Sleep Tourism and Cocoons! Environmental Psych in the News

It seems a lot of us are having trouble sleeping in our homes (see this article for neuroscience research-based insights on creating a place where people sleep well).  So many of us are sleep challenged that multiple hotel chains are developing spaces where we can sleep like a baby, actually probably better than a baby.

Sosenko shares that “A.I.-assisted beds, on-call hypnotherapists and sequestered guest rooms, including one inside a stainless steel sculpture, are taking sleep tourism to the next level. . . . Relaxing the mind is a common theme in sleep tourism, but how each property tries to accomplish that varies. . . . At the Beaumont in London, travelers can stay in perhaps the cocooniest room of them all, called, simply, ROOM (£1,402 per night, or about $1,780), a 745-square-foot suite inside a three-story stainless steel sculpture of a crouching man at the hotel entrance. It lacks a TV, a phone, even wall art. The goal of the British sculptor Antony Gormley, who designed ROOM, is for guests “to achieve a meditative stillness, to lose a sense of one’s body in the darkness and to allow the mind to expand.”

Carla Sosenko, in “$1,780 to Spend the Night in a ‘Cocoon’? Hotels Are Betting on Sleep Tourism” (The New York Times, 2024, https://www.nytimes.com/2024/03/06/travel/sleep-tourism-hotels.html)