Travel as Medicine  /  Restorative Journeys by Debra Orringer

The Thing That Changes Your Sleep by the Third Night

Sleep is one of the first things midlife takes. What a trip quietly resets is how much light your body sees, and when it sees it.

A client texted me from Portugal on the third morning of her trip to say she’d slept nine hours straight and wanted to know what they’d put in the water. She had been waking at three most nights for the better part of a year. She’d tried the magnesium, the cooler bedroom, the earlier last glass of wine. Three days into an ordinary week in the Alentejo, with no supplement and no plan, her body did the thing it had refused to do at home.

I’ve watched this happen often enough that I stopped calling it luck.

The part women stop bringing up

Sleep gets hard in midlife, and it gets hard quietly. A survey of 17,494 women across 158 countries, published in Menopause in 2026 by researchers at Mayo Clinic and Flo Health, asked women 35 and older which symptoms they were living with. Among the 12,681 women in that age group, 76 percent reported sleep problems. Fatigue and exhaustion topped the list at 83 percent each. Hot flashes, the symptom nearly everyone recognizes, came in well below all of them.

So the tiredness is close to universal, and most of the advice aimed at it points at the bedroom. You’ve heard about the blackout curtains and the cooler sheets and the screens after nine. That advice is fine as far as it goes. It just skips the twelve hours before bed, which is where a lot of the trouble starts.

What your body is actually reading

Your internal clock takes its cues from light across the whole day, and the hour before bed is a small part of what it registers. Bright morning and midday light sets the timing, and dim evening light lets melatonin rise on schedule. The contrast between the two is the signal.

Most of us have flattened that contrast almost out of existence. We spend the daylight hours indoors, where the lighting is far dimmer than the daylight outside, and then we light the evening up with screens and overhead bulbs. The days are dim and the nights are bright, which is roughly backwards.

Those results were published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, and the pattern ran in both directions. People living with the flattened version, dim days and lit-up nights, carried higher risk, particularly from cardiometabolic causes. An earlier study of more than 400,000 UK Biobank participants, published in the Journal of Affective Disorders in 2021, found that each additional hour of daylight was associated with fewer insomnia symptoms and an easier time getting up in the morning.

None of this makes light a cure for menopausal sleep disruption. Hormones are doing their own thing, and no amount of morning sun changes that. What light does is give a system that’s already struggling one fewer thing to fight.

Why a trip does this without you trying

Think about what your day looks like on a good trip. You eat breakfast outside, or at least near a window, at eight in the morning. You walk to things instead of driving to them. You’re outdoors during the hours when the light is strong, for hours at a stretch, because that’s where the trip is happening. Then dinner is lamplit, and there’s no laptop open at ten, and the room is dark and quiet in a way your bedroom at home rarely is.

You’ve handed your body the exact signal it’s been missing, several days in a row, without once thinking about your circadian rhythm.

That’s what I’m designing for when I build a week. I put the first thing of the day outside whenever the weather allows it. I schedule the walking and the moving parts during daylight rather than after dark. I keep the evenings low and warm, and I ask about how dark the rooms actually get, because a streetlight through a thin curtain undoes a lot. Those choices look like preference and comfort from the outside, and they’re doing quiet work underneath.

What travels home with you

The trip ends and the old lighting comes back. What tends to survive is small. Coffee outside for ten minutes before the day starts is one. Moving the walk to lunchtime is another, and so is switching to a lamp after dinner and leaving the ceiling light off.

Women I work with come back and keep one or two of those, and their sleep holds better than it did before they left. The improvement is partial and it does fade over time. After a year of waking at three, partial improvement still counts for a great deal.

If you’re in the stretch where the nights have gotten unreliable and everything you’ve tried has been aimed at the bedroom, the fix may be sitting earlier in the day than you’ve been looking.

Debra Orringer, MS, ACE-MES, ACSM-CEP, CIHC