Good Morning Britain host Susanna Reid reveals she starts the day with 8 cups of coffee

While many of us battle the snooze alarm in the mornings, spare a thought for Susanna Reid and her 3.45am wake-up call.

The Good Morning Britain anchor has admitted she feels ‘tired a lot of the time’ but is a big believer in the power of a nap – and caffeine.

‘I’ve been doing breakfast news for almost 20 years,’ the 52-year-old told this newspaper’s You magazine. ‘The early starts are baked into the job. From the outside it looks like a bizarre, strange, unnatural time of the morning but for me it’s just work. You build strategies, habits and rituals for dealing with it.’

One of her main coping mechanisms is drinking up to eight cups of coffee to get her through the three-hour ITV breakfast show. ‘The caffeine starts at 4.30am,’ Reid admits. ‘When I arrive here there’s a coffee on my desk and they keep coming every 15 minutes until 9am. The cups appear wherever I am in the building. I have about eight but then no more caffeine for the rest of the day.’

Afterwards, the mother of three will happily begin a nap, which can last up to two hours. ‘Having a guilt-free nap is one of the enormous pleasures of my day,’ Reid said.

‘I don’t set an alarm. I just see what my body naturally needs… I have told myself that, as long as I get seven hours within a 24-hour period, I should not obsess about getting it all in one go.’

As a journalist, Reid is diligent about her research but there is one area into which she dare not investigate too closely – sleep.

‘There have been a number of big books on sleep recently and I make a point of not reading them,’ she said.

‘I’m worried they will say my sleep strategy is nonsense, that napping doesn’t count and that I have done long-term damage to my health through chronic sleep deprivation. I don’t want to know!’

Source: | Dailymail.co.uk