Life

Healthy shut-eye: What is clean sleeping and why should you start doing it in 2019?

'Clean sleeping' is a trend that has taken hold in the past couple of years
'Clean sleeping' is a trend that has taken hold in the past couple of years 'Clean sleeping' is a trend that has taken hold in the past couple of years

PLENTY of us will be making lifestyle changes to ring in the new year – but how many have resolved to sleep better in 2019? Yet slumber is a part of your life that experts agree needs protecting.

Gwyneth Paltrow, goddess of left-field health advice, is a vocal proponent of "clean sleeping", a trend that has gained popularity in the past couple of years. Riffing on the ideal of "clean eating", it has a simple premise, with potentially complex implementation.

In effect, it says you should make it your mission to get at least seven or eight hours of good quality sleep every night.

Why is sleep so important?

Explaining her theories on sleep, Paltrow claimed that experts from her lifestyle blog Goop found "poor-quality sleep can be unsettling for the metabolism and hormones, which can lead to weight gain, bad moods, impaired memory and brain fog".

All of which sounds fairly worrying, especially as many of us operate on less sleep than we biologically need. The Sleep Council's 2017 report found 74 per cent of people in the UK sleep less than seven hours per night, while 30 per cent of men and 20 per cent of women are even turning to booze to help them nod off – hardly a healthy trend.

By contrast, a healthy sleep regime can positively affect your entire day-to-day life, shoring up your energy levels, improving your mood and helping your confidence.

Dr Nerina Ramlakhan, a sleep expert from Silentnight, says that after clean sleep "we wake up feeling refreshed, invigorated and looking forward to the day ahead".

So what does clean sleeping really mean?

In practice, it means getting yourself into a set of healthy, or at least regular habits, like clockwork. The body's circadian rhythms love nothing more than consistency. So, even if 10pm is too ambitious a bedtime for you, making sure you hit the hay at roughly the same time every night will make a difference. Once you've got that bedrock, you can start to build healthy habits.

Goop's own recommendations range from the achievable to the more challenging. You could try meditating before bed, calming yourself to sleep, while massages can also help. It can also be useful to refrain from eating before bed

Ideally, Goop recommend that you try to leave a full 12 hours between the last food of the day and the first bite of the morning – so if you eat dinner at 7.30pm, don't eat anything else until 7.30am.

More extravagant tips include investing in a copper-threaded pillow to combat wrinkles and ageing: "When your face is in contact with the pillowcase, copper ions are supposedly transferred into the upper layers of your skin, where they help support cell renewal," Paltrow has said.

Some people find the pillowcases effective but Lisa Artis, from The Sleep Council, is more dubious, suggesting "the reality is they often have more of a placebo effect than anything else".

How can you get started?

There are some easy and practical steps you can take to get you started on the path to better sleep; for example, cutting down on screen use in the evenings, particularly in the hour before bed.

Dr Ramlakhan advises: "If you're serious about getting clean sleep, you need to stop looking at your phone an hour before you go to sleep. That may even mean banning your phone completely from the bedroom and investing in a good old-fashioned alarm clock."

The number of hours you sleep is devalued if you're doing it in discomfort, so do ensure your bed and bedding are in good condition.