Make the most of your travel! Smart tips to get quality sleep on long-haul flights
Of course, you want to arrive fully rested and ready to go. But by its very definition, a long-haul flight involves travelling for a long period of time, often more than 12 hours. If you're on a flight from New York to Singapore, it can be close to 19 hours.
All that time you're confined in a seat that's supposed to recline but feels like it hardly moves, while the seat in front seems to recline ten times lower than yours.
So, what can you do to get a a decent rest?
Accept the situation
The first tip for sleep in this setting is to relax your expectations a little.
Humans are just not well designed to sleep in an almost upright position.
Unless you're lucky to fly in a class with a lie-flat seat, you're very unlikely to step off a long-haul flight having had a solid eight hours of sleep.
Research by colleagues and myself has shown pilots — who get a bunk to sleep in during their in-flight rest breaks — have light and fragmented sleep.
Despite not having great quality sleep, you can be assured our research also shows pilots remain very good at their job throughout a long-haul flight.
This, plus findings from many other lab-based studies, tells us that even a short amount of light sleep has benefits.
So, even if you can't get your usual eight hours during the flight, any sleep you do get will help you feel and function better at your destination.
Also, we're not great at judging how much sleep we've had, particularly if our sleep is light and broken. So you're likely to have slept more than you think.
Time your sleep and drinks The timing of your flight, and consumption of alcohol and caffeine will directly impact your ability to sleep on an aircraft.
Assuming you're adjusted to the time zone the flight departs from,
