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Christmas stay over blues
This Christmas millions of us will sleep in a strange bed - in hotels, holiday homes or the houses of friends or family. We will return home tired and cranky, not just because we have eaten and drunk too much but because we have slept badly. Sleep loss can affect concentration, the ability to think flexibly, memory and even speaking ability, a bad night over the Christmas period makes us more likely to feel sleepy in the afternoon, find the in-laws irritating, snap at the children - and have an accident on the motorway.
The first night away from home will always be rather a write-off. Sleep experts warn of "first-night syndrome", which occurs whether you stay in a five-star hotel, a remote cottage or someone's spare room. It seems that we all need time to adjust to a new sleeping environment - to differences in light, noise, type of bed or mattress, the position of the bed or even the side of it on which we sleep. This is why feedback from hotel guests is usually more positive after a two-night stay than a one-night one. Provided there is no time-zone change, "rapid habituation" should have occurred by the second or third night and we should all be sleeping sweetly. Most guests end up in overheated box rooms, sleeping on small beds with sagging mattresses.
Research by the Sleep Council - an organisation funded by bed manufacturers - shows that the British and Americans have the world's smallest double beds (135 x 190cm). This is 20 per cent less than the countries with the biggest beds: Belgium, Greece, the Netherlands, Iceland and Finland (160 x 200cm). And although British bed-buying habits are changing (the number of king-sized beds sold has risen by 2 per cent over the past five years), the standard double is still the biggest seller. What's more, the spare room is the last place to benefit from any size increase - it is likely to contain the bed that your hosts dumped when they upgraded to a bigger, more comfortable one.
This is bad news if you have a back problem, an old or second-hand bed that has shaped itself to someone else's body will almost certainly aggravate or contribute to back pain. A sagging mattress puts strain on muscles and ligaments, which in turn can cause long-term problems.
The other main complaint for people sleeping away from home is room temperature. Our bodies cool as we sleep and heat is lost from those parts that stick out from under the bedclothes - chiefly the head. So if there are too many bedclothes on you, or the room is too hot, this normal cooling process is affected. To sleep comfortably you need a cool room at 16-17C (61-63F).
The room temperature in someone else's house can be difficult to control - and in any case, our preferences tend to differ according to age and sex. Older people usually prefer hotter rooms and men prefer colder bedrooms than women.
As if those problems were not enough, some experts say that the older mattress habitually found in the spare room is a breeding ground for dust mites - hardly cheering news for those with allergies who are planning a sleepover visit.
The problems of sleeping at your mother-in-law's are not so much a bad bed as the trials and tribulations of being there It's all psychological - eating her dreadful Christmas cake again,
the food and alcohol intake, the children being given too many sweets, the fact that the present you bought for Uncle Albert is definitely too small for him. It's all the worries and tribulations of Christmas itself when you go away.
It is reassuring to know, though, that making up for lost sleep while you are away is comparatively easy - you need not match it hour for hour, just make sure that you get one early night. If you usually sleep for seven hours and you lose a whole night's sleep while away, you need only make up a third of the deficit to return to normal. An early night followed by ten hours' sleep should do the trick.
