In the 80’s the ability to live with very little sleep was held up as some kind of badge of honour. The less sleep you needed, the more intelligent you were, and the more highly regarded you were.

But now the facts are clearly out, and we realise that a lack of enough quality sleep is a prime cause of lowered metabolic rate, overweight, illness and disease.

Sleep deprivation, whether deliberate or unintended, can be considered a relatively modern disease, interfering with the normal operation of all of the body’s systems and especially interfering with our metabolism. It’s our metabolic rate that determines whether or not we get fat on the food we eat, or burn it up to run our bodies efficiently.

I’m sure you’ve heard the old story from diet companies that losing weight is simply a matter of getting the right balance between the food you eat (energy in) and the energy you expend in activity (energy out). In fact this is nonsense, because if your metabolism isn’t operating as it should, you’ll struggle to lose weight no matter what you do.

Because the quality of your sleep has such a big impact on weight loss, quality sleep is an essential part of any weight loss program, although the actual amount varies from one individual to another. Most adults need at least 7.5-8.0 hours of uninterrupted sleep each night. Children and teenagers require much more - around 12-13 hours of sleep each night.

Quality sleep is even more essential in the journey to recover from any illness, including depression.

9 Ways to Improve Your Sleep

1 Protect your sleep time. Don’t allow the expectations of others to detract from your sleep. If you need to go to bed early in order to get your sleep, do it. If you need to stop people from interrupting your sleep, do it.

If the situation is one that simply has to be tolerated, for example with a baby waking through the night, or sick children who need to be cared for through the night, make sure you catch up on your sleep the next day.

2 Routine is the friend of good sleep. When we have a regular routine for most days, we’re actually training our brain to shut down really efficiently each night, especially if we schedule in a “slowing down” time each night before bed.

3 Slow Down Before Bed. Keep away from alcohol or stimulants for at least an hour before bed, and avoid stimulating books or television programs. Dim the lights, play some nice music, and relax.

4 Remove Unacceptable Stress from Your Life. Oftentimes people find it hard to relax enough to go to sleep, or to stay asleep, because they’re plagued by troublesome thoughts. There are highly-effective techniques to both remove the stress, and to deal with the thoughts. The two most commonly used are Logotherapy and NeuroStim, both of which you’ll find help for on the forums at TopLifeSolutions.com.

5 Prepare Your Bedroom. Of course your bed and pillows etc should be comfortable! But in addition your room should be dark and on the cool side, with fresh air. Those are ideal sleeping conditions.

6 Stay in Bed. Some sleep experts advise you to get up if you can’t fall to sleep within 30 minutes, so that in your mind bed is linked only to sleeping. I find this rather silly, since bed can be linked to having sex, reading, resting, daydreaming, and even being ill. Instead I recommend staying in bed so that you train your mind that this is the correct place to be at this time.

I claim that there’s obvious and unarguable evidence for my recommendation on this point, and you’ll see that for yourself immediately you think of the situation of training a baby or child into a good sleep routine. What would happen if each time the child struggled to go to sleep, you took the child out of bed and read him/her a book? Would that be a smart thing to do? No, didn’t think so!

So you can be confident that if you stay in bed, especially if you use one of my relaxation techniques, you’ll be training your brain toward better sleeping. And if you don’t sleep, at least you’ll still be resting and you’ll get more benefit from that than you will going and switching on television, or reading a book.

7 A physically active day is important to good sleep. If you don’t get enough activity through the day, your body won’t achieve the chemical state it requires to produce adequate melatonin, the “sleep hormone”.

8 Enjoy good relationships with everyone around you. If you have strained relationships, or adversarial relationships, this will detract from your sense of wellbeing and therefore will definitely impact on your sleep. Get your relationships in shape and you’ll enjoy much better sleep.

9 Ensure your nutrition is adequate. Our body can produce the right hormones at the right time only if we take in the right nutrients. For example the extre low-carb diet that is being touted around the internet (and unfortunately even by some doctors who should know better!) is a recipe for lousy sleep, because it interferes with the production of melatonin. Enjoy a good, healthy diet with lots of variety and you’ll increase your ability to sleep well.