Just One More Hour - Sleep and the hospitality industry
Former bartender turned journalist, Dan Miles is the best-selling author of Filthy Still – a tale of travel, sex and perfectly made cocktails, and a contributor to the Huffington Post, TNT and the New Zealand Times.
Picture the scene – shuffling, shambling figures with dead eyes and blank expressions, ready to chew the brains out of the next person to cross their path. Unfortunately I’m not talking about a zombie movie, but the staff of any hospitality outlet the world over after a long week. The cause – an industry wide lack of sleep.
How to turn your room into a temple of sleep
Despite my best efforts, a great nights sleep still evades me, much like the reason anyone would invent blue curacao. At the height of my insomnia when I was working for a London boutique hotel group, whom I suspect routinely received management training from the Nazi party, the combination of long hours, late nights, bad food and way too much industrial-strength caffeine left me frequently frazzled and occasionally asleep in the store room when I should have been doing stocktake. Since then I’ve worked hard to tackle the problem, unfortunately with mixed results. However as environment plays a huge part in the success or failure of sleep, this month I decided to get serious and turn my bedroom into a temple dedicated to it.
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The experiment - How I improved my sleep
A former bartender turned journalist, Dan Miles is the best-selling author of Filthy Still – a tale of travel, sex and perfectly made cocktails, and a contributor to the Huffington Post, TNT and the New Zealand Times. Here he experiments on himself in order to try and help you, the reader, get a better nights sleep.
It’s no secret that those in the hospitality industry often struggle to get enough sleep – it’s pretty much an official job hazard, along with the uncontrollable desire to talk about Bitters. However in my experience, it’s harder to say exactly how that extra sleep might happen.