Tired? Lethargic? In dire need of 40 winks? Join the club. But how to boost our energy levels without putting in too much effort? Plus, we ask a doctor, a finance whiz, a radio presenter and a chef how they get by on so little sleep

I finally accepted the urgent need to sort out my energy levels when the clocks went back last year. The days were suddenly short, drab, dark. I snored through the alarm every morning, then kick-started myself with strong coffee (and often migraine tablets due to a pain behind my eye). By midday, I'd be working out ways to fit in a sneaky nap. Of an evening, I'd drink wine to wind down, before sliding into bed with a laptop, promising myself sleep by at least midnight, then Skyping friends, ordering groceries and reading tomorrow's papers until past 2am. It didn't seem stupid at the time. Of course it didn't – my mind was in a permanent tired yet over-stimulated fog. And anyway, everyone I knew was the same. The living half-dead.

At some point in British history, we all got exhausted. Knackered. Overworked. Sleep-deprived. Propped up on double espressos and cans of vile carbonated caffeine that tasted of feet, promising ourselves a week of downtime with a Stieg Larsson some time next June. As winter drew in, I kept thinking of cheery Janet Ellis packing George the Blue Peter tortoise into his cardboard box for annual hibernation. "George is going in a nice quiet place under the stairs for a good long rest!" she'd say, snuggling the jammy, half-shelled git in scrunched-up newspaper, then closing the lid. Bliss. I'll have some of that, I thought. However, since nobody would take responsibility for hibernating me in the stationery cupboard, I was forced to experiment with other ways of getting more energy.

I came to my first conclusion early. The main reason we're all so incredibly knackered is – sorry to blind you with science – we're not getting enough sleep. Obvious, perhaps, but also non-obvious. We all seem fully aware that we need, for example, eight hours, but always get five, yet we do nothing constructive about it. I think the reason for that is that getting good sleep requires sacrifice, strong willpower and some very awkward conversations – ie, "I love you, but please go and sleep in the shed. And tell your farting, wriggling children to sleep in their own beds, too, the party is over."

"I feel absolutely bionic if I have nine hours," one friend says.

"So?" I ask. "Oh, I've scraped by on four hours a night for years now. The cat wakes me up at 5.30am scrunch-washing its bum on the landing… then I can't sleep because my husband sleep talks when he's been playing World Of Warcraft." Parents with school-age children admit to me they get about 90 minutes of decent sleep a night, as they share the bed with piles of sweaty, snoring arms and legs in the shape of hieroglyphics, and who then demand porridge before dawn.

My sleep achilles heel is the internet. I know I feel on top form after eight or nine hours a night, yet almost every night I get five. "Of course you're tired," my husband tuts. "You wind yourself up watching Newsnight on iPlayer in bed, then you faff about till 2am on Twitter."

"Oh, pghhh," I say dismissively. My malady is far more likely to be anaemia or seasonal affective disorder or something about "trapped emotions" that requires a month's stay in a clinic playing ping-pong with the tragically exhausted. "If you just slept when you were supposed to sleep, you wouldn't need to nap," he'd moan.

"You're obsessed with my napping – I hardly ever nap," I'd grunt, forming a pile of sofa cushions and a blanket into a nest, then sleeping solidly for 40 minutes.

I agree, after some haranguing, that I will take all my electrical equipment, wires, laptops, iPhones, TVs and iPod docks out of the bedroom. I will be lying down by 11pm each evening at least attempting to sleep. The second agreement is more sensitive. We agree that if I'm being kept awake by his snoring, teeth-grinding or duvet-hogging, I am permitted to go and sleep in another room. Sleeping apart occasionally will be our dark secret, as society says this means we have failed as a married couple, when, in fact, quite the opposite is true: it means we have more chance of staying married. He will not divorce me for playing Angry Birds on my iPhone at 3am, or for resembling one of the corpses in Gunter Von Hagens' Bodyworlds exhibition each day at breakfast.

The first days of the new regime are difficult. I go to bed at 10pm and lie in the dark, eyes open, listless, anxious. There are people on the internet right now, I think, being wrong about stuff, and I'm not there to write pithy tweets about them. How can the world still turn? I could be putting in a grocery order right now. Or playing Scrabble. Or I could just go to bloody sleep.

Eventually, I do. Miraculously, after five nights with eight hours of non-electrically-modified sleep (including one in the spare room, where I sleep alone, wrapped in the whole duvet like a sausage roll), I'm feeling decidedly perkier. As if someone has steam-cleaned my brain. I start to get evangelical about sleep. People must, I say vehemently, "take control of their energy, like I have". All this tub-thumping is exhausting, which is why I'm still taking afternoon naps. They have to go. It is time to get serious.

An ominous package arrives containing a large, white seasonal affective disorder lamp. I perch it on my dining table, where it sits resembling the moon as seen through the Hubble telescope. Apparently I should sit in front of its eye-dazzling white beam, duping my brain and skin cells into believing I'm in Santa Monica. If all goes to plan, after 14 days I should be doing backflips most afternoons like the small one out of JLS, and not, as I usually am, nodding off on the sofa with a laptop on my chest, occasionally answering the phone to editors with an incredulous, "No, indeed I was not asleep. Has someone been talking?"

I get up early to fit in lamp sessions. They're not a roaring success. It's definitely impossible to feel slouchy in the glare of the lamp, because it's ridiculously bright, but managing even 15 minutes a day is a struggle. It's hot and boring. The cat, on the other hand, loves it and is willing to lie in front of it for up to 17 hours a day, paws in the air, topping up moggy melatonin. The lamp has little effect on the cat's energy. The mice of east London have never been so safe.

Two weeks on, I don't feel any big change in energy – although, on the upside, my eyebrows are a lot neater because it's a great light to pluck in. Maybe this is as good as it gets? "No, the thing you need to do," a make-up artist airbrushing my face for an appearance on HD-TV tells me, "is that you have to give up booze. It will change your life."

"That'll be easy," I say. "I hardly drink anyway." I'm sure the poor man who drags my recycling box each Wednesday would beg to differ.

"Giving up alcohol is cruel," Boris Johnson once said. "One of the cruellest and most deceitful things you can do to your body. I've taken more out of alcohol than alcohol has taken out of me. It's a great gift of the gods." I mull over this wisdom as I purge my house of booze, replacing it with elderflower cordial and carbonated water.

"Oh my God, what is happening?" my husband moans. He couldn't have looked sadder if he'd found me having mad sex with a half-nude broadband engineer.

"It all has to go," I say. "Alcohol is poison – why would I drink poison? I really want to get the most out of my days."

He doesn't attempt to argue. How can he? I'm banking nine hours' sleep a night now. I've not had a gin and tonic for two weeks. I've got the wide-eyed, "I love life" look of a cult member and the Things To Do list of a fractious despot.

I've also removed all refined carbs, sugary and processed foods from my diet. The fridge is full of high-protein Quorn formed into various meaty shapes, roasted veg and low-fat yoghurt. I ban bread from the house and stop eating pasta because it makes me "feel sluggish". I'm turning into Gillian McKeith, but without the fun times or devil-may-care panache. I've got much more energy now, and can spend it organising my calender and improving my life in a multitude of manners.

"Oh, and by the way, tonight you need to get in the loft and find some files for me… and I've put Saturday morning in the diary as a time to drive to that garden centre in Kent and look at hedges."

"Do you not have a long afternoon nap on Saturday?" he asks.

"Not now I don't," I say.

Being booze-free, beyond doubt, revolutionises my energy levels and productivity. The downside is that everyone assumes you are a recovering alcoholic. This spurs one on to overcompensate, saying things like, "Oh no! I wasn't a big drinker anyway. I always knew my limits!" which is precisely the kind of thing my alcoholic friend used to say before secretly imbibing a four-litre box of Asda vin de table and falling down the stairs.

The truth is, I never drink excessively, but I do drink regularly. And I now know that when I'm teetotal, I'm a totally different woman. That woman has a lot of energy, but is also a pain in the rear end. She's the type of woman who arrives at parties announcing she's "not having a late one", sips lime and soda, then remembers with KGB-style precision everything everyone who was boozing said. She doesn't want to be wasting time in bars with these losers repeating themselves, laughing like drains and having fun. Tsk, what idiots. No, she'd rather be at home, taking her make-off in a three-step process, drinking fresh mint tea, flossing, then going to bed. She wants to be up at dawn on Sundays, walking five miles, letting the air in her lungs and the wind at her cheeks. If I met teetotal me at a party, I'd want to punch me in the face.

I'm beginning to wonder whether new energised me is actually happier. I realise that the point of a large glass of cold chablis at 8pm is to give the day an enormous, very definite full stop. "No more thinking from now on," booze verifies. Or at least a different type of thinking, anyway. Time for a pondering of silly things and meaningless speculations. Spontaneity. Fun. Boris is correct, I think – teetotalism is cruel. My brain is working more quickly and efficiently than ever, but this just means I try to do more. Tiredness and stress start to manifest in other places around my body, like a giant whack-a-mole game. Flickering eyelids. Migraines. Small rashes. Exhaustion again.

At the start of this journey, I was in a circle of waking exhausted, grabbing naps, getting slightly inebriated, topping myself up with caffeine and painkillers to kill the headache. But I didn't have much time to think about how I felt. Now, I'm more level-headed and energised, but I'm the most self-aware person ever. Mega-well people have too much time to contemplate the shade of their tongue, or mentally revisit past grievances, twaddle on about "negative energies" and crucify themselves for going berserk and eating a whole bag of Milky Way Magic Stars (think of the sugar!).

"You need to find a sense of balance," says a colleague. "Have you tried acupuncture? I have it for anxiety. It's very good."

"How does that work?' I ask.

"I haven't a clue," she says, "but it makes you feel really light-headed."

"Brilliant," I say. "Do they take credit cards?"

To this day, I have little understanding of the science of acupuncture, other than knowing that having needles inserted into various meridian points on my ear lobes, wrists and my forehead feels jolly nice. It feels a lot, to be frank, like a large Martini and half a Valium. There's an argument that says I should have just stayed indoors and had that instead. But I visit British Acupuncture Council-trained therapist Maggie, claiming I need help with my energy.

I tell her about my heavy work schedule, my former tendencies to napping, my worry that I shouldn't be napping, my Blue Peter tortoise story, turning teetotal, how I've cut out refined carbs and sugar. After 30 minutes of me wittering on about my woes, she begins work with her needles, then leaves me, in her words, "to cook".

"What am I being treated for?" I ask.

"I'm giving you a treatment to calm you down."

Amazing. It appears, after months of trying to increase energy, I'm now having acupuncture for mental exhaustion brought on by hyperactivity. I laugh at people like me. I wonder if I'm the first client she catches replying to emails on an iPhone while covered in needles?

In Maggie's opinion, my original lifestyle wasn't wholly wrong after all. "If you feel tired in the afternoons in autumn and winter, and you were working from early morning, then why is it wrong to nap?" This is a salient point. I can't remember any more.

What works best, I realise now, is not banning anything, but trying to find a balance. Living perfectly gives you energy, but not the gratifying kind. I reintroduce the occasional Martini and let myself have a nap mid-afternoon if necessary. I re-allow laptops into the bed for restricted periods, and only to Skype friends, play Scrabble against my brother or watch comedy on iPlayer. Work emails and manuscript editing are strictly forbidden. I steer clear of refined carbs and sugar, aside from when I order two puddings and a double Amaretto. I feel dozier, but decidedly better. And I've kept my early morning walks on Sunday, up before everybody else, laughing at people doing the walk of shame home from clubs. For those short moments, I'm the most energised woman on the planet. And when I've exhausted that emotion, I go promptly back to bed.