Sleeping on a plane comes down to four things: a seat that lets you lean, a way to block light and noise, timing your sleep to your destination, and avoiding the things that make sleep shallow, like alcohol and late caffeine. Here are twelve tips that make a real difference, from booking to landing.
Before you fly
- Choose a window seat. You can lean against the wall, and nobody climbs over you. Avoid rows by the galleys and toilets, where there's light, noise and traffic all night.
- Pick the right flight. A departure close to your usual bedtime, landing in the local morning, is the easiest to sleep through.
- Shift your schedule a little. Going to bed an hour earlier or later for a couple of nights, toward destination time, makes onboard sleep easier. The jet lag calculator tells you which way.
- Pack a sleep kit: a neck pillow that supports your chin (wrap-around and memory-foam styles beat the classic U for many people), an eye mask, earplugs or noise-cancelling headphones, a warm layer and socks.
On board
- Set your watch to destination time and decide when you'll sleep. If it's night there, sleep soon after the meal; if it's day, stay awake and sleep later.
- Skip the alcohol. It makes you drowsy but breaks up sleep later, and cabin air is dry already.
- Watch the caffeine. A coffee with the meal can still be in your system hours later; the caffeine calculator shows how long.
- Get comfortable early. Seatbelt fastened over your blanket, so the crew doesn't wake you to check it. Recline, shoes off, layer on.
- Block the screen glow. Turn off the seat-back screen and keep your phone face down. The eye mask handles the rest.
- Use steady sound. The cabin roar is already a kind of brown noise; noise-cancelling headphones with soft brown or pink noise cover the voices and announcements on top. Downloading a long track before you fly avoids relying on the Wi-Fi.
- Try a wind-down routine. A few minutes of slow breathing, like 4-7-8 on the breathing timer, tells your body it's bedtime.
- Ask about sleep aids before you go. If you're thinking about melatonin or sleeping pills, talk to a doctor first; some pills leave you groggy on landing and immobile for hours, which isn't good for circulation.
Stay safe while you sleep
On long flights, get up and walk the aisle when you wake, flex your ankles and calves, and drink water. Long periods without moving raise the risk of blood clots, especially for people with risk factors; compression socks help, and anyone at higher risk should ask a doctor before flying.
After landing
Even a few hours of sleep on board leaves you with jet lag to deal with. Get daylight at the right time, eat at local meal times and stay up until local bedtime; our jet lag plan has the details.
Sleep by flight length
| Flight | What to aim for |
|---|---|
| Under 4 hours | A 20-minute nap at most, or none; save the sleep for the night |
| Overnight, 6 to 8 hours | Skip the meal and sleep straight after take-off: three to five hours is a good result |
| Long-haul, 10 hours or more | One long sleep timed to destination night, plus short naps; walk the aisle in between |
| Ultra-long-haul, 15 hours or more | Plan two sleep blocks around destination time, and eat and drink on that clock |
If you can't sleep
Don't fight it. Lying awake worrying about sleep makes sleep less likely. Keep the eye mask on and rest: quiet rest with your eyes closed still helps. Try slow breathing, a podcast or audiobook you've heard before, or steady noise. If you're still wide awake after half an hour, switch to something calm, like reading or an undemanding film, and try again later. Some of the best flights for getting work done are the ones you can't sleep on; see why it's so easy to focus on a plane.
Practise with the real sound
Many people find the hum of a cabin oddly soothing. Our free airplane cabin noise is a real in-flight recording, and in Flight, the same recording plays while you focus at your desk.