How do I sleep well in a hotel or somewhere unfamiliar?

Sleeping badly the first night somewhere new is normal and well documented — part of the brain stays more alert in an unfamiliar place. Knowing that helps, because most of the damage is done by lying there worrying about not sleeping. The rest is mechanical: hotel rooms have specific, predictable problems and each one has a fix that takes two minutes.

What you'll need

• Eye mask
• Ear plugs
• A familiar item — pillowcase, book, tea (optional)

Step by step

1. Deal with the light first.Hotel curtains rarely close fully. Use the trouser press hanger or a clip to pin them together, throw a towel over the standby lights, and turn the clock radio to face the wall. If that fails, an eye mask does the job absolutely.
2. Deal with the noise second.Ear plugs, or a fan or the air conditioning as steady masking noise, or white noise from a phone. Corridor doors, lifts and early housekeeping are the usual culprits and none of them care that you are asleep.
3. Get the temperature down.Hotel rooms are usually kept too warm for sleeping. Turn the heating down or the air conditioning to a cool setting well before bed, and take a layer off the bed rather than adding one.
4. Ask for the right room when you book.High floor, away from the lift, the ice machine, the bar and the road. It costs nothing to ask at booking and reception will often accommodate it. A quiet room is worth more than any gadget in it.
5. Keep the same wind-down as at home.Same rough timing, same last hour, same sequence. Familiarity is the thing that is missing in an unfamiliar room, so importing whatever you can of it genuinely helps.
6. Take one familiar object.A pillowcase from home, your own tea, a book you are already reading. It sounds trivial and it works — this is exactly why it works for children.
7. Do not lie there fighting it.If you are awake for more than twenty minutes or so, get up, sit somewhere dim and read something dull until you feel sleepy. Lying in the dark being annoyed is what turns one bad night into three.
8. Get outside in daylight in the morning.Morning light is the strongest signal for resetting the body clock, which matters most when there is a time difference. Ten or fifteen minutes outside early does more than any amount of coffee.
9. Adjust the alcohol and caffeine.A nightcap fragments sleep in an unfamiliar bed just as it does at home, and holiday coffee tends to arrive later in the day than usual. Both are worth watching for the first couple of nights.
10. Accept the first night.It is usually the worst and it usually improves by the second or third. Planning something undemanding for the first day removes the pressure from it entirely.

Tips

• Pack the eye mask and ear plugs permanently in the wash bag. They weigh nothing and they are the two items that make any room workable.
• Check where the fire exit is and where the light switches are before turning the light off. Waking disoriented in a strange room is much worse than knowing the layout.
• In a shared room or a hostel, agree the light and noise arrangements early rather than negotiating at midnight.

If it doesn't work

Questions people ask