Ever fancied a 'Duvet Day'?
The new fad from America caught the attention of third year journalism student Kate Simpkins, whose thoughts were first published in the online magazine, hackwriters.com

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Sleep your way to a better life?
Had trouble getting out of bed recently?

If you wake up and struggle to leave your warm and cosy duvet you are experiencing a common winter morning trauma.

It's so easy to give yourself ten more minutes in bed in the morning. The alarm goes off and the first thought for the day is 'just ten more minutes'. It happens to most of us, at least occasionally.

But right now, in the depths of the winter months, there seems to be an epidemic of lie-ins.

Over the last few weeks not a day has gone by without one of my work colleagues complaining about how hard it was to get out of bed that morning. Some gave themselves an extra ten minutes, some an extra half-hour, and in the most severe cases, a Duvet Day.

A Duvet Day is of course, a day spent under your duvet. Even if we're not actually daring enough to take one, the popularity of the phrase is proof enough that some days we're all longing to just stay in bed.

This morning was a classic example for my boyfriend and I. We must have hit the snooze button at least seven times, and with seven minutes between each snooze we notched up an extra 49 minutes in bed.

So why is it proving so difficult to get out of bed? The obvious answer this time of year is the weather.

If it's cold and grey outside it becomes a mammoth task to leave a warm and cosy duvet. Or it could be that we simply need more sleep.

A recent study in the medical journal the Lancet, found that the average night's sleep in the UK is now about 90 minutes less than it was in the 1920s, when it was 9 hours per night.

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