Why the first night in a hotel affects your sleep quality and how to improve it

The first night in a new place is always the same for Robinson Leoni: he takes longer to fall asleep, wakes up more often during the night and gets less sleep overall.

At home he averages seven hours. The first night away – with or without earplugs and regardless of the bed’s quality – his smartwatch tells him he gets about five.

“I feel normal, you know, no stress, nothing, but it’s just I notice I wake up continuously,” Leoni says. He is a sales director for a tech company and travels once or twice a month for work.

He is a victim of what sleep specialists call the first-night effect. The phenomenon has been confirmed by dozens of studies and is believed to have evolutionary roots, says Anna Wick, a senior sleep researcher at the University of Freiburg in Switzerland.