A Brown University Study Found Why The First Night Away Is The Bad One, And Half Term Families Are About To Feel It Again

This one is about a sleep study from 2016, and the reason it caught our eye this week is the calendar. Half term in most of England runs to Friday 30 October, and right in the middle of it, at 2am on Sunday 25 October, the clocks go back an hour. So there are thousands of families in hotel rooms and lodges this weekend with a child in a strange bed on Saturday night and that child awake an hour early on Sunday morning, and the study goes some way to explaining the first half of that.

Now, the study was done on adults, not children, and we want to say that up front, because it would be easy to pretend otherwise. But the thing it found is the thing every parent already knows from a hotel room, and it is nice to see somebody measure it.

What The Brown University Team Found In The Sleep Lab

The paper came out of Brown University in Rhode Island, and it went into the journal Current Biology in April 2016. Masako Tamaki and Yuka Sasaki led it, with Ji Won Bang and Takeo Watanabe as the other 2 authors. And the first night effect was not their discovery, we should say. Sleep researchers have known about it since 1966, when Agnew, Webb and Williams put 43 people through 4 nights in a row in a lab and saw the first one was the worst. What the Brown team wanted was a reason for it. Going by the paper and Brown’s own write-up, it went like this:

• 35 people: young, healthy adults, which is not many, split across 3 experiments, and each person slept 2 sessions in the lab about a week apart, so not 2 nights running.
• Session 1: during the first stretch of deep sleep, one network in the left half of the brain, the default mode network, slept more lightly than the matching bit on the right. Three other networks they checked showed no difference.
• The sounds test: they played odd beeps while people slept, and that left side reacted faster to them in session 1 than the right did.
• Session 2: the difference was gone. They could not find the left and right gap any more, and people reacted more slowly to the beeps.
• Nerves: the volunteers did not report feeling unusually anxious or uncomfortable in the surveys; nerves on their own do not seem to explain it, though the paper does not rule them out.

So the first night somewhere new, one part of the left side of the brain seems to stay more alert during deep sleep, and by the second visit that had stopped. The team only measured the first cycle of deep sleep, and they said themselves the watch might swap sides later in the night. Sasaki compared it to the way some birds and dolphins sleep with one half of the brain at a time, and the 1966 study plus a later review of 53 studies back up the simpler bit, that sleep is usually worse on night 1 than night 2.

And that was calm adults in a quiet lab with a bed each. A 6 year old in a Premier Inn with a lift pinging down the corridor and 3 other people in the room has a lot more for the left half to listen to. So when night 1 of half term is a disaster, that is not the holiday going wrong, it is a brain doing its job, and sleep usually settles as a place gets familiar, though not for every child and not always by night 2.

The Bit Where Most Of Us Make It Worse

We recognised this part straight away. The first night goes badly, the next morning the child is allowed to sleep till 10, because they had a rough night, poor thing. And that is where it can go wrong, because a big shift in wake-up time moves the body clock, and night 2, the one that should have been easier, is a mess as well, and by Wednesday the week is off.

The NHS gives children a range, not a bedtime, and when we looked it up the range is wider than we expected. A 3 to 5 year old wants 10 to 13 hours in every 24, naps included, that is a 3 hour window. Ages 6 to 12 get 9 to 12 hours. Teenagers 8 to 10. So a 7 year old who went down at 9 instead of 8 and got up at 7 is still sat in the middle of that. The odd late night is fine as long as they are getting enough sleep over the day. What the NHS advice keeps coming back to is a steady wake-up time, holidays included, and a 3 hour lie-in is the opposite of that, and honestly, we have done it, everybody has done it, because at 7am on holiday a sleeping child is a lovely thing.

The Clocks Make Sunday The Hard Morning, Not Saturday Night

And this is why the date matters. Adults get an extra hour in bed on Sunday 25 October. Children do not, because a child who wakes at 7 every morning wakes at 7 by their own clock, and the clock on the wall now says 6, and on holiday there is no school run to drag them back into line, left alone that 6am start is there all week.

What we would do is what the children’s hospitals say every autumn, Nationwide Children’s in the States being the one we found, which is shift bedtime and wake-up time 10 to 15 minutes later a day for the few days before, by Sunday the child is close to the new 7. Arrived on Saturday and missed all that? Then you are doing it in bigger steps over the weekend, and it will not be as neat, but it still beats doing nothing. Night 1 is likely to be rough whatever you do, 60 years of sleep research says that much, you may as well get something out of it.

What The Left Half Of The Brain Is Listening For

The other thing the study gives you, if you read it sideways, is a list of what that alert bit of the brain is listening for, because it is listening for anything new. Footsteps in the corridor. The plumbing next door. A strip of light under the door that is not there at home. A parent moving about. The stuff to pack is the stuff that gives it less to hear, and none of it takes up any room. The toy or blanket they sleep with, because it smells right, and smell is how a small child decides a room is safe. A little travel night light, because hotel rooms are pitch black or lit all night from the corridor and never the thing they are used to. The audiobook or the white noise app or the playlist they drop off to at home, so the corridor has something to hide behind. And their own pyjamas and their own bedtime drink, which sounds daft until you have done a hotel without them.

The one thing you cannot pack is a wall. A child will not believe bedtime has started while they can see mum and dad sat up 6 feet away with the telly on, and in a single hotel room there is no way round that except everybody going to bed at 8, which is a holiday for no one. The places built around families know this. We had a look at Manor & Ashbury Resorts in Devon, 2 hotels on the edge of Dartmoor, and their website lists family rooms in the hotels alongside a fun house, water slides and adventure golf, so the parents get somewhere to sit after 8 and the child gets a day on a water slide first. One thing to read before booking, though. The lodges on their site are privately owned and not part of the resorts, with their own terms, and the dining and the activity pass are bought separately, a lodge booking does not come with the water slides thrown in. And a day on a water slide helps a child feel ready for bed, it does not put them there, so the story and the comforter still have to come out of the bag.

That is half term, going by a sleep lab in Rhode Island and a clock on the wall. Night 1 is usually the bad one because the brain is on guard, Sunday is early because the clocks moved, and the week has a better chance if the mornings stay roughly where they were. What is the one thing from home your child will not go to sleep without?