A dream vacation starts with sleep
Visit Canyon Ranch to beat insomnia with expert assistance
When I peer out the window on our descent into Tucson, Arizona, the mountains look like slumbering bodies under blankets of brown earth, and I feel bitter longing. Must be nice to sleep, I think.
My husband and I have insomnia. His came on earlier this year and robs him of sleep for days. Mine has been present for most of my life, lurking and re-appearing here and there, like an alley cat. We’ve tried warm milk, specialty teas, acupuncture, flotation therapy. Our home is a graveyard for fancy pillows and mattresses that we bought in desperation and discarded when we couldn’t sleep on them.
So having exhausted our options, we’ve travelled to Arizona, essentially, to sleep. Canyon Ranch, a luxury health spa resort located on more than 150 acres of desert in Tucson, is one of the few all-inclusive vacation resorts in North America that offer specialized sleep programs run by a team of experts. They consider sleep to be one of the foundations of good health.
“If I’m not talking about sleep, then I’m not talking about wellbeing and wellness,” Param Dedhia, the ranch’s director of sleep medicine, tells us shortly after our arrival.
The ranch takes sleep seriously. Our room, located in a one-storey unit and decorated in Southwestern style with earth-tone blankets and carpets, comes with noise machines and a pillow menu with options for side, back and stomach sleepers.
Dedhia and his team have put together a program for us designed to enhance restful sleep — restful, restless, we’ll take it in any form — including a consultation with a therapist, a nutritionist and a personal trainer. We’ve previously had sleep studies to rule out sleep apnea, so fortunately we won’t be needing an overnight study at the ranch’s sleep lab at a cost of $2,600 US.
Resort life also promotes sleepiness. During the day, we tire ourselves out at workshops and fitness classes, like we’re at summer camp for adults. We perform tai chi and Pilates. We attend cooking classes and do arts and crafts. We swim laps in the pool and get massages. Our bodies become heavier in the dry heat as we walk the grounds, along windy paths between cacti and flowers, to get to our hourly appointments. Then our minds become quiet and primed for slumber with all activities ending at 9 p.m. and the dining room offering its last healthy meals at 8 p.m.
But the first night there, I turn my pyjamas backwards, rolling like a reel, struggling to get comfortable. I keep tossing until the edges of the windows glow with the light of day.
“What the heck?” I ask Karen McIntyre, the ranch’s life management therapist.
She asks about my bedtime ritual. Most nights, I simply collapse into bed at the end of my long day and pass out. Other nights, I flop around like a fish, unable to turn off.
“Your body learned to fall asleep from exhaustion,” she says. “Most of us need to learn to fall asleep to relaxation not from exhaustion, but the world that we live in
CANYON RANCH’S STRATEGIES FOR RESTFUL SLEEP
1.
Keep room completely dark and quiet. 2.
If you’re not asleep in 30 minutes, get out of bed and return only when you’re sleepy. 3.
Remove your clock. Looking at it only makes your insomnia worse. 4.
Lower the room’s temperature. 5.
Expose yourself to sunlight during the day and simulate dusk by dimming the lights four hours before bed.
IF YOU GO
Prices (for the period from Sept. 14 to June 13) begin at $4,130 for three nights per person in a deluxe room (single occupancy) and go up to $9,500 for a luxury twobedroom suite.
Includes healthy gourmet meals, transportation to and from the airport, daily fitness classes, wellness workshops, cooking demonstrations, guided hikes, biking excursions, access to four pools and an 80,000square-foot spa. For reservations, call 1-800-7429000 or visit canyonranch.com. has created this kind of intensity. Sleep is the foundation of health at the tectonic level, but everything in our culture encourages us to erode it.”
She suggests that I try to usher my brain waves into a more calm state before bed. This means no TV or cellphone screens. This means dim lights and hushed voices. This means clearing my mind of overactive or anxious thoughts.
Try reading a book, taking a warm shower or performing gentle stretches or yoga poses to “trigger diaphragmatic breathing,” she offers.
Next my husband and I are off to see George Mera, who teaches yoga, qi gong and tai chi classes at the ranch.
The problem, he says, is that “it’s rush hour up here,” using his middle finger to point at his forehead. To stop the mental traffic, he leads us through several breathing exercises and yoga poses; we lie on our backs with our legs propped against the wall. We lie on bolsters like pieces of sushi spread on top of rice. As I time my breathes to Mera’s count, I feel drowsy, perhaps a little drunk, which is unlikely because there’s no alcohol served at the ranch.
The only activating beverage that you’ll find is coffee and tea which we steer clear of since Dedhia tells us that if we drink a coffee in the morning, a quarter of the caffeine is still in our system at 10 p.m. We see a nutritionist, Lisa Powell, at the ranch and I tell her that we’ve been drinking camomile tea to relax at night. She says I’m better off with Valerian Root tea: “Chamomile is also a diuretic,” she says. “It might make you sleep, but it might make you pee more.”
Whether it’s the meditation or the exercise or the healthy foods or a combination of many factors, on our third night there, my husband and I sleep until our alarm goes off. It feels like a victory, one that we hope to replicate when we’re off the ranch. That would be something — taking the dream home.