How to Sleep Well Away From Home

You picked the hotel with the good reviews. You did everything right. And you are still lying there at half-past three in the morning, staring at an unfamiliar ceiling and doing the maths on how many hours you have left. It happens in hotels, spare rooms, holiday cottages and new houses. It happens to people who sleep perfectly well at home.

Sleep researchers have a name for it. They call it the first night effect, and it comes down to your brain treating an unfamiliar room as something worth keeping half an eye on while you’re trying to sleep. Stick with us, and we’ll go through what the research says and what actually helps you settle.

The first night effect is the poorer, lighter, more broken sleep people can get on their first night in an unfamiliar place. It was first described in the 1960s and appears so reliably in sleep laboratories that researchers have long treated the first night differently from the nights that follow. Six decades of studies, and the first night is still the one that researchers treat with caution.

So what is actually going on up there?

In 2016, a team at Brown University decided to study the thing everyone else was discarding rather than simply ignoring it. Using several measures of brain activity at once, they found that on the first night in a new room, one hemisphere showed less deep sleep activity than the other. In their study, it was the left half. That side also showed a stronger response to unexpected sounds, suggesting it might be more alert to what was happening around the sleeper.

The researchers described this asymmetry as a kind of night watch. Some birds and marine mammals sleep with one half of the brain awake when they are somewhere risky, and this looks like a faint human version of the same thing. As the study’s corresponding author put it, there is a Japanese saying that if you change your pillow, you cannot sleep. Which is a neater summary than most research papers manage.

The “night watch” is the explanation you will most often see given for the effect. It is also still being argued over. A 2024 study in the journal Sleep tested it on 45 people. The people whose brains showed the biggest imbalance were not the ones who slept worst, which weakens the case for that imbalance being the whole explanation. The same team found that people slept badly on the first night, even in their own beds at home. They were wired up to monitoring equipment on those nights, mind you, which is its own kind of unfamiliar.

So, the science is still working out exactly why it happens. What happens to sleep is clearer. The first night tends to be the worst one, with people taking longer to fall asleep and spending more of the night awake.

Often, just one night. A study of 24 healthy young men found they spent less of their time in bed actually asleep on the first night than the second, and more of the night lying awake. That is the technical version of tossing and turning at 3 am and then sleeping fine the next evening.

The same study found something you can actually act on. The researchers tracked everyone’s sleep for the week before they arrived. The more irregular someone’s bedtimes had been, the less of that first night they spent asleep. It is an association rather than proof of cause, but it is still a useful one.

By the third night, things appear to have levelled off. A 2022 meta-analysis pooling 53 studies found almost no difference between the second night and the third.

There is one obvious caveat. If the room is genuinely uncomfortable or noisy, a second night will not fix that on its own.

Whatever the brain is doing, it is only part of the story. Unfamiliar rooms tend to get the basics wrong in ways your own bedroom doesn’t, because you’ve spent years quietly fixing your own.

Temperature is the usual culprit. In our 2026 UK Sleep Survey of 2,000 adults, 24% of people who have disturbed nights named being too hot as one of their usual reasons, and 23% named struggling to get comfortable. Hotel rooms can run warm, and the windows do not always open. Our guide to the best temperature for sleep covers what to aim for, and there is a separate one on getting cold at night if you have the opposite problem.

Then there is noise you have no control over. Lifts, corridors, road traffic, someone else’s television through a thin wall. Your brain is already primed to notice unfamiliar sounds, so a room that would be fine at home can suddenly feel like an event every twenty minutes. Steady background sound helps mask it, and white, pink and brown noise each work slightly differently. Then there is light, because hotel curtains rarely meet in the middle and standby lights are surprisingly bright at 4 am.

Part of what you are missing is physical. A mattress you’ve slept on for years has become familiar to your body, and you’ve become familiar with it. Swap it for a stranger’s, and every pressure point lands somewhere new.

The bigger part might be what the bed means to you. In our 2026 survey, 41% of UK adults said their bed is their favourite place to relax, and 37% said it is the most relaxing space in their house. Think about what actually happens in yours. The late-night chats, the toast crumbs, the dog who is absolutely not allowed up there. Years of that have quietly turned your bed into a place your body has learned to relax. None of it transfers automatically to a hotel room, where you’re asking a bed you’ve never met to do a job your own bed has had years to get right.

It also explains why some hotel beds feel so good once you have settled. There are specific things good hotels do to their beds that are worth stealing, and we have pulled them apart to explain why hotel beds are so comfy. If you want that feel at home, our hotel-style beds are built around the same idea.

Let’s get straight into the sleep advice:

• Get your sleep regular in the week before you go: Irregular bedtimes beforehand were linked to poorer sleep on night one in the study above, so a steady week beats a frantic one.
• Bring your own pillow if you possibly can: A pillow gives you a familiar shape, height and feel, and an unfamiliar one may simply not suit you.
• Bring one familiar smell: A pillow spray, your own hand cream, the shampoo you always use. It weighs nothing, and it can make a strange room smell a little more like yours.
• Sort the room out before you get into bed: Curtains clipped shut, standby lights covered, heating turned down, kettle and air conditioning switched off at the wall. Pack earplugs and an eye mask too, even if you never use them at home. Doing all this at 10 pm is much easier than doing it at 3 am.
• Run your usual wind-down in the usual order: Same book, same stretches, same tea. The cues matter more than the location.

Everything else still applies. Short daytime naps, a light late meal and a relaxation technique to fall back on all help wherever you are.

Moving house is the version of this nobody warns you about. There is no going home to your own bed at the end of it, because this is now your own bed, in a room that still feels like someone else’s.

It shows up in our data. When we asked 2,000 UK adults to pick up to three things that had the biggest impact on their sleep, 8% chose moving home, putting it ahead of both getting married and getting divorced.

The first night effect usually fades after the first few nights. What sometimes does not fade is a mattress that came with the house, or one that made the move with you and was already past its best. If you are still sleeping badly weeks after the boxes are unpacked, the room is no longer the obvious new variable. Our guide on how often you should change your mattress covers the signs, and Sleepmatch will tell you which comfort grade suits you before you buy.