 3 ... See more

‘WHEN it comes to exercise, what everyone wants to know is, “how little can I do?”,’ says Professor Bill Kraus, a cardiologist at Duke University in North Carolina.

And the answer is... to reduce your chances of dying early by almost a third (30 per cent), you only have to walk a mile every day (that’s around 2,000 steps).

There. It doesn’t matter if... See more