London
The Milestone Hotel (020-7917 1000, milestonehotel.com) in Kensington recently launched a "Sleep Experience Package". This involves an hour-long one-to-one session with sleep expert Tej Samani, followed by a 90-minute slumber-inducing massage.
"Forget your mind: exhaustion, burnout and sleep issues are all primarily physical," says Samani, who counts celebrities, politicians and Premiership football club managers among his clients. "Insomnia occurs when the two sides of your autonomic nervous system, the sympathetic and parasympathetic, are unbalanced."
Samani's approach (which also includes nutritional advice during your stay) is engaging and pleasingly scientific. Guests are fitted with nervous system monitors for 24 hours and, if relevant, sent to bed with a matchbox-sized device that mimics the brainwaves of good sleepers. You tuck yourself into bed, pop in the earphones, and wait for your own brainwaves to replicate them. It costs £488pp based on two sharing.
Paris
Nowhere has embraced the idea of sleep tourism more than the City of Lights. Recently opened in passage Choiseul, off Avenue de l'Opéra in central Paris, is the Zen Bar A Sieste (+33 1 7160 8155, barasieste.com), purporting to be "Europe's first nap bar", where for €12 you can steal un petit somme for 15 minutes on a massage bed or zero-gravity chair, with low lights and relaxing music. Across town in the Marais, the boutique Hotel Gabriel Paris Marais (+33 1 4700 1338, gabrielparismarais.com, doubles from €139) has installed NightCove – a system that emits "soft sounds and melatonin-producing light", supposedly soothing your senses and easing you into sleep.
Switzerland
One of the finest medical offerings comes, not surprisingly, from Switzerland. The medical centre at Grand Resort Bad Ragaz (+41 81 303 3838, resortragaz.ch) will film your sleeping patterns over the course of a night – from your breathing to the position of your limbs – then analyse them painstakingly, to diagnose your problem. You'll pay £2,270 a night for the privilege, though.
US
Adopt a more … ahem … relaxed approach to sleep on a Wild West ranch. The "Rest & Rejuvenation Retreat" at Canyon Ranch, Tuscon (wellbeingescapes.co.uk) aims to "teach better sleep patterns for life". Its approach, which looks at everything from "pillows to posture", encompasses nutrition, meditation, yoga and self-hypnosis, and costs £3,749pp for seven nights including flights, based on two sharing .
