Many folks find they don’t sleep well their first night in a new bed, or anywhere that’s new.  Sleep is more fitful and difficult, rest less lasting.  In the sleep lab this is known as the “first night effect.” The expectation is strong that sleep the first time in a new, or even a different environment, will not be as “normal” as at home.

But why?  Why is sleep in a perfectly comfortable bed in the home of a friend, a relative, or a posh hotel, so much more troublesome than in your own?  Could it be that humans have some affinities with dolphins, who sleep in circles, so that the single hemisphere awake at any moment can scan the environment for sharks and other dangers?  Or is the first night effect related to recent insomnia research, that shows different parts of the brain to be “awake” when most of it is asleep?

A group at Brown led by Yuka Sasaki tried to find out.

Why Is This Night Is Different From Other Nights?

The usual suspects, healthy young adults, were rounded up to sleep consecutive nights in the lab.  They were fitted for careful electroencephalography and magnetoencephalography, bit by brain  bit, to define what happened to them.  Then they were exposed to different types of beeps, some regular, some not, and their brains imaged.

What Happened?

The researchers were interested in deep sleep, where the human body gets as close to coma as we normally approach.  Rather than look at deep sleep in turns of sleep stages, slow wave activity, the major marker of deep sleep, was assessed.

On the first night in the lab, the left hemisphere was considerably more asymmetric in its activity than on the second night.  The part that showed the biggest difference was the default mode network.  The DMN fascinates and confuses researchers.  On one hand, it doesn’t seem to “do” much.  Many think it’s used to simulate physical and mental activity, and is often assessed in studies of meditation, for example.  But the DMN is more “on” is different phases of sleep than one would normally surmise.

Not only was there less slow wave activity in people’s left hemispheres during the first night, they were also easier to activate. In essence, they were more alert and more prone to wake.

The default mode network was looking out for changes in the environment – probably many different kinds.

What Does This Mean?

1.The first night effect is related to increased vigilance throughout the night. 2. Sleep is far from monolithic – there are many different regions of the brain that are more or less arousable at different phases of sleep, a particularly pertinent finding for insomnia. 3. The default mode network is doing a lot of things in sleep and in wake – and we still don’t know what.

Travel and Sleep

So here is prima facie evidence that sleeping in a different bed is harder on sleep, in what appears to be a basic biological way.  Is travel inevitably difficult for sleep? Or are their steps to counteract it?

The Rituals of Travel

The brain loves novelty and learns from it.  Get people out of the house and their risk of later Alzheimer’s dives.  Grow new information in the brain and its capacity for resilience rises.

Except to obtain those advantages, you first have to sleep.  Sleep will consolidate many of those informational changes into useful, functional memory.  And a novel bed environment is at least at first, inimical to sleep.

So the trick is to make that environment less novel and more comfortable.  And one of the best ways to obtain that sense of security is ritualize sleep, and bring with you some of the elements of home.

Many of you know about sleep rituals even if you don’t use the term: prior to sleep you floss your teeth, brush them, turn down the bed, put out your clothes for the next day, and turn off the computer monitors, TVs and cellphones.  Many will read before they sleep; others will take baths or listen to music; some will have sex.

So it makes to take much of your home sleep ritual along with you on your travels, to make your sleep environment – wherever it may be – more homelike.  You can take a small reminder of home, a coin, a piece of jewelry, a short poem.  You can re-enact the same ritual in a different spot, as when many perform yoga poses, including sleep inducing corpse pose, before you rest.  You can take one of your favorite sleeping inducing books, to put your mind into a different state.  Interestingly, reading about travel often helps people while travelling.

But most of all you can take with you a memory of the sense of wholeness and contentment you have when you possess a full night’s sleep.  Sleep restores.  The body regenerates its tissues, and retunes and remakes its informational core.

And that memory is even stronger when you wake the next morning.