Getting your sleep back after a festival

The short version

A sensible way back to normal sleep after a festival is to aim for one long night at roughly your usual bedtime, in a dark cool quiet room, rather than a scatter of naps across the afternoon. General sleep guidance points to a regular schedule and a cool, quiet, dark room.

You will probably not feel normal after one night, and that is expected. A few short nights in a row is a debt that clears over several nights of ordinary sleep.

Why the first night sets the week

Sleeping at four in the afternoon feels irresistible and then leaves you wide awake at two in the morning, which pushes the problem into Monday. Getting to something close to a normal bedtime is the single decision that matters most.

If you really can't stay upright, a short nap early in the afternoon is easier on the night than a four hour one at six in the evening. Keep it short and keep an alarm on it. A nap is not a substitute for a proper night of sleep, and neither is caffeine.

The room does more than you think

Dark, cool and quiet is the whole formula. Blackout the room properly, drop the temperature, and if your ears are still full of a weekend of noise then a quiet room matters more than usual.

Get daylight in the morning. Light in the first part of the day is one of the more reliable levers for pulling a shifted sleep pattern back where it belongs.

• A dark room, properly dark
• Cooler than feels obvious
• Phone away from the bed
• Daylight the next morning, early

Food, fluid and timing

Go to bed neither starving nor uncomfortably full. A normal meal in the evening tends to work better than either skipping it or eating an enormous one at midnight.

Drink enough during the day rather than a lot right before bed, unless you enjoy being woken up. If you have been drinking alcohol, expect the sleep quality to be worse even when the hours look fine.

• What to eat after a festival

Travel and the journey home

Plan the trip so you are not driving while exhausted. Tiredness at the wheel is a serious risk and a festival return is a classic setup for it.

If you are flying or crossing time zones, treat the festival and the travel as one long stretch rather than two separate problems, and give yourself a buffer day where you can.

Why forcing it is a bad plan

Reaching for whatever is in the cupboard to knock yourself out is where post festival sleep goes properly wrong. Mixing substances, self medicating or stacking sleep aids on top of a weekend is not something we will give instructions for, and it is not a shortcut.

If you cannot sleep for several nights, if sleep problems keep coming back, or if you are worried about your own use of anything to get to sleep, that is worth raising with a qualified professional. Persistent insomnia is a medical question rather than a lifestyle one.

Where supplements sit in this

We do not sell a sleep product and we do not claim our formulas do anything to your sleep. The After formula is described by when it sits in a routine, not by an effect.

Everything on this page is general information for healthy adults rather than medical advice.

• What Before and After actually mean