GETTING A GOOD night’s sleep is essential to firing on all cylinders when we’re up the next day. Parents of small children, shift workers and anyone else whose sleep patterns are disturbed on a regular basis will know this by bitter experience.

New research from Switzerland saw scientists disturb patients during the deep sleep phase of their rest and they found that those who were disrupted performed worse in specific tasks the following day. (It’s a bit more complicated than that but you can read more here on Science Daily if you’re interested.)

Deep sleep, by the way, is a state you fall into several times a night (after an initial phase of light sleep of about 90 minutes, from which you can be easily roused). And it’s been shown that the quality of deep sleep in the first few hours of your rest time is the most powerful.

Do you get a good few uninterrupted hours of sleep at the start of your night (for a ‘normal’ 9-5 worker, this would mean at least two hours before midnight)?