Tired of being tired: are sleepcations really a thing?

Just when you thought that trends couldn’t get any more weird than goblin mode and living your grandma era, here comes a whole new craze - sleep. That thing we all do, almost every day of our lives, is suddenly cool. Or if not cool, then at least extremely desirable. Good sleep is now so rare for many of us, that we’re taking time off just to do it. It’s called a sleepcation and it’s yet another symptom of our stressed modern lives.

The sleepcation is supposed to have arisen because of a secondary phenomenon called sleep debt. This concept suggests that consistently getting less than the recommended seven hours of sleep adds up, affecting our health and well-being in significant ways. Lots of people build up sleep debt through something called 'revenge bedtime procrastination' (no, we’re not just making this up) in which a busy life during the day is compensated for by staying up late to feel like you’ve had some time to yourself, even if that’s scrolling social feeds or jabbing the next episode button.

You’re then a bit more tired the next day, even less efficient at the daily grind and end up feeling like you just need some time to yourself to relax. So you stay up late and… round and round we go. This vicious cycle leaves us more exhausted and struggling to meet our basic needs while juggling work, home responsibilities, and side hustles—which, according to some reports, 44% of the British public now have.

So the sleepcation looks like the answer. A holiday given over entirely to sleeping as much as you need, that completely levels out your account. But as much as we’d love to sit here and say, “book a stay with us, all your sleep debt worries will be over”, that would be as honest as the terms of a pay-day loan. Sure, you’d get a big hit of sleep to pay off your debt and you’d feel great for a few days, but soon enough you’d be back in that screen-lit alleyway with TikTok saying, “want another video of someone dancing to Murder on the Dancefloor. This is the good stuff.”

So what’s the real answer? Sadly, it’s harder than taking a few days off. You need to sleep better all the time. Happily, a lot of people are trying to work out how to do that. Many swear by not using an alarm, allowing themselves to wake naturally. We aren’t sure whether or not those people have jobs though. The ever-popular Andrew Huberman says that getting 10-20 minutes of sunlight in the first hour after waking is the key to sleep hygiene and there are plenty of studies showing how around 30 minutes of exercise (generally taken early in the day) can be great for regulating sleep.

So yes, hydrate more, exercise more, eat better. Start a virtuous cycle to replace the vicious one. All the usual stuff people tell you to do. If you can get all that down, then you never build up sleep debt in the first place and holidays can be exactly what they should - a time to be MORE awake than usual, to bounce out of bed with the dawn chorus and run laughing through the woods. Well, maybe a little lie in wouldn’t hurt, but you know what we mean.

Last of all, devices are the enemy. The blue light that screens generate stimulates our brains and makes falling asleep much more difficult. So if you’re up in bed reading this, stop right now.

Still here? Turn it off and get some sleep!