Wake up refreshed EVERY morning

SOMe people leap out of bed in the morning, raring to go. Others need an alarm clock — preferably two — to get them off to work on time. My wife will quite happily stay up working until the small hours, while I prefer to head for bed soon after 10pm. I’m itching to leave a party by 11pm; she is just warming up. It’s pretty clear that I’m a lark; clare is an owl.

The extent to which you are owl-ish or lark-oriented is called your ‘chronotype’, and it is something that is rooted in your genes.

However, if your sleep isn’t as great as you’d want, or if, like me, you’ve suffered from insomnia for years, it is important to understand whether you are more lark or owl, because those tendencies exert huge control over your body clock (your circadian rhythms) and the natural chemical drivers that help you fall asleep and sleep soundly.

Luckily, I have discovered that it is possible to re-tune your circadian clock and get your body back into the synchronisation necessary for good sleep by making a few straight-forward tweaks. These involve making sure you eat the right food, at the right time, and that you get exposure to strong enough light, again at the right time.

All this week in the Daily Mail I have been serialising my brilliant new book, Fast Asleep, which brings together the latest scientifically proven ways to improve sleep.

Once you have given your diet a more Mediterranean twist, increasing your intake of vegetables and pulses that your gut bacteria love (as explained in Tuesday’s paper), and you have created the perfect bedtime routine (as I outlined yesterday), you might find the suggestions I make below are enough to significantly improve your sleep quality.

That’s because one of the most important drivers of sleep is your circadian rhythm. This is a 24hour internal clock which runs in the background of your brain, cycling between sleepiness and alertness at regular intervals.

If you sleep badly, there’s every chance your clock has become disrupted, but the really good news is that it can be changed to improve your sleep quality, and I’ll show you how. Oddly enough, your circadian clock doesn’t follow a day that is exactly 24hours long. Some people’s clock runs fast, others’ runs slow.

If you have a fast clock then that means you are a lark — you like to get up early. If you have a slow clock then you are an owl, someone who likes to stay up late.

A while ago I did a genetic test which confirmed what I had long suspected: that I am one of those people whose circadian clock is a little fast.

I also have a marker for increased risk of insomnia and one which is associated with poor sleep efficiency in people who are exposed to high levels of work-related stress.

All this knowledge is fine if you live a rarefied life which allows you to go to bed and wake up when your clock demands it.

However, in the real world we often have to get up horribly early when our body would much rather be asleep, or work late at night when every cell in your body is screaming for sleep.

Pushing your natural chronotype beyond its boundaries night after night can easily disrupt your circadian rhythm, ruining your sleep and putting you at risk of insomnia.

This is important, because when your biological clocks get