Up until recently we used to admire people who claimed they needed very little sleep. There was even a view that a need for little sleep was related to higher intelligence!

But now the facts are clearly out, and we realise that a lack of enough quality sleep is a prime cause of lowered metabolic rate, overweight, illness and disease.

Sleep deprivation, whether deliberate or unintended, can be considered a relatively modern disease, interfering with the normal operation of all of the body's systems and especially interfering with our metabolism. It's our metabolic rate that determines whether or not we get fat on the food we eat, or burn it up to run our bodies efficiently.

Have you heard the silly line from the diet companies that weight loss requires you to calculate the energy from the food you eat, and then deduct the energy from your activity output? If this advice weren't so pointless and dangerous, it'd be laughable. There is a far more important factor, and that's your resting metabolic rate.

There are many lifestyle factors that impact on metabolic rate, and sleep is one of them, so quality sleep is a crucial part of any serious weight loss program. The amount of sleep you need is unique to you, though probably it will be around 7 1/2 to 8 hours of good sleep each night. Of course kids need a lot more than that, often more like 12 or 13 hours of sleep nightly.

When it comes to recovery from serious illness, quality sleep becomes even more important.

9 Steps to Improve Sleep

1 Guard your sleep time like the precious commodity it is. Who cares what other people think! I'm not talking about welching out on parenting duties at the expense of someone else's sleep, of course! What I'm saying is don't let other people's expectations or selfish behaviour interfere with your sleep needs.

Sometimes our family responsibilities mean that our sleep is necessarily interrupted and every parent is very familiar with that! But make sure you catch up the next day, and that at least on some nights someone else takes turns being the "nightwalker".

2 Have a routine. A time for slowing down in the evening, a time for going to bed, a time for waking up, a time for all of the activities you need to do in the day. Although you'll obviously vary your routine from time to time, your regular routine will help to train your brain for efficient "shut down".

3 About the slow down time before bed. This is a time when you want to avoid stimulation, whether that's from books or television, or from alcohol for example. This is a time for dimmed lighting, quiet music, and easy conversation.

4 Remove Unacceptable Stress from Your Life. Oftentimes people find it hard to relax enough to go to sleep, or to stay asleep, because they're plagued by troublesome thoughts. There are highly-effective techniques to both remove the stress, and to deal with the thoughts. The two most commonly used are Logotherapy and NeuroStim, both of which you'll find help for on the forums at TopLifeSolutions.com.

5 Make sure the environment in the bedroom is comfortable and supportive of great sleep. You want your bedroom to be nice and dark, and to be at least a little cool, with sufficient air flow. Check your bed and pillows to make sure they invite sleep rather than annoy you!

6 Stay in Bed. Some sleep experts advise you to get up if you can't fall to sleep within 30 minutes, so that in your mind bed is linked only to sleeping. I find this rather silly, since bed can be linked to having sex, reading, resting, daydreaming, and even being ill. Instead I recommend staying in bed so that you train your mind that this is the correct place to be at this time.

And there's very good evidence for my stance on this. Take the example of a baby or small child whom we're helping to move into a good sleep routine. One thing we never do is, after a time of trying, get them up out of their bed! The idea is to provide as little stimulation as we possibly can because otherwise that would be training them to be wakeful - the exact opposite of what we're hoping to achieve.

So you can be confident that if you stay in bed, especially if you use one of my relaxation techniques, you'll be training your brain toward better sleeping. And if you don't sleep, at least you'll still be resting and you'll get more benefit from that than you will going and switching on television, or reading a book.

7 You must be physically active during the day. Your body needs vigorous physical activity in order to properly produce sleep hormones. Mornings or early afternoons are the best times for you to play a sport, or go for that really brisk walk or bike ride.

8 Enjoy good relationships with everyone around you. If you have strained relationships, or adversarial relationships, this will detract from your sense of wellbeing and therefore will definitely impact on your sleep. Get your relationships in shape and you'll enjoy much better sleep.

9 Enjoy good nutrition. In the end it's the nutrients we take into our body that allow us to produce the hormones that allow good sleep.