Time - USA (2020-08-17)

78 Time August 17/August 24, 2020

in a small room wiThouT windows, i am in-

structed to breathe in sync with a colorful bar on a

screen in front of me. Six counts in. Six counts out.

Electrodes tie me to a machine whirring on the table.

My hands and feet are bare, wiped clean and placed

atop silver boards. My finger is pinched by an ox-

imeter, my left arm squeezed by a blood-pressure

cuff. Across from me, a woman with a high ponytail,

scrublike attire and soft eyes smiles encouragingly.

She is not a doctor, and this is not a lab. The air smells

like lavender and another fruity scent I later learn is

cassis. My chair is made of woven reeds, topped with

a thick cushion and a pillow for lumbar support. The

windowless room feels more cozy than claustropho-

bic; this is not torture but a luxury. I am, in fact, in a

five-star resort with a 2,000-sq-m spa and an indoor

heated pool. This process, I have been promised, will

help me sleep better.

For years, I had been waking up exhausted. My

primary care doctor ran my blood work three sepa-

rate times to try to suss out an underlying problem,

and each time it came back fine. I had no problem

falling asleep, or even really staying asleep. The prob-

lem was that no matter how many hours of sleep I

got, I had to haul myself out of bed in the morning,

grumpy and lethargic.

So, in December, before COVID-19 ravaged the

world and made travel unsafe, I journeyed to a beau-

tiful valley in Portugal’s Port wine region to take part

in the €220-per-night Six Senses Sleep Retreat to

try to learn to sleep better. Six Senses has long made

wellness and sustainability two of its main pillars of

business. They have yoga retreats and infrared spas.

They’re aiming to be plastic-free by 2022—all plas-

tic, not just single-use. But for the past two years, the

luxury resort brand has bet big on sleep. In 2017, they

launched a sleep program with a sleep coach, sleep

monitoring, a wellness screening, bedtime tea ser-

vice and a goody bag of sleep-health supplies. The

idea was that, with three nights of analysis and be-

havioral adjustments, I might finally train my body

to get a good night’s sleep. It’s a vacation with a pur-

pose, and it’s one with big appeal: Six Senses offers

the program at 10 of its resorts and is requiring all

new resorts (including New York City in 2021) to in-

clude the program.

Luxury hotels have been pushing health as a sell-

ing point for travel since well before events made the

two oxymoronic. The global wellness-tourism mar-

ket was valued at $683.3 billion in 2018 by Grand

View Research, and according to the Global Well-

ness Institute ’s 2018 report, 830 million wellness

Selling sweet

dreams

INDUSTRIES

FROM TRAVEL

TO TECH ARE

CASHING IN BY

CATERING TO

THE RESTLESS

By Kelsey
McKinney

trips were taken by travelers in 2017. That was up

nearly 17% from 2015. In 2018, American Airlines

partnered with the meditation app Calm to help their

passengers sleep. Headspace has partnerships with

seven different airlines to do the same thing, all over

the past few years. A survey from the National Insti-

tutes of Health shows that the number of U.S. adults

who reported meditating while traveling tripled from

2012 through 2017. And all this travel wellness has

one common goal: to get people to sleep better, be-

cause we know that—generally—people aren’t sleep-

ing well.

In 2016, the Centers for Disease Control (CDC) pub-

lished findings claiming that one-third of adults are

not getting enough sleep and that sleep deprivation

is costing the country some $400 billion each year in

productivity. It is also important to note that many

studies have found a large disparity in sleep quality

based on race, ethnicity and socio economic status. In

comparisons of white and Black populations, studies

have found that white women have the best sleep du-

ration and Black men the worst. Those disparities do

not go away when studies adjust for socio economic

level. The Sleep Foundation writes that a factor may

be higher levels of stress because of discrimination

in daily life.

Although consumers have opened their wallets

in pursuit of better sleep since the debut of mem-

ory foam in 1966, the past five years have been a

boom for the sleep-wellness industry. The global

sleeping-products market brought in $69.5 billion

in revenue in 2017, and, according to the most re-

cent report published in May 2018 by P&S Market

Research, the industry is on track to hit $101.9 bil-

lion in 2023. The consulting group McKinsey put

out a seven-page guide to investing in sleep health

in 2017. And anyone who has tried to buy a mattress

online recently has noticed just how many new mat-

tress brands there are: Casper, Tuft & Needle, Purple,

Leesa, Allswell, SleepChoices, Bear. The U.S. mat-

tress industry has doubled in value since 2015, from

$8 billion to $16 billion.

In my desperate quest for good sleep, I’ve bought

into all of this. When I sat down to calculate it all, I

was stunned to find that over the past three years,

I have spent more than $1,000 on sleep. I bought

a Fitbit , a Sonos speaker with a built-in alarm, a

new pillow, a new mattress, a fluffier comforter, a

weighted blanket, cold eye masks, a humidifier, pa-

jamas made of bamboo, pajamas made of 100% cot-

ton, pajamas made of satin and an alarm clock that

mimics a sunrise. The sleep retreat, I hoped, would

do something all the other purchases had not.

I don’t sleep well on the plane. After four hours

of fitful slumber interrupted by turbulence, dinner

service and my seat neighbor bumping into me on

Sleep