Want a better night's sleep? Go camping

No beds, more birdsong: why outdoor sleep can make for better slumber which continues after you return home.

I am not a great sleeper. Not terrible, but patchy at best. I'm all too familiar with the long, dark hours when there's nothing for it but to readjust my eye mask and resist the urge to pass the time in the glow of my TikTok feed.

Despite this, I've attempted a night here and there in some challenging places. I've pitched tents in Scottish snowstorms and Amazonian downpours, on damp Swedish islands and damper Glastonbury fields. Strange noises and hard ground usually meant sleep didn't come easily, and my tent now languishes at the back of a cupboard. 

According to research though, if I want to get a better night's sleep, I'd do well to get back into camping. 

Most of us go to bed well after the Sun does, and this mismatch has physical and mental health impacts. Research suggests that sleeping outside can help counter this by giving us a better chance of staying in tune with the Sun and Moon; scientists have found that spending a weekend camping can reset our circadian clock so that it better aligns with the world outside. For most of us, that means shifting our sleep a bit earlier – and avoiding the health issues associated with sleeping late, including cardiovascular disease and depression. 

Fifteen years ago, Kenneth Wright, lead author of the study and director of the Sleep and Chronobiology Laboratory at the University of Colorado Boulder in the US, set out to explore how camping impacts sleep as a proxy for understanding our circadian clocks better.

Wright wanted to understand just how out of step our circadian rhythms – the natural sleep-wake cycle that repeats every 24 hours – are today with the natural world that humans evolved in. He decided to take a small group of people on a weeklong summer camping trip in the Rocky Mountains to immerse them in the natural cycles of day and night. This meant no torches or phones, and exposure to four times more natural daylight than they usually experienced during the day.

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Wright collected the participants' saliva to measure their levels of the hormone melatonin – a biological marker of night time – throughout the night before and after the trip. The results showed that their circadian clock shifted two hours earlier following the camping trip. "A key finding from the study is that our circadian rhythm is earlier after [exposure to the] natural light-dark cycle, which means we're later in our modern world," Wright says.

The campers' melatonin levels dropped shortly before they woke up – whereas when they had been sleeping at home, melatonin levels stayed high for a while into the morning. "Our modern [artificial] light exposure changes our circadian rhythm such that in the hours after we wake up, our circadian clock in our brain is telling us we should still be asleep," Wright says. "We should be asleep for [another] couple of hours in some cases."

In this sense, sleeping outside keeps us "more in sync with our biology, not just the environment", he says. By shifting our rhythms earlier, sleeping outdoors has real consequences for our health. "Later sleep timing or a later timing of our circadian rhythm is associated with a number of negative health outcomes. Earlier types have [fewer] health problems – they have less substance abuse, depression, obesity, diabetes," Wright says.

The effects of sleeping earlier and with less exposure to artificial light are still being studied, but Wright believes we might expect that people would feel better and more alert in the morning after sleeping outside.

Sleeping under the stars

This is certainly Ella Hewton's experience. As well as being a keen hiker and camper, she is community manager at Love Her Wild, a non-profit women's adventure company in the UK. 

"I think there's something about just being in those rhythms," Hewton says. "The birds wake you up with their dawn chorus, and as the light then comes – it's just a lovely way to wake up, isn't it?"

Her best night's sleep happened on a trip that involved no artificial light at all – no phone, no torch, just a fire and woollen blankets to stay warm. Bedtime came earlier, but she did have to wake up a few times to stoke the fire. Despite getting up in the night, she says, "I was more awake during the day. I felt more alive and in-touch with myself and nature, I didn't feel tired at all. I definitely was sleeping longer."

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Hewton's experience is reflected in another of Wright's studies, in which he took a brave group of campers out in the depths of Colorado's winter. He found that people woke up slightly more in the night, but overall got over two more hours' sleep than they did when sleeping inside. Once they got back from the trip, he also measured their "biological night" – the time during which their body released melatonin – and found it was longer for those who had camped during winter compared to another group of his research participants who camped in summer.

Melatonin is known to play an important role in many animals' lives, says Wright, prompting changes in fur colour, reproductive status and weight gain as the seasons change. "Our findings showed that humans are really no different – we have the capacity to respond to seasonal changes in the natural light-dark cycle," he says. (Read more about how the seasons change our sleep here). 

Removing artificial light could also have health benefits that go beyond getting a proper sleep. A body of research shows that too much exposure to artificial light at night can affect blood pressure, hormone regulation and depressive symptoms. Other animals also feel the effects of artificial night-time light – it has been found to disturb amphibians, bats, birds, fish and insects. 

A bit more darkness, then, is welcome. Still, Hewton says, sleeping outside can take some getting used to. "The first couple of nights of camping, you're a bit more conscious of unusual noises that you wouldn't have at home," she says. "I probably sleep worse on the first or second night, but then improve as I adapt to being outside."

Sounds of nature

Those outdoor sounds, once they're familiar, could even help aid sleep. The UK's Camping and Caravanning Club conducted a survey of 1,000 campers and found that 56% would recommend outdoor sleeping to people who struggle to nod off at night. Around one-in-four said they personally sleep better outside than they do in their bed at home, with most of these people putting this down to hearing the sounds of nature. They're soothed by the patter of raindrops, rustling leaves, chirping insects, steadily breaking waves – even the rumble of thunder.

"In my experience, the hooting of owls and nocturnal creatures snuffling around is just lovely," says Rob Ganley, editor of the Camping and Caravanning Club's monthly magazine and a lifelong camper. "It's sort of soporific."

He was surprised, however, that some of those surveyed said they found thunder helped their sleep. "I've been camping in a few extreme weather conditions where you've had to get up and repitch your tent," says Ganley.

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I also remember a less than restful night I once spent in a tent in 40mph (64km/h) winds. Still, the 41,000 YouTube search results for "thunder sleep sounds" suggest the sounds of stormy weather really work for some.

There are ways to make sleeping outside more comfortable for inexperienced campers and light sleepers like me. Ganley suggests never pitching a tent under a tree, unless you want "big, fat, heavy drops of rain machine-gunning your tent". And whatever you do, get some "good chunky insulation between your body and the ground," he says. "Because that ground is never anything but cold when you wake up in the night."

More like this:

• How people woke up before alarm clocks

• Seven ways to improve your sleep

• The micro-dreaming game that helps you sleep

For first timers who want to give camping a go, Ganley notes that tent companies have started selling second-hand tents to help tackle the industry's waste problem. You might even be able to borrow a tent from the library. "The cost of entry into this sort of pastime isn't necessarily expensive," he says.

When he's not in the lab, Wright, too, is an avid backcountry camper. "Being outdoors, I do get in sync with that natural environment right away," he says. But he adds that there are ways to bring the outdoors inside to make our days brighter, and our nights dimmer. Matching the spectrum of lightbulbs to the time of day – bluer in the day, redder in the evening – is one way to do this, he says. "That way we can try to get closer to what the natural environment is but still go about our modern lifestyles."

It's probably time for me to dig out my dusty camping gear, or, at the very least, turn the lights down at home a couple of hours earlier. It remains to be seen if it improves my sleep, but my brain will no doubt appreciate some respite from the night-time glow of bulbs and screens and gadgets. And if a chorus of birds can lull me awake, all the better.

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