Sleep can feel like a precious commodity in my household.

My wife has had her fair share of insomnia. Across the hall, our one-and-a-half-year-old is…well, a one-and-a-half-year-old. The days of regular, two to three times a night wake-ups have barely faded. Plus, all it takes is one daycare sickness to take us right back. I’m a stay-up-too-late procrastinating kind of guy. In other words, we all could use a bit more sleep.

While the benefits of a full night’s sleep have been well-documented, those good Zs can be hard to come by. It’s led to parental burnout, workplace burnout, and even the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention declaring insufficient sleep a public health epidemic. Today, the agency says about one-third of US adults and children don’t get enough sleep.

Now, a growing number of Americans are heading out on vacation with one goal: a great night of sleep. According to a recent travel trends report, “sleeping” now outranks shopping, nightlife, and seeing wildlife as US travelers’ main vacation activity.

Globally, luxury hotels are meeting their demand by offering high-end luxury sleep packages designed hand-in-hand with sleep scientists that promise a scientifically curated night of relaxation. It’s birthed a global sleep tourism industry worth around $600 billion.

Dr. Matthew Walker, a world-renowned sleep researcher and director of the Sleep Innovation Laboratories at the UT Dallas Center for BrainHealth, partnered with the luxury hotel chain Equinox Hotels to design what they call their “Sleep Lab.” It’s a nearly $2,000-per-night room entirely optimized and dedicated to getting guests to sleep.

“It’s a whole thermal and sensory ballet, all of which is designed around the biology of what your body needs,” Walker told me.

We’ve already gamified just about everything with our health, from how many steps you take in a given week to what your heart rate says about your stress levels and, of course, how well you sleep at night. This data has created new ways to try to optimize even the parts of life that are supposed to be relaxing.

So I was curious to interrogate sleep tourism and the luxury gamification of sleep. Could going on a sleep vacation unlock ways to sleep better all of the time?

I set off into Equinox Hotels’ Sleep Lab for a night with a sleep mask and reporter’s notebook in hand. I spoke with Noel King, co-host of the Today, Explained podcast, about the journey and my takeaways.

Below is an excerpt of our conversation, edited for length and clarity. There’s much more in the full podcast, so listen to Today, Explained wherever you get podcasts, including Apple Podcasts, Pandora, and Spotify.

So the people who do marketing have been marketing a solution to burnout, a sexy new solution, and the sexy new solution is: Go to sleep.

Indeed. Hotels are now offering these luxury sleep vacations: tailor-made packages designed for sleep tourists, the growing number of people who say they’re going on vacation not to go shopping or see wildlife, but just to catch a few Zs.

This makes sense to me, although I always thought of catching a few Zs as part of the vacation. You’re telling me that they’re saying this is something new?

Yes, sleeping on vacation has been around as long as vacations have been around. 

But these new things are specific hotel packages designed to be all about sleep. And it’s actually birthed this new global sleep tourism industry that’s worth about $600 billion.

$600 billion is a lot of money.

Part of that is because they’re offering these luxury sleep packages designed hand-in-hand with sleep scientists. So now we’ve got sleep tourism options in Fiji, Portugal, Hawaii. 

I couldn’t make it to Fiji myself, but I did go to one in New York City, where I live, at Equinox Hotels, the luxury hotel cousin of the luxury gym. 

They are ready, willing, and able to sell you a package to help you sleep. As both an intrepid sleep reporter and a sleep-deprived dad, I wanted to understand the mechanics of this and to know if being a sleep tourist could unlock better ways to sleep in general. Like, could I take any of my tourism home with me?

So I approached my sleep journey in three legs. In the first leg I asked: Could I, sleep tourist, get as relaxed as humanly possible? 

So I hit the Equinox spa to get what they call a sleep IV. There I was, sitting by a window, classical music floating through the air, sipping my lemon water, about to pump myself full of this bright yellow Gatorade-looking cocktail of things like magnesium, taurine, vitamin C, B, zinc. All these things, they said, supposedly prime my body for good sleep.

An hour later, hanging in the sauna, I was feeling pretty zonked. But I knew I couldn’t stop yet. I had more relaxation to do. 

Which brings us to leg two of my journey. Now that I had found relaxation, could I squeeze the most out of it?

“Overall, we’re at a moment where we’re thinking about sleep a little differently than we have in the past.”

So I did this thing called the Wave Table. It’s marketed as a way to get the equivalent of three hours of sleep in just 30 minutes. You basically lie on this water bed under a weighted blanket and listen to these sounds that are supposed to help slow down your brain.

To me, it just sounded like this ambient oceanscape. And because I’m a nerd, rather than napping, I was focused on the sound design of it all, wave after wave after wave.

Peter, you will recall that the point of this was to get some sleep. Did any sleeping actually happen?

Yes, the sleeping part of the journey. I wanted to see if the tools of science could help with that. So I entered what they call their Sleep Lab.

What does that mean?

It’s a hotel room which promises a full-on scientifically tailored premium sleep experience.

It’s got a room bar. But instead of just Diet Cokes and chips, it’s full of supplements and juices and patches to help you sleep. It’s got a smart mattress that adjusts things for you overnight.

And it came equipped with all these activities and exercises that help you get good sleep. So I set out to do every single thing they recommended. 

There were breathing exercises, color therapy, meditations, breathwork, bodywork yoga stretches, more breathing exercises, drinking sleepytime tea, drinking cherry juice to get extra melatonin, taking a steam shower… 

Almost two hours of activities later, I was finally done. And the room goes to sleep too. The shades automatically drop, the room cools off, the mattress does too, and then darkness.

They claim that this is scientific. Scientifically, what was happening with all this? 

To figure that out, I spoke with Dr. Matt Walker, who’s a professor of neuroscience and biomedical engineering at the University of Texas Dallas. Now, this man is the face of sleep in America today. He teaches the literal MasterClass on how to sleep. And he helped design this room.

To get sleep, your body needs to do a ton of dancing, it turns out. Matt tells me temperature is a huge part of that. You need to drop your brain and body temperature to fall asleep and then stay asleep. And then to wake up, your body has to do that whole dance again, but in reverse.

And the wake up…was honestly really nice. 

The room came alive around me. The room and mattress had warmed.

The shades lifted. These ambient alarm clock sounds floated through the air. And there I was, soft, light, pleasant feelings all around.

So you did it. You got to sleep. Did you wake up well-rested?

I kind of wish I’d had one of those video game health [bars] floating above my head so I could tell where my levels truly were. It was a lot of work to go to sleep. But once I did wake up, I did feel pretty nice.

One thing that is striking me in this moment is that none of this sounds particularly cheap. How much did this cost you?

Well, to get one of these rooms, depending on how far you book in advance, it’ll run you about $2000 a night.

$2,000.

And that’s just for the room, not even the Gatorade-colored IV that I did.

Okay, you and I have talked about this. I am not a sound sleeper. What are the lessons for those of us who were not lucky enough to have this experience with you? Give me some tips.

Sure, sure. I think there’s things like keeping your temperature cool or taking a hot bath or shower before bed, keeping things as dark as possible. You can do that even if you’re not out on a sleep vacation. Another thing — doing all those sleep activities did keep me off my phone before bed and that’s pretty good for sleep too.

But I actually asked Matt about whether this could help someone like you who has bad insomnia. And he says a sleep vacation, even in his carefully designed lab, is not necessarily going to change things.

I trust him, but I will tell you that even if I had $2,000 a night to spend on this, I would not do it. I am too skeptical. 

However, you said this is a $600 billion industry, which means lots of people are willing to spend the two grand a night. What do you think that is telling us about where we are at the moment?

As I was looking into all of the sleep tourism, there did seem to be more branding than substance at times. You would see a place boast about their sleep tourism option on their website, and then I’d go and look and they offer you a sleep mask and a comfy pillow, but not necessarily anything that seemed super sciencey.

Overall, we’re at a moment where we’re thinking about sleep a little differently than we have in the past. The grindset mindset is out. Pamper yourself. Take care of yourself. That’s in. Sleepmaxing is a thing that’s all over TikTok with people offering tips on how to hack your sleep. 

Did you take anything away from the hotel? The stuff that they taught you, did you keep doing any of it?

That’s kind of what I went in looking for. Could I, as a tourist, take any of this home with me? Like, I don’t have a fancy bed — but I can breathe at home, or try to keep my room cool.

But all those exercises they prompted me to do in that room, it’s just not realistic to do all the time. Because life is busy, it’s messy, it’s full of friction and challenges — things that aren’t great for sleep but are part of having a full life.

Source: Vox.