One of the hardest parts about business travel is trying to get a good night’s sleep in a hotel room. But this is also one of the most important good habits to build to maximize your effectiveness and wellness on the road. So let’s learn how to get better sleep in a hotel by unpacking the components of sleep and then diving into some tricks and tools to maximize sleep quality.
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Why is good sleep important?
Good sleep is crucial for wellness because it plays a fundamental role in maintaining physical, mental, and emotional health. Just like the other building blocks of health (nutrition, exercise, connection, breathing), the quality of sleep can have a meaningful impact on our body and mind. Some reasons for the importance of good sleep include:
- Physical restoration: Sleep is a restorative process during which the body repairs and rejuvenates itself. This includes the growth and repair of tissues, muscle recovery, and the release of growth hormones.
- Cognitive function: Sleep is essential for cognitive functions such as memory consolidation, problem-solving, decision-making, and creativity. It helps with learning and retaining new information. Studies show that deep sleep (SWS) is linked to neuroplasticity (which is the condition when our minds clean and categorize the previous day’s information)
- Emotional wellness: Adequate sleep is closely linked to emotional stability. Poor sleep can lead to irritability, mood swings, and an increased risk of developing mood disorders such as depression and anxiety. Emotional health is an important factor for reducing burnout.
- Physical health: Chronic sleep deprivation is associated with an increased risk of various chronic health conditions, including obesity, diabetes, heart disease, and hypertension. It can also weaken the immune system, making you more susceptible to infections.
- Metabolic health: Sleep regulates hormones that control appetite and metabolism. Inadequate sleep can lead to weight gain and an increased risk of metabolic disorders like type 2 diabetes.
- Stress reduction: Quality sleep helps reduce stress levels. It gives the body a chance to relax, lowers the production of stress hormones like cortisol, and helps regulate the stress response.
- Daytime Alertness and Safety: Good sleep is essential for staying alert during the day, which is crucial for tasks such as driving safely and performing well at work or school.
Clearly, good sleep is essential for maximizing our work potential as well as staying healthy (in addition to our long term health).
What are some of the markers of good sleep?
While there are an innumerable number of factors that can contribute to good sleep, there are a handful of metric that we can use to describe sleep quality. These are true whether you are sleeping in your own bed or are trying to get a good night of sleep in a hotel.
- Sleep Duration: The total amount of sleep you get is an important factor. Most adults need 7-9 hours of sleep per night for optimal health & well-being, although individual needs can vary widely. Duration can also be broken up into circadian cycles (which are ~90 minutes).
- Sleep Continuity: Sleep should be continuous and uninterrupted. Frequent wake events during the night, even if they are brief and you fall back asleep, can disrupt sleep quality because it takes time to get back to SWS and REM sleep.
- Sleep Architecture: Sleep consists of different stages, including light sleep, deep sleep (SWS), and REM (rapid eye movement) sleep. A balanced sleep architecture with adequate time spent in each stage contributes to sleep quality. The most recovery occurs in REM and SWS.
- Sleep Efficiency: This measures the percentage of time spent asleep compared to the total time spent in bed. Higher sleep efficiency indicates better sleep quality.
An additional way to start to understand habits and behaviors that impact your sleep is a Whoop 4.0. I track about 20 behaviors in the Daily Journal feature and the Whoop correlates those behaviors to my sleep and recovery quality. Learn more about how to use the Whoop for sleep tracking in this article.
4 Keys to getting good sleep in a hotel
Exact techniques for getting better sleep in hotels will vary by individual, but trying different techniques / combinations should result in finding an optimal setup.
Make it cold in the hotel room
Studies show that optimal sleeping room temperatures range between 54 and 75 degrees F. Use your hotel thermostat to lower the room temperature to an range that works well for you. Additionally, taking a warm shower before bed can lower your core temperature (counterintuitive, I know) which can also contribute to better sleep.
Make it dark to sleep better
One of the major issues with hotel rooms is that they are all configured differently and can contain light sources (which can be disruptive to sleep). I look for light sources and try to turn them off or otherwise mitigate them. These could include:
- Open Shades – close them up, use a chair to hold the shades closed (if needed)
- Alarm clock glow – flip it over or unplug it
- Appliance indicator lights – cover with a towel or otherwise cover up
- Glow under / around doors – you can roll up a towel to block light (but be careful about blocking an emergency exit)
Get a hotel room that will be quiet
Request a room that’s away from elevators and ice machines, as well as facing away from highways or other exterior sources of sound. If you’re in a hotel that’s frequented by late night partiers (or maybe convention attendees), you might consider requesting a room at the end of the hall (so there will be fewer people passing by late at night).
I used to stay in a hotel in downtown Houston that had a trolley outside and the trolley clanged all night as it crossed an intersection. Once I learned to move to the other side of the hotel, I was sleeping much better.
Minimize blue light 60 minutes prior to bed time
blue light tricks your mind into thinking it’s still daytime and you shouldn’t be getting ready for bed. Minimize blue light 30 minutes before bed by either employing blue light blocking glasses or just shutting off electronics that use LED screens. You can also avoid TV or read on an non-LED e-reader (currently using my reMarkable 2 while traveling).
Stay consistent with bedtime and waketime when traveling
Travel schedules can throw the most disciplined sleeper off their game. Between delayed flights, late team dinners, and the need to commute to work or client sites, business travel absolutely tugs at our normal routine when home. Do the best you can to get to bed approximately when you normally do. The Whoop Sleep Planner can help you think through how much rest you’ll need (based on your strain and sleep debt).
What are tools that can help us sleep better in a hotel?
Beyond just methods of maximizing sleep, some tools can be helpful in the fight to have better sleep in hotels. Check out our article on tools that can help!
