I appreciate that this may not be quite the thing you want to read on a Monday morning, when you have a whole day ahead of you before you can climb into bed, so please do feel free to bookmark the page and come back later tonight! There’s nothing worse than reading about sleep or relaxation when these things are so far in the future – it’s mental torture. When I was in Land Law lectures at University (many, many years ago) I used to sit there with my eyelids physically held open and dream, fantasise about being able to close my eyes and nod off…it was dangerous to say the least. (Quite a good feeling to recall, though, on nights where I have trouble switching off!)

This video is all about ways to have a good night’s sleep – as usual, they’re 90% common sense with a dash of something you may not have thought of. My most important tip in a physical sense is probably the “good mattress” one – I’m a bore if you get me started on mattresses. I have a Hypnos one on my bed and a Sealy one on my spare bed and I bought both of them from Mattressman – one seven years ago, one last month. I think that I saved around 50% on both, which was what drew me to the website in the first place – it’s well worth checking prices against some of the big department stores if you’re looking at investing.

My most important tip in the mental sense is the one about forming little signals to tell your brain that it’s time to start winding down. It could be a beauty ritual, it could be a pre-bedtime bath, a reading session – it could be that (like me) you write a few lines in a diary. Whatever it is that you do, make it quiet and make it something that doesn’t require electronic devices such as mobile phones or iPads. If it’s an app (meditation or the like) and you must use a device, then turn it onto Airplane mode. In an ideal world, I think that no-phones-in-the-bedroom is a great rule to follow, but it’s surprisingly difficult to enforce this one – Mr AMR is certainly prone to rebelling and reading the news in bed!

Please do watch and enjoy – there’ll be a follow-up video about some of the brilliant overnight beauty products that I like to use at bedtime so stay tuned for that. If you’re reading this on an email then you’ll need to click here to watch the video; as always, some extra information about products and so on below.

Mt pyjamas and the cardigown I’m wearing are both from Hush Homewear.

Link to the Relaxation Tips and video mentioned – there isn’t one. I completely imagined this video and it doesn’t actually exist. I am clearly going bonkers!

Link to the “How to Hibernate” video mentioned

Amazon for books and Kindle: http://goo.gl/Q0lZTA
Mattressman for discounts on luxury mattresses: http://tidd.ly/303aef33
This Works Pillow Spray: http://tidd.ly/62918ea4
The Lumie Lamp: http://goo.gl/BDuhiE