If you think you sleep better in a hotel room than at home, you’re not alone: According to one survey, about 73% of people surveyed reported better sleep when they crash in a hotel. While some of that might be exhaustion from travel or being away from stress factors, there’s something else going on here: Hotels have designed their rooms to be as sleep-friendly as possible. Some hotels even lean into this phenomenon, marketing “sleep retreats” and offering amenities like pillow menus. There are several reasons you might want your home to emulate the look and feel of a high-end hotel, but if sleep is your enemy, you can one more to the list: Setting up your bedroom like a hotel room can lead to better sleep.
Choose quality bedding
This is pretty obvious: Even mid-tier hotels offer luxurious mattresses, pillows, and linens that make crawling under the covers a comforting, pleasurable experience that scratchy old sheets and a mattress you’ve moved through six apartments will never replicate.
If you have an existential sleeping experience in a specific hotel, you might be able to buy their bedding directly from them to get the same experience at home. You can also make a note of the bedding and research whether you can buy it directly somewhere (my wife and I once simply asked a hotel what kind of sheets they used, then found them online).
But just by upgrading your mattress, sheets, and pillows, you’ll give yourself a sleeping experience closer to hotel living.
Make the room darker
Hotel rooms, you may have noticed, tend to be dim: Even when you turn on every light in the room it’s all warm, low-level light. There are usually heavy blackout curtains on the windows, too. The combined effect is a cocoon of soothing, warm light that transforms into an enveloping darkness with the touch of a button. Put simply, darker environments equal better sleep.
Adding blackout curtains to your bedroom can replicate that near-perfect darkness that makes a great night’s sleep just a little easier to attain, but you should also pay attention to the lighting. Getting that warm, dim hotel vibe is all about choosing light bulbs that aren’t harsh—avoiding “blue light” in your bedroom can lead to better sleep, so install some sleep-promoting light bulbs and make sure you’ve got the lighting set very low when you enter your bedroom every night.
Cool the room down more
Temperature has a big impact on how well you sleep—heat and humidity can interrupt sleep cycles, so hotels usually keep their rooms pretty cool. The ideal temperature for sleeping is probably lower than you think—it’s about 65 degrees. Setting your room’s climate control to hit that temp when you go to bed will give you that cozy hotel room vibe that encourages deep, restful sleep. Boosting air movement and ventilation with a ceiling fan, an oscillating fan, or by installing a window air conditioner can also help get you closer to that ideal temperature.
Plus, fans and air conditioners double as white noise, which can also block out the ambient sounds that can startle us out of a deep sleep. You can also add a white noise machine or use an app on your phone to block out even more noise.
Straighten things up
One final secret why hotel rooms are so restful? They’re tidy and cleaned regularly. Housekeeping showing up every day, putting everything back into place and cleaning things up can have an effect on how you perceive the environment. Studies have shown that clutter and mess can have a negative impact on our sleep, so the magical way hotel rooms stay clean and tidy contributes to getting better sleep. So if you’re looking to improve your sleep experience at home, do a weekly sweep of the bedroom and put things away, wipes down surfaces, and freshen the air to give it a sense of cleanliness and order.
