Woman sleeping

I have something to confess: even though I’ve written before about how unhealthy lie-ins lasting more than an hour are meant to be for us, I still manage at least one a weekend.

I can’t help it, I tell myself. I’ve always struggled with my sleep, and “social jet lag” feels like a small price to pay for an extra couple of hours’ snoozing.

Surely, I figured, sleep experts must sometimes skip a couple of alarms of a Sunday morning, too?

So, I asked some to share their “rules” for healthy lie-ins, if such a thing exists.

1) Don’t rely on lie-ins to replace good sleep

Though all of the sleep experts I spoke to said the odd lie-in won’t hurt you, the caveats “occasional” and “once in a while” were used more often than I perhaps hoped.

That’s because, Dr Hana Patel, an NHS GP and resident sleep expert at Time4Sleep, said, “there’s a lot of evidence to suggest that keeping a regular sleeping pattern has positive impacts on our mental and physical health.

“This is because it........

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