We have lost count of how many friends have told us before leaving for a holiday “I can’t wait for this trip, I’m finally going to catch up on sleep.”

And every single time, we smile a little, because we already know how that usually goes! xD

Unless you go to an all-inclusive hotel and do nothing for the entire time of your stay, here is the truth nobody puts on the postcard: travel is often terrible for sleep, at least at first! ;D

A 2024 survey from the Global Wellness Institute’s Sleep Initiative and SSH, found that 63% of travelers report sleeping worse while away from home, with noise, lighting, and unfamiliar bedding as the top three culprits.

So, today we decided to actually dig into why this happens (and bring you with us into our rabbit hole xD).

Once you understand what your body is doing, and why it’s doing it, the fixes will make a lot more sense, and you can actually adapt them to your own kind of travel, whether that’s a two-hour flight or a three-week road trip 🙂

Let’s dive right in!

So…

How Does our

Sleep Actually Work?

Quick, simple version, I promise: no medical degree required!

Your body runs on two systems that decide when you feel sleepy.

The first is scientifically called “sleep-wake homeostasis”.

Hard name, but easy concept, bare with me!

Basically, every hour you’re awake, a chemical called “adenosine” builds up in your brain and makes you feel more and more tired.

Sleep clears it back out.

That’s your “sleep pressure,” and it’s the reason you feel wrecked after a long travel day regardless of what time zone you’re in.

Crazy simple, isn’t it? I know you start feeling like a biologist now too! xP

The second system, is your “circadian rhythm”. 

This can be roughly imagined as a 24-hour internal clock run by a tiny region of your brain called the “suprachiasmatic nucleus” (yes, we had to look up how to spell that too 😅).

This master clock is set mostly by light hitting your eyes, and it tells your body when to release melatonin, the hormone that makes you sleepy as it gets dark, and when to stop.

When you actually fall asleep, you don’t just “switch off” like a light bulb.

You cycle through stages roughly every 90 minutes:

• light sleep first,
• then deeper stages where your body physically repairs itself and consolidates memory,
• then REM sleep, where your brain is buzzing almost like when you’re awake and you dream.

A normal night includes four to six of these cycles, and each one matters, deep sleep for the body, REM for the brain.

Both systems, sleep pressure and your internal clock, need to line up for you to actually sleep well.

And here’s the part most people get wrong: you can’t “bank” sleep before a trip or fully “catch up” after one in a single long night! That’s not how we work!

Sleep debt doesn’t clear that neatly.

Travel is really, reeeeally good at knocking both systems out of sync at the same time, which is exactly why traveling hits our sleeping habits so hard, so often!

What Actually Messes up

With our Sleep When Travelling?

Here are the main culprits!

1) Time zones confuse the internal clock.

This is what jet lag truly is, and it’s not “in your head.”

The circadian clock in us still thinks to be in the old time zone, while the sun outside says otherwise.

According to CDC travel health guidance, the body typically needs about a day to a day and a half per time zone crossed to fully adjust, and eastward travel is harder than westward, since it’s easier for our internal clock to stretch a day longer than to shrink it!

2) Planes and long journeys work against you physically.

Commercial aircraft are pressurized to the equivalent of 6,000–8,000 feet of altitude, according to research published in the New England Journal of Medicine.

That thinner air can drop your blood oxygen saturation by a few percentage points, and cabin humidity on many aircraft sits at just 5–8% (some newer planes like the Boeing 787 push it up to 15–20%).

Low humidity plus low oxygen equals dehydration, headaches, and worse sleep even if you did manage to nap along the way, and long train or car journeys bring their own version of this: hours of sitting still, snacking out of boredom, and skipping water because bathroom stops are a hassle!

3) New places make your brain stand guard.

This one is genuinely fascinating: researchers at Brown University found that on your first night sleeping somewhere unfamiliar, one half of your brain stays measurably more alert than the other during deep sleep, almost like a night watch, and it responds more strongly to unusual sounds.

It’s a leftover survival instinct, cool stuff bro! xD

4) The room itself might often be the actual problem.

Going back to that same GWI/SS survey we quoted in the beginning, noise disrupted 75% of travelers, poor lighting affected 72%, and uncomfortable bedding hit 70%.

A squeaky air-conditioner, street noise, a mattress that’s too soft or too firm, curtains that let the streetlight in, any one of these is enough to turn a tiring day into a bad night (not my case as I sleep under cannon fire, but my lovely half – Isa –  knows this very well!)

It’s also worth thinking about what’s waiting for you back home. Weeks of hotel beds and unfamiliar mattresses add up, and the nights you spend at your own place are what actually let your body catch up. Investing in something like a king size mattress with room to stretch out means the recovery time you get between trips actually recovers you, instead of it being one more mediocre night’s sleep.

5) Meal times and routine disappear.

Eating at odd hours, more caffeine and alcohol than usual, skipping fitness and the small habits that normally cue our brain that it is bedtime.

Some researchers even call this “social jet lag,” the mismatch between your body clock and the schedule your trip forces on you, even without crossing a single time zone.

So, given this 5 culprits, we thought of leaving you here also 5 ways can we actually fix this when we’re on the road! 🙂

1. Start Adjusting Before You Even Leave

If we’re crossing more than a couple of time zones, we start shifting our sleep and wake times by 20–30 minutes a day in the two or three days before departure, moving toward the destination’s schedule.

It sounds small, but it genuinely narrows the gap your body has to close once you land, and it’s the exact approach recommended by the Sleep Foundation’s own travel guidance.

Even without time zones involved, the same logic applies to any trip that starts with an early flight, a long drive, or a red-eye train: try not to stack a short night of sleep right before a demanding travel day, since you’ll be starting the trip with sleep debt you didn’t need to carry!

2. Use Light on Purpose (and Darkness Too)

Since light is what actually resets your circadian clock, we try to use it deliberately instead of just reacting to it.

Heading east, we get outside for morning light as soon as we can after landing. Heading west, we chase evening light instead.

On the flip side, sunglasses and an eye mask at the “wrong” time of day genuinely help too, especially on overnight flights or trains where the cabin lights stay on regardless of what your body thinks the time is.

Quick Tip: if you use melatonin, timing matters more than the dose. Taking it at the wrong hour can push your clock the wrong way instead of the right one, always consult a doctor on its use!

3. Treat Travel Days as Genuinely Dehydrating, Because… they normally Are!

Two years ago we got a drinking-water mania (hit the 30’s baby!), and start drinking more water than what felt necessary on our everyday life and so on trips. 

Before and during long flights or drives, drinking more water helped us a lot keeping a better sleeping pattern (fights dehidration!). Only downside, is that you might need to look for a toilet a bit more often eheh

In addition to drinking more water, another tip we can give you is to skip or seriously limit alcohol and coffee while in transit, and get up to walk or stretch every couple of hours whenever possible!

I know none of this is groundbreaking, but this small routines can really make a drastic difference between arriving wrecked and arriving functional, and it applies whether you’re on a plane, a coach, or behind the wheel too! 😉

Water rules!!

4. Give Your Brain

Fewer Reasons to Stay on Watch!

Since a chunk of bad sleep in unfamiliar places comes from your brain treating the environment as a potential threat, we try to make it feel familiar fast, wherever “it” happens to be!

Same earplugs and eye mask every single trip, a white noise app on the phone, and a room checked for blackout curtains and a reasonably quiet location before booking whenever we can.

These are small, repeatable rituals, everyone can create its own, but really they give your brain the same cues every time, which seems to be exactly what helps it stand down faster!

5. Build a Wind-Down Ritual

That Travels With You

Consistency matters more than the specific routine you pick!

We keep a short pre-sleep sequence, no screens, some stretching, maybe reading a few pages, that we try to do wherever we are, whether that’s a hotel room, an Airbnb, or a friend’s sofa bed.

On harder nights, especially after long flights or a stressful travel day, many travelers also lean on gentler options to help the body relax and unwind before switching off the lights: magnesium, herbal tea like Chinese ones or Turkish Cay, a drop of CBA like MedTerra, matcha, mate… you name it!

There are many products aimed for nights when the body is tired but the mind hasn’t caught up yet, just need to find what works for YOU!

It’s not a fix for jet lag or a noisy room, but as one small piece of a consistent wind-down habit, it can take the edge off 😉

Conclusions 🙂

And here we are at the end 🙂

Sleep and travel have never gotten along perfectly for us, and honestly, after years on the road, we don’t think they ever will completely!

But understanding what’s actually happening, jet lag, the physical toll of the journey itself, that stubborn first-night effect, the missing routine, made a real difference in how we handle it, no matter what kind of trip we’re on 🙂

All in all, you can’t force a system as old as sleep-wake homeostasis to just adapt on command, but you can absolutely work with it instead of against it.

So, before you go,:

• What’s the worst night of sleep travel has ever given you?
• Do you have a wind-down ritual that survives long trips?
• Have you tried adjusting your schedule before departure, and did it actually help?

Let us know in the comments below! 😀

Here are a few other articles you might enjoy:

17 Surprisingly Good Ways to Kill Time While Travelling

Thank you for reading, and see you in the next article! 🙂