Get into the rhythm

Strand one - really basic stuff.

Unit two.

Are you getting light directly onto your skin for at least 30 minutes every day? Good. Because now you can turn your attention to getting enough darkness too.

We try to defy our need for darkness because we want to extend the day to watch TV, read or party.

But if humans have lived their lives by the sun for thousands of years it seems likely that we've developed the need for downtime just as we have for uptime. Other growing things have no option but to accept daylight and darkness when they occur, so could we be impairing our health by messing around with these things?

With the advent of electric lighting we have been able to structure our 'day' around the requirements of our job or our pastimes rather than around the sun. Although firelight and candlelight had existed previously, these were expensive in terms of the resources available to most people and would have been used sparingly by the vast majority of humans. It is only in the last hundred years or so that most people have been liberated from the cycle of the earth's twenty-four hour spin and the regular rhythm of light and dark that this causes.

Sunrise is still important on a farm but most of us rise according to our alarm clocks. Sunset is still important if you are gardening but makes little difference if we are inside working at the computer.

Freed from the restrictions of dawn and dusk we increasingly live unpatterned lives. In fact for most of us office hours have become our dawn and dusk. But now even this is changing. We take flexitime. We work from home. Shop hours used to add structure to how we lived but now our local supermarket opens all night. Even TV schedules, which until just a year or two ago, governed how families organised their evenings and weekends, have become irrelevant. We can watch that favourite programme any time we want now.

It is unlikely that these changes in our lives have as little effect as we might like to believe. Doctors have understood for some time that the body works differently at different times of the twenty-four hour cycle. Some vitamins and drugs are now prescribed with a time attached because their effect varies according to the hour we take them. Or put another way, our bodies work differently according to where the sun is in the sky we live under.

Yet we start life very differently. We are trained from our earliest days to adapt our lives to day and night.

I have a friend who is paid large fees to travel round the world to the families of the rich. Her task? To get the newborn baby into a set routine of sleep as fast as possible. Most parents know this rhythm is vital.

Yet other mothers feel guilty about this. They wonder whose benefit it is for. Is it just so they won't be disturbed every night by the baby crying? But this guilt is misplaced. Not only is training a child to fit into the routines of the group essential to its long term happiness but making a distinction between day and night, play and sleep, may well be key to the child's mental and physical health.

One of the first aspects of our lives to suffer when we are anxious or depressed is our sleep. It is as if the power of the sun to control our daily routine is completely lost. We rise groggy and exhausted. We doze early evening. We lie awake most of the night then fall deeply asleep just as the alarm goes off.

We blame poor sleep on our worries.

As we lie awake in the early hours our mind trawls over all that is negative. We see our debts crushing us forever, our business worries impossible to resolve, our partner's behaviour heart-breaking. But as the dawn arrives our spirits rise. In the light we see that there is a way forward to becoming free of our debts, to restructuring our business, to living on after infidelity. We may not feel happy, but we are no longer in the depths of despair.

So perhaps we should blame our worries on poor sleep, not the other way around.

Nobody really knows why our minds wrestle with problems in preference to joys at this time of the night. But if your life is not happy you may well dread the thought of going to bed, knowing those hours of heart-ache lie ahead.

People turn to sleeping pills to get them through. But this programme is about using your own, very basic, very simple, innate abilities to solve as many of your difficulties as possible. In this way you develop confidence in yourself to control your life. Taking a pill reminds you that you can't cope. Feeling out of control makes it impossible to be happy. So work hard on the exercise that follows before resorting to medication, if you are troubled with sleeplessness.

Start the exercise by looking at your working week. Divide the average day into a pie chart. Now make another pie chart for Saturday and another for Sunday. Shade in the hours you need to be working, paid or otherwise. Then add other things that occur including appointments, leisure activities, even favourite TV programmes. Try to make the week look as regular as possible. Now mark out the 7 to 8 hours when you can be in bed. Make these the same time every night.

You now have your daily pattern.

You have a time when you retire and a time when you rise. Alter your activities to fit between these times. Don't alter these times to fit between your activities.

It's easy to cheat on routines when others, such as work or family, are not forcing us to stick to them. It's certainly a lot easier to let your life slide into chaos when you live alone or when you are unemployed. And chaos feels bad. We get depressed. And then our lives get even more chaotic. So treat yourself like a baby! Decide on your bedtime and stick to it.

Whether you feel tired or not, get into bed and out of bed at exactly the hours you have set. It does get easier. And the rewards are massive. Your body will start to wake naturally as the light reaches the level it has grown accustomed to expect on waking. And once your waking has adjusted to a regular time then your sleeping will adjust too. Your body will get used to a certain length of downtime and start to crave it just as much as it craves anything that gives it energy: sugar, starch, excitement.

Here are some tips to bear in mind.

Write down the time you intend to go to bed somewhere you will see it in the evening. (You might like to change these exact hours a little over the year, to allow for the change in the time of sunrise.) Do you often make a hot drink later on? Then put the time on a post-it note next to the kettle. Or set an alarm that will be heard above your music or the TV. It is the time you go to bed that is the most important to make into a habit, the morning will be reasonably easy as long as the time to go to bed is adhered to.

Make your bedroom a quiet, clear and calming space that you look forward to retiring to. Put clothes and other reminders of your waking hours away out of sight. Make sure the temperature is right. Open a window to keep fresh air circulating. Keep out street lights and noise as far as possible. But it is unlikely that early humans slept in pitch black caves. All animals need a small amount of information about their surroundings when they sleep, so as to sense danger. So I would suggest having a very dim source of light available all night. This might give an unconscious sense of security and make it easier to give way to deep sleep.

Remove the TV. The realism of the images will trick your mind into staying alert and influence your dreams with information that is irrelevant.

Some people find a book a help to getting off to sleep. But don't read anything that is too close to your own situation as it will prompt your brain to make parallels and keep you awake. Escapist adventure, romance or mysteries are good, especially if you tend to get involved in TV films and stay up late to watch the end. Looking forward to finding out what happens next in your book can encourage you to switch off the TV and get into bed. Or try something less exciting. I find history has me asleep in minutes! If you prefer to listen to your radio, keep the sound low.

Don't worry too much about having to fall asleep. If at first you find yourself reading for hours so be it. Just make sure you get into bed at the same time every night. Then put down your book and switch off the light five minutes earlier than the night before. You'll be surprised that once you give yourself permission to read, you relax more easily.

Avoid lie-ins at the weekend as they'll put your body clock out and probably leave you with a headache. Unless you have someone very gorgeous to share your morning with, make the effort to get out of bed on time and start moving around and doing things. Keep your routine going. Never, ever, allow yourself to fall back to sleep.

The vital thing is to ensure that you are never awake in the early hours of the morning, between about 2 and 5 am. The brain works in a very odd way between these hours. It is as if we have learnt, over thousands of years, never to be awake in the middle of the night, unless there is danger nearby. Then we become alert and wary very fast. So sleeping through these hours is important. Make the decision now to develop your daily routine. Get into the rhythm.

And the first step is to get to bed on time.

No excuses!