 There's this myth about we should all be striving for eight hours of sleep. There's huge differences between individuals of how much sleep they will need and of course this changes as we age. We have to work out for ourselves how much sleep we need each night. There's the idea that we can help our sleep with sleeping tablets and alcohol. These are sedatives, these do not provide a biological mimic for sleep and in fact things like alcohol can actually disrupt some of the important things going on within the brain whilst we are sedated. There's an idea that we can basically be sleep deprived during the week and then just catch up by massively oversleeping at the weekends. You can catch up a little bit but you never fully catch up so you will start the next week actually sleep deprived so it's not a good strategy. There's an idea that if you see blue light before bedtime you're going to delay the circadian clock. The evidence for that is very weak. Some studies have shown that there's no effect of blue light at all. The idea that melatonin is a sleep hormone seems to be embedded in the media and yet it is not. Melatonin is a biological marker of the dark. We release melatonin at night and it is a mild modulator of sleep. There is an idea that if we get good sleep we'll look more attractive. If you're chronically tired you release a lot of the stress hormones and they can actually make the skin more puffy. So there's some truth to that one.