In praise of lazy

The Clarins counter in John Lewis was recently “on gift”– with travel sizes of some of my favourite products if I bought two full size items. If I bought a third, I qualified for a free 40 minute facial. Being a sucker for that kind of thing, I quickly picked out an extra shower gel and counted down the days to my appointment. I was imagining falling asleep during a relaxing facial massage – more fool me. It was, of course, just another marketing ploy to lure the unsuspecting Clarins customer into buying new skincare products that were not so far on their radar.  That said, it proved a very useful exercise.  After I’d confessed that I am a bit forgetful about exfoliating, and therapist/saleswoman Elaine introduced me to what she called a ‘lazy exfoliator’ – the Gentle Exfoliator Brightening Toner, a lotion that you only have to apply to your face and leave on all night, once a week at bedtime -- I started thinking about other opportunities for a bit of healthy laziness.

Here are some of my favourites:

1.   Floss – only once a week.

A top dentist recently told me that instead of guilting out when we forget to floss twice a day, we should be proud to do it once a week. ‘It’s just about enough to keep the plaque at bay,’ she said. And another periodontologist pointed out that we may even be doing ourselves a favour when we forget to do it more often. ‘Many people get the technique wrong, leading to more damage from plaque than if they didn’t floss at all,’ he explained.

2.   Use spray vitamins.

I like BetterYou DLux 3000, providing 3000iu of D3 in each minty squirt, and carrying a Jan de Vries recommendation.

3.   Make a lazy smoothie.

Naturopath Enid Taylor says that when she’s too tight for time to juice apples for a base, she uses 300ml Innocent Smoothie to which she adds a massive handful of fresh spinach leaves, a chopped mango or banana, and 250mls water to make enough for two to three servings. Thoroughly blitzed, it is bright green and not too spinachy-tasting for breakfast.

4.   Wear clothes that do the work for you.

I like Fit Flop and MBT shoes, and Zaggora Hotwear capris – said to raise core body temperature to increase energy expenditure, with testers burning 9% more calories than the control group wearing normal fitness clothing.

5.   Sleep.

A good night’s sleep helps dieters shift more fat (56% of their weight loss), while sleep deprivation leads to more muscle loss, although the overall weight loss is the same, according to research at the University of Chicago. Other studies have shown that getting at least six and half hours a night adds years to your life, with more deaths in women aged 50-79 who have less than five hours sleep. Sleep also curbs inflammation leading to heart disease, stroke, diabetes, arthritis and premature ageing according to a 2010 study.

Prescription for sleep

I’ll come clean – I sleep exceptionally well. And, apparently, that makes me very unusual. I hate to labour the point, but it really is very rare for me to lie awake long enough even to think about counting sheep.

Though we’re really supposed to be counting backwards in sevens, starting at 2000, according to Dr Jason Ellis, director of the Sleep Research Centre at Northumbria University, who says (try it!) this is so hard to do that you may even nod off with boredom.

No time for that for me – I am someone who has to will myself not to fall asleep during yoga relaxation...

I know this makes me very lucky when around 30% of the British population are lying awake staring at the ceiling, but it’s all about sleep hygiene, which comes easily to me as a creature of habit.

Here’s what I do:

1.   Go to bed around the same time every night – always recommended by experts.

2.   Take a sleep aid – I don’t need one, and only had an academic interest in Cherry Active (the subject of some decent research by Dr Ellis’s team at Northumberland) until I learned that it’s also good for joint pain. Now I take two capsules as soon as I reach the bedroom. As well as a healthy dose of anti-inflammatory anthocyanins (for joint pain relief), Cherry Active also contains a natural form of melatonin, by passing the need to convert tryptophan from other foods – the usual way we get this. Melatonin encourages sleep – and it’s possible I’m enjoying even deeper zzzzzzs now.

3.   Dim the lights. I like to keep the bedroom softly lit at bedtime – it makes me feel relaxed, but is also a way of sending a message to the brain that it’s time to sleep.

4.   Have a bath. I use nice aromatic Clarins bath oils, and don’t spend too long bathing. The idea of a bath is really to let your body cool down afterwards. The naturopath Deborah McManners once told me that the bath should be tepid, and you should remain in the tub while the water drains, draping a towel around you. Body temperature should cool as a precursor to sleep – and this is one way to do it. Though I tend to have a hot bath and don’t lie in the empty tub – a step too far – I love this part of my bedtime routine.

5.   Then bed. I may listen to a bit of Radio 4, or read, for 20 minutes, but I’m often already too tired to do that. We don’t have a TV in the bedroom, and we leave our phones and laptops in our studies. Bedtime is about switching off.

6.   Turn the lights out – fully. We have a blackout blind in the velux over our bed – but only muslin on the other windows, which means we do get a decent amount of light filtering through in the morning, when we need it to help us wake up.

7.   Pets are supposed to be banned from bedrooms and especially beds, if they’re likely to disrupt your night. Our spaniel inevitably ends up on, or in, our bed – and frequently jumps in and out during the night, launching himself at me and momentarily waking me. Fortunately I go back to sleep almost immediately – but, sorry Joe, lovely though you are, I sleep even better when you choose to spend the night in someone else’s room... The ultimate luxury, even for me, is to wake up in the morning having not even stirred in the night.