It often feels as though good health has become a numbers game. Need to move more? Just get your 10,000 steps. Want to lose weight? Eat within an eight-hour window. Seeking better gut health? No less than 30 daily plants stand between you and a diverse microbiome. Many of us spend our days trying in vain to hit each of those targets. But the hardest one to achieve is surely that elusive eight hours of sleep.

There is some good news on that front this week. Research has found it is the regularity of our sleep patterns that really matters, not the number of hours we are clocking up. A new study looking at sleep and longevity concluded it would be better to sleep for six hours every night, consistently falling asleep and waking up about the same time, than to vary the number of hours we sleep.

The Telegraph London