Some links on this page are affiliate links. We may earn a commission if you use them. See our Affiliate Disclosure.
I can’t make the flight shorter and I can’t make the seat any wider.
What I can do is set the whole thing up so I sleep through most of it and get off the plane like a person instead of something that has been folded into a drawer for nine hours.
None of this is expensive. It’s a short list of things I’ve landed on after a lot of overnight flights, and the order I do them in.
It all goes in your personal item
Every single thing on this page lives in the bag that goes under the seat in front of me, not in the carry-on overhead. Once boarding gets crowded your rolling bag ends up in a bin three rows back, and climbing over two strangers at midnight to dig out a sleep mask is worse than not having one.
So pack the sleep things where you can reach them sitting down.
Dark and quiet
The free eye mask the airline hands you presses flat against your eyelids and slides off the moment you turn your head. Mine is a contoured mask made for side sleepers, which means there’s a little dome of space over each eye. You can open your eyes inside it. It stays on when you roll over, and it’s properly dark even with every cabin light on.
For ears, foam earplugs have never worked for me. They goes in, work for twenty minutes, then creep out and I wake up. I use silicone putty (wax) earplugs instead. They mold over the opening of your ear rather than pushing into it, they stay where you put them, and they come eight pairs to a box, so losing one in a seat cushion is not a problem.
If you’re someone who needs to still hear things, Loop earplugs turn the noise down instead of shutting it off. You’ll still hear an announcement or your alarm. They’re reusable and they look like jewelry rather than something from a hospital.
Melatonin, and when to take it
The timing matters more than the dose. Don’t take it at boarding. You’ve still got taxi, takeoff, drinks and a meal service ahead of you, and by the time the cabin actually goes quiet you’re past the window and wide awake again. I take melatonin gummies when the meal service ends and the lights go down.
Three milligrams is a sensible starting point and for most people it’s plenty. More is not automatically better with melatonin. Gummies rather than pills, because you don’t need water and you’re not fishing a tablet out of a bottle in the dark.
If you take anything regularly, ask your doctor before you add this. And melatonin on the plane is only half of it: what you do in the first twenty-four hours after you land is the part that actually fixes the time change, and that’s in my free guide How We Avoid Jet Lag.
Your neck, your back and your feet
I gave up on the big horseshoe pillow years ago. It hangs off your bag, it takes up room you don’t have, and it isn’t any better than an inflatable one that packs flat and blows up in about twenty seconds. Get one with a cover you can take off and wash, because travel pillows get grim.
The one that sounds ridiculous and isn’t: a foot hammock. It hooks over the tray table arms and your feet rest in it. If you’re short enough that your feet dangle, this takes the pressure off the backs of your legs and your lower back, and it sets up in seconds. I felt silly the first time and I don’t fly without it now.
Compression socks on anything over about three hours. Feet swell at altitude, and this is the difference between walking off the plane and hobbling off it. They don’t have to be the sad beige medical ones any more, in fact the ones I use are cute!
And your shoes are coming off, so bring something for your feet. Slippers that fold into their own pouch or grip socks, either one. What you don’t do is walk to the airplane bathroom in your socks. That’s just gross.
The cabin is freezing, and then it’s boiling
Both, usually, on the same flight, and you can’t do anything about the thermostat.
For the cold half I carry a big cashmere blend wrap. It’s a blanket on the plane and a layer over a dress at dinner for the rest of the trip, which is the kind of double duty that earns something space in a carry-on. If you’d rather have an actual blanket, a fleece one that packs into its own bag clips to a strap and costs you no room at all. An oversized cardigan does the same job if you’d rather wear it than carry it.
For the hot half, a little rechargeable fan. Mostly it earns its keep on the ground, sitting on a plane that hasn’t pushed back with the air off, which is the worst twenty minutes in travel.
One more, and it isn’t about temperature. Cabin air dries you out faster than you notice and plain water gets boring by hour six. I put an electrolyte stickpack in my bottle after the first drinks service. Skip it and you land with a headache on top of everything else.
The whole kit, every item with a link, is on my travel sleep list.
The honest answer is a seat that lies flat
The way you actually sleep on a plane is by lying down.
I know how that sounds. I’m not telling you to go and spend six thousand dollars on a ticket, and I never have. What I’m telling you is that a lie-flat seat is far more reachable than most people think, because almost nobody pays cash for one. You pay in miles, or you catch a fare that has fallen through the floor for a few hours.
That’s how we’ve done it. Points from ordinary spending, and a deal alert landing in my inbox at a moment when I was not looking for anything. Daily Drop is great for this. Their team watches fares and award space all day and emails you when something is genuinely worth booking, with the instructions for how to book it. You don’t go hunting. You open an email, look at a number, and decide.
The catch is that you have to be able to move when one lands, because the good ones don’t sit around. If your dates are fixed to the week, this isn’t going to work for you. If you have any flexibility at all, it changes what you can afford.
How the alert services work and how to pick one is in my free guide Let the Flight Deals Come to You. And if the flat bed isn’t happening this trip, the mask and the earplugs are the two that do the most work.
Frequently asked questions
When should I take melatonin on a flight? When the meal service ends and the cabin lights go down, not at boarding. Taken too early it wears off before the plane is quiet enough to sleep in.
Window or aisle for sleeping? Window, every time. You get something to lean on and nobody climbs over you at three in the morning. Take the aisle if you know you’ll be up and moving.
Do compression socks really matter? On anything over three hours, yes. Feet and ankles swell at altitude whether you notice it or not, and the socks are the reason you can put your shoes back on when you land.
What about a glass of wine to help me sleep? It puts you under and then wakes you at hour four, and it dries you out on top of what the cabin is already doing. One with dinner is fine. Using it as a sleeping pill is not.
Is a neck pillow worth the space? An inflatable one, yes. The big foam horseshoe hanging off your bag, no. It does the same job and costs you a quarter of your personal item.
If I only buy two things, what should they be? A contoured sleep mask and silicone earplugs. Dark and quiet do more than everything else on this page put together.
