Did you get any sleep last night?

A London bed, 3am. Unless you are among the fortunate elite of easy sleepers, this is likely to be a fraught scene. This is the time when novelist Alice Munro wrote that everything “looks like a spiteful imitation of itself”. In the capital there are too many distractions to settle down to restorative sleep. Our fully charged calendars and equally occupied minds mean sleep is being referred to as a new luxury item, and there is an art to getting enough.

“I have seen a huge increase in the number of people coming to me with stress, sleep and energy problems in the past year,” says sleep specialist Dr Nerina Ramlakhan. The average amount of sleep for 46 per cent of 18- to 60-year-olds in the UK is only five to six hours a night — at least an hour short of the recommended amount — while how to sleep is one of the most searched-for terms on Google.

Offices are adapting so we can catch up — video advertising company Unruly and YouTube both have office snooze pods, and Thomson is working with a sleep psychologist to incorporate rest into its practices. It is a topic of desk debate — to nap or not to nap, and is there a correct way to wake up? So is it possible to have the best sleep of your life while still actually having said life? Or is that just a dream?

“The amount of sleep you need is genetically determined,” says Professor Adrian Williams of the London Sleep Centre. “The average is 8.1 hours but some people need less or more and you need to get what you need.”

Many of Ramlakhan’s clients “try to play catch-up with sleep at the weekends. But that is too late. By then they’ve missed out on the vital sleep phases they should have been getting earlier in the week.” Williams adds that “you can’t bank sleep”.

It isn’t all about having a set bedtime. Ramlakhan says everything you do in the day contributes towards good sleep including “regular hydration and taking regular rests throughout the day away from technology to respect our natural 90-minute energy cycles”. This way, when bedtime comes, it will be easier to resist a frenzied trawl through email and social media.

The aim is to avoid “feeling tired but wired”, which sends your adrenal glands into overdrive. The smartphone has taken an hour off the average sleep time for a British adult, making it

6.5 hours rather than 7.5. Ramlakhan says: “Technology leads to polluted sleep and an overload of the working memory, so not only is it distracting people from going to sleep earlier it also reduces the quality of sleep.” She advocates an “electronic sundown — switch off all technology an hour before you get into bed to avoid the ‘cognitive noise’ that many experience as they try to fall asleep.”

Timing is everything, says Ramlakhan, and you should aim to be in bed, ideally by 10pm, at least three times a week. “The sleep phase before midnight is incredibly restorative. Nature has designed our sleep cycles so that we get one of the most powerful ‘hits’ of sleep before midnight. In other words, this is the phase that rejuvenates the body on every level — physical, mental, emotional. During this phase adrenaline levels drop, the body lets go of the day physically, which some people feel as a jerk while they drop off to sleep, and the adrenal and thyroid glands are rebalanced and replenished.”

If you do wake in the night, resist the urge to check the time. Ramlakhan says: “It can send you into a whirl of calculations and make you worry about how much sleep you will or won’t be getting.” Focus on breathing instead, deeply from the low part of the lungs. “If you can’t sleep, then rest. If you notice the word ‘sleep’ popping up in your vocabulary far too many times, try using the word ‘rest’ instead. It is a subtle but effective shift in mindset. If you’re lying in bed unable to get to sleep then just say to yourself ‘I’m going to use this time to rest’.”

Living in London means noise beyond your control. An investigation by the Standard found that incidents of neighbour sex and the ensuing sound effects have been increasing since the recession began — new-builds mean thin walls and no protection from amorous expression. A woman who lives in Hoxton was routinely disturbed at 4am by her neighbours having “an apocalyptic bang-fest — real filthy, meat-slapping sex”.

Earplugs or a white-noise app can help here but sometimes the only solution is to turn it into a funny story for your colleagues and hope that means they will be tolerant of you behaving like a sleep-deprived zombie. Resist the urge to mainline caffeine, although Williams says there is no harm in drinking it as long as it isn’t too close to bedtime.

Napping is not for the weak. Ramlakhan believes that companies “should start to see this as giving them a competitive advantage as employees are more rested, energised, laser-focused and creative”. Naps aid evening sleep by “unloading the brain’s working memory so there is less ‘filing’ to be done at night, which leads to deeper sleep”.

Williams does warn that long naps of more than an hour are “not a good idea because you go into deep sleep, and then if you wake immediately from that, you suffer sleep drunkenness”.

Like everything else in the capital, sleep requires thoughtful management. But there is no need to be sleepless in the city.