In consulting, we often travel to customers during the week. Many of my team fly to a customer on Monday morning, and fly out on Thursday night — working at home on a Friday, and having the weekend at home. It’s a common scenario, and the consultants spend 3 nights in the same hotel before heading home.

By contrast, in my role as a General Manager, I generally travel from city to city, meeting with new customers and supporting existing project teams. It’s not unusual to travel to 4 or 5 cities in a week, staying in 3 Or even 4 different hotels in a week.

I’m not too picky or needy, so long as I’ve got a quiet room and a bed with clean sheets, I’m good to go. This is pretty much guaranteed in all the big hotel chains, though I generally stay in Marriott properties.

For some reason, multi-city trips are tiring

I’m quite used to it, but since my team has grown, there are now some others doing multi-city trips for the first time, and they have been shadowing me as we travel around the country. By Thursday they are totally spent; exhausted.

At first, I put it down to the stress of flying; to do multiple cities you typically get up early in the morning to fly, or fly in the evening, or both. But I’ve been wondering if that was really a big factor; in most cases, people are able to get a solid 7 or 8 hours sleep, so it’s not like traveling multiple cities leaves you sleep deprived.

Our crocodile brain is at work

And then I came across an article in The Economist, which explains it all.

It turns out that our brain treats new sleeping locations differently, and as a result, we don’t sleep as deeply when we’re in a new location for the first night. The second night, things go back to normal.

This is presumed by the doctors in the Brown University, in Providence, Rhode Island, to be caused by an evolutionary instinct to be a night watchman in a new and unfamiliar territory, AKA the Courtyard Marriott in Dallas TX.

My corollary is that if you do 3, or 4 nights in different hotels, you may not get a good night’s sleep all week. This adds up as the week progresses, leaving you drained.

What can we do?

What I’m left wondering is what we can do about this. I’ve read articles suggesting that traveling with your own pillow can help (but don’t have the patience for this). It seems likely that creating familiarity might help.

Perhaps it’s possible to trick your crocodile brain into thinking it’s in a familiar location, by using a sound machine at home and while you are traveling? Or by using a familiar smell, like an essential oil, and putting some drops on the bed?

Does anyone have a mechanism they use to trick the brain whilst traveling? I’d love to hear from you.