THE THING IS... Your 30-second guide to everything Sleep

What: Sleep. Simple as that. Or, more specifically, ending the sleep deficit. The days of macho boasting of the ‘I get up at 4am and sleep only three hours a night’ variety are over. Switching off for 10 hours a day is the new ‘sending emails at 5am’.

Why: Because we badly need it. Insufficient sleep is apparently at the heart of a growing number of problems affecting adults and children, in a variety of physical and psychological ways. These include obesity, heart disease, diabetes, attention deficit, depression and anxiety.

Why Now: Because we are in the grip of ‘a global sleep crisis’. This has many causes — stress and longer work hours chiefly, but the increased use of technology is having a major impact.

How: This is where it gets tricky. Getting more sleep sounds easy, but it ain’t. It’s not just the over-achieving among us who aren’t sleeping

— the ones who are closing multi-million dollar deals in the middle of the night — it’s the rest of us, too. And we’re not sleeping because we can’t. However, more and more help is at hand. There are now sleep clinics, sleep technicians, sleep retreats and a heap of advice around how to wind down and nod off. Start by denying yourself all screens for an hour before bedtime and take it from there. Consider a daytime nap — the HIIT-style solution of the sleep world.

Who: Arianna Huffington literally wrote the book on this: The Sleep Revolution. Gwyneth Paltrow claims she aims for a minimum of nine hours a night. Gisele Bundchen calls sleep the key to beauty, and Beyonce declares herself unwilling to go without. That’ll do for us...