Reclining Buddha statue at Gal Vihara, the Rock Temple, in Polonnaruwa, sri lanka
By Adam and Larry Mogelonsky
With sleep science reaching the mainstream over the past few years, numerous hotel brands have unveiled fancy new sleep programs in an arms race to win over travelers looking for accommodations that will help them get a full night’s rest while aboard.
But the rise of sleep tourism needn’t be limited to only luxury hotels that have the capital to devote a gargantuan sum per key to noise-dampening materials, new air purification systems or state-of-the-art bedding systems that have built-in temperature and moisture controls. Rather, any brand can build a strategic plan for deploying affordable sleep enhancements to their rooms and their onsite services.
But to be strategic in the true sense of the word, and not just remixing amenities arbitrarily based on what the competition is doing, the most important term to have a base understanding of is ‘sleep architecture’.
Lest we forget that it has only been a decade or so that society has started to approach sleep not just as an unconscious and unnecessary aspect of life but as perhaps the most vital period of the 24-hour cycle. This is when the body goes to work on building muscles or restoring other organs, when the immune system is most active to prevent disease propagation, when hyperemotional states are reset to baseline and when memories are transferred from short-term to long-term storage. The latter of these two processes mostly occur during rapid eye movement (REM) sleep while the first two repair pathways largely occur during deep or slow wave sleep (also called non-REM sleep).
Sleep architecture describes the controlling operator in the brain that determines the daily rhythm of when you feel tired when you should wake up, when you should extend the duration of sleep and how to allocate the time you are asleep to REM and non-REM.
As an example, let’s say your regular sleep-wake cycle is 10:30 pm to 5:30 am and you had a heavy barbell squats day at the gym. As you’re drifting off that night, the brain says to itself, “Okay, we have seven hours here and we did a lot of damage to our musculoskeletal system today, so let’s devote more time to slow wave repair at the sacrifice of REM-based memory codification.” Bundling a big gym day with lots of important meetings may result in some important information conveyed during those meetings being forgotten because the brain prioritizes non-REM repair tasks.
Once you understand that the architecture of sleep is all about maintaining a rhythm and the allocation of limited resources, you can begin to design some sleep programming for your hotel that is highly personalized, customizable, and more effective – and thus more meaningful and valuable – based on a guest’s needs on any particular evening. Here are some ideas to inspire you with what you can do for programming as lensed through the principles of sleep architecture:
1. Melatonin supplementation. Ostensibly the most renowned sleep aid and one that’s being studied as a longevity supplement, several hotels are now including melatonin-based beverages, low-dose pills or powder additives as part of the minibar or in the sundry. The issue with this supplement is timing; take it too late and in too high a dose (which is very easy to do) then you will likely wake up quite groggy, especially if your sleep rhythm hasn’t adjusted to a new time zone.
As such, melatonin wouldn’t be recommended for someone arriving in the wee hours of the morning and looking for something to settle the nerve before drifting off. Instead, a signature herbal tea with chamomile, passionflower, lemon balm or other natural ingredients will work far better to gently lull you to sleep. Then on the techie side, there are quite a few devices, especially those in the IR (infrared) and PEMF (pulsed electromagnetic field) areas that claim to extend REM and promote deep wave, so that you can maximize whatever your body and mind need after an intense travel day.
2. Circadian lighting equipment. It’s becoming common knowledge that we should all limit blue light and stick with amber-red wavelengths at night to get a good night’s sleep. Sleep architecture tells us the answer in that you have a bodily clock that is sensitive to blue light. A few hotels are keen to meet this need, upgrading their lighting systems with non-overhead, dimmed evening lights as well as ones that can adjust into the red spectrum to set the mood for sleep. A far cheaper amenity is to offer blue light-blocking glasses.
Sleep architecture also tells us that these solutions may not do the trick. Suppose your daily rhythm is to wake up at 6 am EDT in Toronto then you head out to Vancouver on a business trip for the week. You eat right, you settle into your room, and you wake up at 3 am PDT. Counterintuitively, to bring your clock back three hours to the West Coast tempo, you may want some softer, balanced yellow light in your room alongside a noncaffeinated energizing tea to extend your bodily clock.
3. Bedding customization. When you start regularly tracking your sleep, one of the first things you may discover is that you wake up and move around quite frequently during the night. These can be ‘unconscious wakeups’ while the latter is often ascribed as a form of ‘restless leg syndrome’. The cause of these can be poor nutrition, stress, acute bodily pain, room temperature, moisture, bad air quality, uncomfortable linens, uncomfortable mattresses, uncomfortable pillows, or any combination of these. What we do know is that these sleep interruptions can negatively affect bodily repair and REM cycling.
Enter a host of new-age suppliers ready to help solve these issues. You have uber-expensive mattresses with built-in temperature controls being deployed at luxury hotels. You have pillow concierge services where guests can sample different firmness levels. You have smart thermostats that can better help to keep the ambient temperature at the scientifically preferred 19C. You have more breathable linens. You have materials that don’t emit volatile organic compounds (VOCs) and more effective HVACs. Combine these features with sleep tracking wearables and your guests can see the overnight benefit to their health in terms of improved sleep quality scores.
4. Food menus. The current heuristic for getting the best possible sleep is the 3-2-1: no food three hours from sleep, no water two hours out and no screens one hour out. By doing this, it means that your blood is never being redirected to your digestive tract to absorb food and can squarely focus on repairing the body during slow-wave sleep. This alone means that in general snacking before bed is bad for the health, but alas, sleep architecture suggests that the answer needs to be individualized.
To start, if you regularly snack before bed then this has become a part of your daily blueprint; interrupting this by not snacking when combined with the stressor that is a foreign bedroom can be enough to cause a cortisol or adrenaline release at times when they aren’t conducive to falling fast asleep. Given these rhythmic challenges, hotels can best serve varying guest needs by designing sleep-friendly food menus comprised of light, nutrient-dense and easily digestible snacks.
To close, we hope this wasn’t too far into the weeds of the science of sleep. This is still an emerging field but as you can see there are numerous applications for our industry. Above all, what we are witnessing is a great societal push for more awareness of the importance of quality sleep, and this will ultimately compel hotels to start designing services and amenities that cater directly to this guest demand. Hence, you best start building a sleep strategy for your hotel and understanding sleep architecture will help to ensure that you develop a highly fruitful plan.
