In this episode of Unpacked by Afar, contributing writer Chris Colin explores what keeps us up at night and what sends us traveling for better sleep. From getting hypnotized to braving a hyperbaric chamber and trying a sleep-inducing menu — follow an insomniac as he puts sleep tourism to the test.
Transcript
Aislyn Greene: I’m Aislyn Greene and this is Unpacked, the podcast that unpacks one tricky topic in travel each week. This week, we’re looking at the rising interest in sleeping at hotels. But not quite like you might think. Because, yes, we all sleep at hotels, of course. But there’s a new trend that’s emerged in the last year or so, where hotels not only want you to sleep really well while you’re there—they also want to help you sleep better once you’re back home. And they’ve got CBD candies, lavender spritzes, hypnotherapists, and sleep therapists ready to help you catch some Zs.
Your guide to a better night’s sleep—while traveling—is Afar contributing writer Chris Colin. He’s a writer, an editor, and producer of the podcast Longer Tables with José Andrés. He’s also an insomniac. So this past summer, he decided to hit the road and put some of those so-called sleep hotels to the pillow test.
Chris Colin: Oh sorry, in case it’s not obvious, that’s the sound of me thinking about the shrinking Greenland Ice Sheet. It’s 2:30 in the morning. Already I’ve put in some quality time pondering space debris, also term limits and whether my kids should’ve taken karate, because karate seems cool. In a few minutes I’ll move on to a routine I call What Was That Breathing Exercise I Read About on Instagram the Other Day?
Waking up in the middle of the night, or struggling to fall asleep in the first place—not uncommon, of course. That very same night, I learned that my friend José had been up doing his insomnia routine, which is fretting about money, and my friend Rebecca was up doing hers, which is listening to soothing Wikipedia entries read aloud. (Wombats stack their feces to mark their territory, she wanted me to know.) All in all, about 30 percent of American adults report symptoms of insomnia, and more than a third of us get less than our recommended seven hours. That’s more than 70 million zombies walking among us with unsightly bags under our eyes, by the way.
Having this basic biological need regularly thwarted is such a familiar and exhausting ordeal that we often overlook how interesting it is also. I have a friend who got divorced and woke up at exactly 3:33 a.m. every night for a year. I heard of multiple people, not one person, multiple people whose response to insomnia is watching old Frasier episodes. So, I began asking people to tell me about their struggles and or their perfectly normal, appropriate cures.
Svetkov: Woolly eyes. Trying to imagine the day ahead without sleep. A little bit scared. I think I’ll recover. Eventually.
Sarah Rich: Around 3 a. m. I started looking on the internet for macrobiotic cookbooks, and it’s actually very hard to find a macrobiotic cookbook that was not written in the ’70s when macrobiotics were at their peak
Honan Short: I always have trouble falling asleep. I’m usually like anxious when I go to bed at night, tossing and turning, thinking about things that have gone wrong that day or things that I have to do tomorrow that I’m worried about, you know, getting done or doing wrong or stuff going on with my kids.
Chris: I’m not the only person paying attention to society’s wakefulness. The 585 billion-dollar sleep industry is vast, and it was inevitable that it would eventually collide with the world of travel. I’m talking, of course, about the rise of the “sleep destination.”
Maybe you’ve noticed. Over the last year or so, a growing number of hotels and resorts have begun luring guests with the promise of better sleep.
The specifics of these programs vary widely. Some are built on a solid foundation of scientific research. Others seem more drawn by pseudoscience. Some do their best to help you sleep that night, others want to change your habits permanently.
What they all have in common is they blew my mind when I heard about them. For as long as I’ve been paying attention to it, the travel industry has revolved around things you do with your eyes open: seeing great scenery, eating amazing food, enjoying luxurious accommodations. The idea of traveling somewhere to go unconscious is incredible to me and a reflection of something truly fascinating about where we are as a civilization.
It’s probably not surprising that several of these sleep destinations have cropped up in Northern California, where I live. We tend to be at the forefront of both excellent, cutting-edge things and also vaguely silly things. Over the last couple months I decided to visit some of these places. I wanted to see what I could learn about the rise of sleep travel, and about sleep itself, and about whatever our sleep troubles and sleep cures say about us as a species.
Chris: Can you describe the sweater?
Emily Nichols: Yes. It is a really ugly, yellow sweater with a very large turtleneck, like that kind of drapes. And I’m a very conservative dresser. I’m usually in a black suit, black clothes.
Chris: That’s Emily Nichols, describing this period where she started getting weird articles of clothing in the mail. Turned out she’d been sleep shopping in the middle of the night. She was making these inexplicable purchases, typing in her credit card number and everything, and she remembered none of it in the morning.
That was a few years ago. These days Emily is the general manager at the Kimpton Alton, a surprisingly cute, little hotel in San Francisco. I say surprising because it’s right near Fisherman’s Wharf, which is hugely popular among travelers and not at all popular among San Franciscans. But the Kimpton has created a cozy little sanctuary a couple blocks away—and as of last year, they’ve also created the Leafy Dreams package for guests. Emily’s position had given her a direct view into how many international travelers arrived desperate for sleep, sometimes pacing the lobby in the middle of the night.
So now, guests who opt for this new package get nuclear-level blackout curtains, an eye mask, a mattress that’s supposedly so perfect guests exclaim about it, a spritzer of eucalyptus pillow spray, a complimentary late checkout and, thanks to a partnership with the weed shop Cannabis Cultures, 100 mg of CBD caramels.
Chris: I know what you’re thinking: Our sleep issues are complex and deep-seated and knocking yourself out with cannabis sounds like a quick fix. To that I say: Yes! Quick fix! So much faster than a slow fix! If I’m OK taking ibuprofen for a headache, by god I’ll eat some candy to fall asleep if it’s really that easy.
So I arrived at the Kimpton on a Thursday afternoon, ate a delicious dinner at the excellent ground-floor restaurant, Abacá, and checked out from the front desk that Steely Dan record you’re hearing now. It’s not part of their sleep program, it just kind of felt right. Then a little before 10, I spritzed some pillow spray and popped a 10 mg square into my mouth. By 10:25 I was yawning—were they placebo yawns? CBD yawns? Yawns I would’ve yawned naturally? Impossible to say, but I climbed into my very comfortable bed and put on my eye mask. Within two minutes I was out.
Chris (at the Kimpton): Alright, it’s three in the morning. I don’t know about this chocolate. Pretty wide awake.
[the sound of Chris opening a CBD wrapper]
. . . that’s me deciding to double down with another 10 mg.
The verdict? Inconclusive. Maybe I have weird cannabinoid receptors. Maybe I’d have woken up regardless of what was in my system. Maybe the caramels delivered better sleep than I was otherwise headed for.
I do know that Singapore Airlines crew members use the Kimpton as their official lodging when they’re in town. So do a lot of jet-lagged business travelers, who take their sleep seriously. I don’t know how many of them gobble caramels, but 100 percent of them presumably enjoy walking around the waterfront, and nearby North Beach, and burning calories on the assorted hills therein, and at the end of the day conking out on those nice mattresses. For the sake of research, I came back a few weeks later. Skipped the caramels. This time just went au naturale. I slept like a rock.
Lauren Veloski: My nightly insomnia inevitably revolves around whether that sound I hear outside is a raccoon or a serial killer.
Chris: That’s my friend Lauren.
Michael Breus: When you turn off the light and it’s dark in the room and nobody’s talking to you or distracting you, I would argue that fear is the thing that is the thread through most insomnia, and that’s the thing that keeps people up at night.
Chris: And that’s clinical psychologist Michael Breus, aka the Sleep Doctor. He’s a fellow of The American Academy of Sleep Medicine, a bestselling author and a frequent guest on news shows you might, in fact, watch in the middle of the night when you can’t sleep.
Michael: When you see a time like we see now with divisiveness here in the U.S., uh, the political system, when you see wars going on, and all these different things going on, um, it affects people.
Chris: I’d called Breus to talk about sleep, and within five minutes—no surprise—we were talking about the state of the world.
To be clear, there are serious, diagnosable sleep issues that have nothing to do with Gaza. But for the rest of us, the state of the world is living rent-free in our heads and in our beds. The sheer quantity of worrisome issues is crazy, from the environment to geopolitics to AI’s plans for your job. It’s also all become so normal as to become unremarkable. But here’s the thing, our bodies are still struck by it, our bodies don’t simply shrug and sigh and doom scroll some more. Our bodies lie there in the dark and at 1 a.m. wonder what the hell is going on?
How many bodies, you ask?
UPenn researchers found that a quarter of all Americans develop insomnia each year—that study was done in 2018, and we all know the world has gotten much more calm and chill since then. A more recent study found that only 32 percent of Americans give their sleep a high rating. The rest range from meh to miserable. Women? They suffer more than men. Non-Hispanic Asian adults fall asleep more easily than Hispanic, non-Hispanic Black, and non-Hispanic white adults. Sleep duration varies by state. West Virginians sleep significantly less than Coloradans.
Dr. Breus offered a few handy sleep pointers for the traveler. One, bring your own pillow if at all possible. He said they overstuff them at a lot of hotels so they last longer. Two, open the window if you can, or at least lower the thermostat. We sleep better with fresh and cooler air.
Third, bring an eye mask if you can’t fully block out any light. Of course, these things can’t stop a mind set on spinning over the state of the world, but that’s OK. I had a plan for that.
Dr. Bee Epstein-Shepherd: So when we’re finished here, what would you like to have accomplished?
Chris: Dr. Bee, aka Bee Epstein-Shepherd, is the in-house hypnotherapist at Carmel Valley Ranch, a family-friendly, golfer-friendly resort tucked into 500 acres of rolling Central California hills and vineyards. I think it’s safe to say Dr. Bee is the centerpiece of the resort’s sleep program, or at least the piece I was most curious about. Where other destinations offer relaxing treatments, cute canisters of lavender-scented mist—Dr. Bee gets under the hood.
Dr. Bee has been working in this field for decades, having first made a name for herself hypnotizing professional golfers. At some point in recent years, she decided even more important causes exist. When she pivoted away from golf and toward the needs of the general public, she saw how much people were struggling with one issue in particular: sleep.
Anyway, the two of us chatted a bit, then she led me into a small office, sat on a chair across from me, and got started.
Dr. Bee: It’s your desire to be able to fall asleep whenever you want. And this is possible with the use of hypnosis.
Chris: With nothing but her voice, she began to lead me into a state of heightened relaxation. There were no tricks or anything—it really just felt like a person getting me to ratchet myself down a few notches. But apparently something was happening beneath the surface.
Dr. Bee: Your eyelids are so comfortably heavy, that in a moment when I ask you to try to open them, you’ll notice that they don’t want to nor can they open. Try to open your eyes now.
Chris: I couldn’t! No joke—I couldn’t open my eyes, at least not at first. It felt like they were physically stuck. Anyway, on we went, me a new believer now, and Dr. Bee be an escort into my subconscious. She went on, and after a few minutes gently asked me to imagine a set of steps, myself at the top. She then guided me down them, having me grow more relaxed with each one.
Dr. Bee: Ten. Nine. Deeper and deeper. Eight.
Chris: Before we began, Dr. Bee had asked me to come up with a deeply happy memory. I told her about a trip my family had taken, my wife and our kids and me splashing around in this warm river. Now, my subconscious receptive, she invited me to picture that trip. She then connected it in my mind with a special phrase.
Dr. Bee: You say to yourself, “Go to sleep, dream,” and immediately this vacation comes to mind.
Chris: After a few minutes cementing that connection, she eventually led me back up those steps to normal life. When she gave me the signal, I opened my eyes again.
The world was very much how I left it 10 minutes earlier. I was still sitting in a small room with a friendly woman in a pretty part of California. Only now, I was armed with a secret password. From this day on, whenever I needed help falling asleep, I would merely repeat those four words to myself, and my subconscious would do the rest. She had also recorded the hypnosis. And the more I listened to that recording, she said, the better it would work.
For the remainder of the day, I swam and hiked and ate a delicious dinner, and even drank a couple cocktails, not worrying about their effect on my sleep at night. The place is tucked into this gorgeous corner of California, and you burn off some serious energy just exploring it. When it came time to speak my sleep mantra, turns out, I didn’t need it. All that swimming and hiking and eating and cocktails had knocked me out cold.
But then 2 a.m. came around, and again, I found myself wide awake. For a moment, I somehow forgot all about my new regimen and started reflexively drifting towards some nagging work worries. But then Dr. Bee popped into my head and I did my thing.
Go to sleep,dream. I said it again, silently, go to sleep, dream. I’m not going to pretend I just instantly fell asleep. My first thought, in fact, was hypnosis is bogus. But my next thought—no kidding—was oh my god, look at that, it’s morning.
Luis Jaramillo: When I can’t sleep, I listen to Antiques Roadshow U.K. I don’t like the U.S. version—too many baseball cards and jerseys. So I play YouTube and then just hear what they’re saying about different kinds of porcelain, Meissen. Um, I like to hear about Delft. There’s many, many different kinds of British porcelain that I think I have an idea what it looks like, but I don’t actually. Uh, I don’t like when they talk about dolls, especially the shoulder-head dolls. Um, I like furniture, especially 17th-century furniture. Anyhow, I love to listen to it and then it puts me to sleep.
Chris: That’s Luis Jaramillo, an otherwise sane, human man who nevertheless spends his resting hours learning about very old dolls. I don’t know if you, too, watch Antiques Roadshow U.K. in the middle of the night. But I’m guessing that you’ve experienced some version of this at some point, too.
That is the guess the sleep destinations are making, too. The emergence of this trend amounts to a strange mirror, being held up to us all.
The hospitality industry’s offerings have always reflected something about our current state of mind. It’s not very different from how our current political campaigns or our Instagram algorithms tell us something about our deepest fears and desires. But travel, I think, is a category all its own. I’d argue that our leisure pursuits have a special line to a special section of our consciousness—and maybe our unconscious.
Look, for example, at the development of ecotourism. It’s not hard to see how that reflected a rising concern about the impact of our existence on the planet. The growth of agritourism perhaps revealed a discomfort with how far we’ve strayed from our simpler rustic roots. Then there’s all the marketing of travel as an opportunity to get centered, to enjoy the present more. Clearly, this reflected our anxiety that we’ve become too frazzled and scattered as a people. In the marketing of family travel, I see an appeal to our worries that we’re not doing enough for our children—we’re too distracted or stressed, so we need to take them on this amazing cruise.
Pull back a bit and the psychic underpinnings of this very country are essentially one big travel offering. Westward expansion was marketed toward our deepest fantasies about freedom and adventure. Over time, with the rise of the middle class, hotels and resorts in turn began to offer the fantasy of upward mobility, in the form of opulent weekends at high-toned venues.
And now, at least in a sliver of the travel industry, this latest trend suggests a new turn in our collective psyche. What we crave, it seems, isn’t freedom, or adventure, or upward mobility—but sweet, sweet oblivion.
On a recent Thursday, that craving brought me to the Stanly Ranch, a historic working ranch at the southern edge of Napa Valley. It’s a beautiful place, 712 acres of winding pathways and waving grasses and luxurious-but-not-fussy farmhouse-style accommodations. On top of all that, they have developed a pretty robust sleep program.
“For guests seeking better sleep,” they say in their literature, “we advise sitting in the steam room or cedar sauna to release toxins before a Dry Brush Massage with Lymphatic Release, touted for reducing tension and putting the body at ease. Finish with roughly 30 minutes in the hyperbaric chamber to boost oxygen levels in the body and brain while minimizing inflammation.”
Their offerings continue: acupuncture, restorative yoga, Reiki, guided meditation and hours-long sound baths, and other things that help quiet the body and mind.
By the way, over the course of all these visits, I only used the sleep techniques or products from that particular place. I wouldn’t, for example, use Dr. Bee’s hypnosis phrase here at the Stanly Ranch, which is appropriate because they had pretty interesting approaches of their own here.
Hyperbaric chamber attendant: People think it’s very intimidating, but it’s not.
Chris: That’s the nice hyperbaric chamber attendant showing me into what resembled a space-age vinyl coffin. I climbed in, stuck some plastic oxygen tubes into my nostrils, and she zipped me up. And then I just lay there, in this padded tube, affixed to the side of the chamber. In front of me was a small gauge marked “vacuum”. Sure enough, the attendant tinkered with something outside and the needle on the gauge started creeping up: 5 PSI, 10 PSI, 15 PSI. As the pressure rose, I began to hear little popping noises—the sound of the vinyl snapping taut around me.
I also began to notice a growing pain in my right ear. I’m going to get this part out of the way right now: The hyperbaric chamber didn’t work for me. Turns out I’d been swimming a couple days earlier and had water in my ear canal. It felt like I was on an airplane, except even more uncomfortable. When it got too much, I bailed. I’m sorry. This was totally on me, and I do not join my wife in calling it the “barbaric chamber.”
But it’s OK! In another universe I might have lost sleep, as it were, over my bungling of the hyperbaric chamber. But my other Stanly Ranch treatments were so excellent that I didn’t miss it at all.
Tim [Stanly Ranch]: Uh, lymphatic drainage is basically your trash system of your body.
Chris: That’s Tim. His craft could benefit from a renaming session, once they’re done with “hyperbaric chamber.” “Lymphatic drainage” doesn’t have quite the poetic ring of shiatsu or aromatherapy. And you might know it as more as a treatment for people with cancer or who otherwise have blocked lymphatic systems. But in recent years it’s grown in popularity as an all-purpose wellness offering, designed to promote a broader kind of body health.
Jen [Stanly Ranch]: This is a practice for modern well-being, so there are techniques that we’ll use that scientifically slow your heart rate and relax your nervous system. But at the same time there’s no expectation as to how this practice should go for you.
Chris: And that’s Jen, who led my mediation class later. She had red hair up in a clip and the warm, relaxed smile of someone who gets a solid eight hours a night. Hers was not the kind of meditation where you steal off to your messy bedroom for 10 minutes while the kids clomp around in the other room. Behind her was a huge glass window, framing the golden foothills of the Vaca Mountains.
Woman[ Stanly Ranch]: This is actually helping clear the central channel chakras. I also work with the knees and the feet and the hands. Those are energy vortexes.
Chris: And that’s the woman who led my Reiki session. I’m sorry, I got her name and promptly forgot it because my entire mind got wiped over the next hour.
Lymphatic drainage, meditation, Reiki: These are not insomnia remedies, per se. But insomnia doesn’t really have a remedy. To the extent that sleep trouble, my kind anyway, is the product of imbalance, what these pursuits offer are gentle ways of finding a little equilibrium.
When I first started pondering my own insomnia, I focused on the anxious state of the world. But, of course, things can get off kilter more locally, too. Not in huge ways—those are easy to spot. I’m talking about a little mismanagement of your time, or attention, or relationships, or general centeredness. It adds up in sneaky ways that you might overlook during waking hours. But that late-shift bookkeeper dutifully tabulates it. Sleep is where we pay the piper for the choices we make all day—the food, the wine, the screen time, the elevator instead of the stairs, the busyness. The sun goes down and the balance comes due.
Well, back at the Stanly Ranch, I felt a kind of sedative clarity come over me during my different treatments. As my lymph nodes drained, I found myself thinking about my parents, and how I wanted to be more deliberate in the way I spent time with them.
During meditation, I absorbed what Jen was saying about having our ever-vigilant nervous systems learn to stand down and getting in touch with our parasympathetic nervous systems, which relaxes our bodies after danger or stress. During Reiki, without this person even touching me, a well of emotion about my children and the waning days of their childhood swept over me. I made about 9 million promises to myself about time and priorities right there on the table. They weren’t the kind that make you anxious—it was relaxing, somehow, to have that lucidity. I slept great that night. But more to the point, I felt like I’d been reminded of what my sleep needs going forward.
José: Not infrequently, I will pop a melatonin, which I don’t think is good. But the other thing that’s more pressing is I’ve gotten into the habit of needing to be listening to a sports podcast, to sort of interrupt intrusive thoughts.
Chris: That’s my friend José, the one who worries about money at night. It was a Friday afternoon and I was on my way to my fourth and final sleep destination. Which is to say I was in the mood, as I often was these days, to hear friends talk about their sleep neuroses. That, ostensibly, is why I called him from the road.
But as we talked, it dawned on me I’d also called because I was bored. I wanted input, and it’s frowned upon to scroll Instagram while you’re driving down the freeway.
Was this not part of the whole problem? Our inability to downshift and just sit quietly? Here I was on 101 South, that part where Northern California magically becomes Central California, and suddenly you’re surrounded by these bright gold hills, dotted with live oaks. All around me were cherry stands and artichoke stands and local honey for sale and the improbable offer of eight avocados for a dollar. But that wasn’t enough for me. I needed more stimuli.
It’s not hard to see that need as the offshoot of something that happened long ago. Something, by the way, that the Sleep Doctor hates.
Dr. Michael Breus: So I think a lot of the human inventions have caused a lot of the sleep problems. Let me put it to you this way. If it wasn’t for that asshole Thomas Edison for inventing the light bulb, my guess is, is we probably wouldn’t have insomnia.
Chris: The problem he described wasn’t just the light itself, but all the other stresses that our technologically distorted days have let in.
Dr. Breus: Sleep from the 1940s to the 2020s is dramatically different, right? We have much different influences on our lives, much more light, physical light in our lives, much more stress, physical stress.
Chris: I passed through Monterey and 30 miles later the stunning Big Sur landscape opened up. At every gravelly turnout, a handful of drivers had pulled over to take selfies. Behind them, where the Pacific Ocean should be, there stretched an endless expanse of clouds—a cozy, pillowy cushion of whiteness, as though the world had turned into sleep itself out here.
Fifteen minutes later, I pulled into the Post Ranch Inn.
Californians know of this place, by reputation if not direct experience. It’s this legendary hideaway perched atop a cliff overlooking the Pacific Ocean. When you win your third Oscar, this is where you go to recharge. I’ve heard people say it’s the prettiest spot in the country.
During the pandemic, the Post Ranch Inn teamed up with Michael Breus to create a pretty ambitious sleep program. In addition to a couple sleep-focused spa treatments, you’re given access to a seven-part video series that Dr. Breus created for guests, and an array of Dr. Breus–approved products—more on those later.
The place itself also just naturally abides by the Breus-ian principles. No TVs or alarm clocks in the guest rooms, no chemicals or dyes in the bedding, just you and the trees and the horizon and the inner calm you’ve accrued over the course of the day.
My home for the next almost 24 hours would be a private residence on a cliff, 1,200 above the ocean. In some ways the sleep treatment starts there—when your brain is scanning for humpbacks instead of to-do list items, your parasympathetic nervous system takes the hint. I stood on my little private deck for a while then eventually walked down a winding path to a cute little yurt, tucked in among some pines.
I was about to experience yoga nidra for the first time.
Krystle: Nidra is deep sleep. Or meditative, conscious sleep. So you’re in a state of awareness, yet deep, deep rest.
Chris: That’s Krystle, explaining it to me. Yoga nidra is a tantric relaxation technique, more meditative than yogic. I’m playing that tape because I did it, and it truly brought me back down to first gear. So did the forest meditation I did later. But what I’d soon learn is that one of the best features at the Post Ranch Inn is the lack of features.
They don’t ram endless activities at you. I mean, yes, you can absolutely sign up to have a falcon land on your arm if you so desire, and that falcon can probably serve you your favorite kind of scotch. But in general you don’t feel like you’re on a cruise ship, with 9,000 things to do every hour.
There’s a statistic I think about a lot—not because it’s surprising, but because of how precisely it confirms your suspicions. According to the Lancet journal, the prevalence of chronic insomnia is just 1–2 percent in the few preindustrial equatorial societies that still exist. The Post Ranch Inn is by no means preindustrial—I doubt that was an agrarian infinity pool I lazed around in. But I was kinda moving at a preindustrial pace, and letting only a preindustrial number of things into my brain.
Pushkin, the Russian poet and apparently insomniac, spoke of the quote “mouse-like scampering of life.” Well, I could feel my scampering subside a bit.
Dinner at the Post Ranch Inn is served a quarter mile above sea level, surrounded by floor-to-ceiling windows and warm wood. I enjoyed a multi-course personalized sleep menu: zero-proof cocktails, followed by salmon tartare, white gazpacho, guinea hen, and other delicious dishes chosen for the sleep-assisting ingredients in them: tryptophan, vitamin B and D, omega-3, magnesium. I ate slowly, taking my time with bites, tracing my tongue over the soft rivulets of a morel mushroom instead of wolfing it down.
Back in my room, hustle culture scratched at the door: Just dash off a quick email, Chris! Or maybe numb myself hotel-room style with a few minutes of some dumb detective show.
But I resisted and instead put on some spacey music.
[SPACEY MUSIC TAPE]
Chris: I opened the window for some ocean breeze, and began going through Dr. Breus’s Sweet Dreams bag of goodies. There was a sleep mask, and some blue-light blocking glasses, and a nasal breathing device that gently holds your nostrils open a bit more. There was tea, and natural lip balm, and a special flower essence mist, two different kinds of sublingual spray, and one of Dr. Breus’s books, which helps you identify what he calls your chronotype, your natural sleeping style more or less based on your internal clock. In the book, he goes more into Edison’s invention of the light bulb, and I learned that a decade later, he bragged in an interview that he seldom slept more than four hours a night anymore.
“There really is no reason why men should go to bed at all,” Edison wrote, “and the man of the future will spend far less time in bed.”
Well, this man spent the next eight hours in bed. Not a toss or a turn; I slept great. I can only assume Edison rolled over in his 200-watt grave.
Over the course of all these visits, friends would of course ask, “Did it work?” I get it—I certainly wondered the same. Well, one way to answer is: sometimes. Probably better than sometimes, though it’s hard to say definitively—there’s no A/B test in life or in sleep.
But another way to answer is that the question is wrong. “Did it work?” That question is born of the same busy, modern, productivity-focused mind that gets us into this mess in the first place. There’s a big buzzing through-line connecting technology with the pace of our lives and the acceleration of unsettling global crises. This in turn connects to our incessant, dysregulating internalized capitalism—wanting quick returns on our lavender-scented sleep cures is born of that very system.
Our sleep issues are a massive, groggy ship that needs to be turned around slowly. So I came to think about these sleep destinations less like a “cure” and more like a dentist appointment (a very, very high-end dentist appointment). You don’t come home from the dentist and ask, “Did it work?” You come home a little more committed to taking better care of yourself and with a little less plaque on your teeth. The plaque, in this case, being all the bad habits we pick up every day as modern inhabitants of the modern world. And look, if I truly don’t improve in the months ahead, my friend Charley has a solid plan B for going to sleep.
Charley Locke: When I can’t sleep, I listen to an audiobook series about a wizard cop in London solving magical crimes throughout the city.
Aislyn Greene: And that was Chris Colin. We’ve linked to his website, his books, and the podcast he produces in the show notes. And if you’d like to change your own sleep patterns at one of the hotels Chris visited, you’ll find those links in the show notes as well. And don’t forget to sign up for our podcast newsletter, Behind the Mic.
Next week, we’ll be back with an episode unpacking Myrtle Beach, South Carolina, where there’s a whole lot more to the beach than meets the eye.
Andre James: It’s one of the most diverse food scenes in the country, when the city was officially incorporated, they put all their eggs in the tourism basket. So you have these hotels that people need to work at. So what happened was Myrtle Beach started letting the J1 visa, the workers come work for the summer, and a lot of them end up having to stay, and having families.
There’s a German restaurant, Cafe Old Vienna. Then you go a couple streets down and you have Thai food, you know, then you go further down, you got a Brazilian restaurant, like, real Brazilian, that don’t speak any English, you can drink cachaça with them. Then you go down the street from there, you know, you got a Filipino restaurant, you know, right by Family Kingdom. So it’s diversity. Like, you don’t really see that everywhere.
Ready for more unpacking? Visit afar.com, and be sure to follow us on Instagram and Twitter. The magazine is @afarmedia. If you enjoyed today’s exploration, I hope you’ll come back for more great stories. Subscribing makes this easy! You can find Unpacked on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or your favorite podcast platform. And be sure to rate and review the show. It helps other travelers find it. We also want to hear from you: Is there a travel dilemma, trend, or topic you’d like us to explore? Drop us a line at afar.com/feedback or email us at unpacked@afar.com.
This has been Unpacked, a production of AFAR Media. The podcast is produced by Aislyn Greene and Nikki Galteland. Music composition by Chris Colin.
And remember: The world is complicated. We’re here to help you unpack it.
