Tired of sleepless nights? The 12-point plan that will have you sleeping like a caveman

Sleep therapist and scientist Dr Merijn van de Laar thinks so, joining a long line of those advocating for a return to simpler, more natural sleep practices. The difference is that van de Laar looks at sleep from an evolutionary perspective, drawing on years of research into personality, sleep, treating insomnia and his own experiences of chronic insomnia when he was in his 20s.

Studying the sleep patterns of modern-day hunter gatherers, like the Hadza of Tanzania, whose night-time routines aren’t ruled by technology and artificial light, has also been part of his research.

Van de Laar details his theories in the new book How to Sleep Like a Caveman: Ancient Wisdom for a Better Night’s Rest.

He’s upfront about acknowledging the chronic stress and social media, which keeps many of us awake in contemporary society, are things our ancestors didn’t have to deal with. At least not to the same extent. As he points out, a stress-free night’s kip when sabre-toothed tigers might be lurking outside your cave wasn’t always guaranteed either.

Despite our much-altered circumstances, van de Laar argues we can align modern habits with evolutionary sleep patterns through proper exposure to natural light, creating a serene sleep environment, improving sleep hygiene, and managing stress.

Stressing the critical role circadian rhythms (the body’s internal clock, which regulates sleep-wake cycles) van de Laar is a fan of getting natural light exposure during the day and avoiding bright screens at night. Here, we share van de Laar’s 12-point plan for how to get a better night’s sleep in 3 weeks:

1. Don’t believe everything you read or hear about sleep: Many things you think you know about sleep are probably incorrect and have to do with a distortion of reality due to problems with scientists not placing research data in their correct context, or with unscientifically substantiated cultural trends. Flashy, clickbaity, “newsworthy” media reports can further reduce the reliability of information about sleep that reaches us. If you read messages that say nothing about how sleep is measured, what exactly is measured, or how statements about causal relationships are substantiated, ignore them. [Van de Laar points out that How to Sleep Like a Caveman contains only the scientifically proven facts about sleep.]

2. Let go of the 8-hour rule: It is common to sleep between 5 hours 20 minutes and just over 7 hours, as objectively measured by actigraphy. To this you should add about 23 minutes because, generally, we tend to overestimate our own sleep. This means that an average good length of subjective sleep is between just under 6 hours and almost 7½ hours. However, this varies person to person - so you need to experiment to find your personal optimum sleep length.

3. Use a sleep diary to record your subjective sleep pattern over 3 weeks: This will give you an idea of how you think you are sleeping and allow you to compare it to how you feel. Don’t watch the clock while you are in bed, because it might lead to more restlessness. Instead, fill the diary in every morning for 3 weeks based on your perception of sleep. For people with insomnia, it is best to avoid smartwatches or apps to measure sleep because, for this group in particular, they are less reliable. Additionally, it can lead to increased sleeplessness because people with insomnia might focus too much on improving sleep scores, which creates more tension. Measure the effect of the other points of this sleep plan during these 3 weeks by using the sleep log and your daily functioning as a reference. [How to Sleep Like a Caveman includes a sleep diary.]