Sleep is an important issue for Evan Davis, who needs to get up at 3.15am. Now, the presenter of Radio 4’s Today programme has revealed his bedtime secrets, and they are just as unconventional as other aspects of his life.
Davis, 49, tells Mandrake that he relies on his long-term companion, the French landscape architect Guillaume Baltz — and hypnotherapy.
“The blackout blind comes down, he’ll shut the curtains, I go to bed and he puts on the tape,” says Davis, who also presents the BBC Two television programme Dragons' Den.
“It’s a nice little tape that tells me to go to sleep. It’s hypnosis. It’s a bloke going, 'Go to sleep’. It really works.”
Davis, speaking after his bedtime at a talk about his new book, Made in Britain, at Foyles, tells me that the recording works so well he is now unable to fall asleep without it.
“It fills your brain with soft fluff that slowly eases out all the stimulating things that you’re thinking,” says the presenter, who is known for his “punk” outfits and jewellery in unusual places.
“There are one or two — I won’t name them because it is probably against BBC policy to do so — but I very rarely get 15 minutes into it without it knocking me to sleep. I’ve never enjoyed sleep as much until I got the Today job. There is something about early sleep that’s much better than late sleep.
“I feel myself going to sleep; I don’t just plonk my head on the pillow. It’s a sort of winding-down thing. We’ve got a nice little routine, really.”
Davis does not say whether he has shared his soporific tips with his Today colleagues, John Humphrys, James Naughtie and Sarah Montague.
Humphrys, 67, has said: “If I am presenting Today, then I am in bed by 9pm. My body has got so used to this that 11pm feels very late. I’m very good at cat-napping. Half an hour after lunch is very restorative and good for the brain, too.”
Source: The Telegraph
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