I Used This 2-Second Travel Hack for Sleeping on a Plane — Here’s How It Went

Even on an overnight flight, I can never sleep on planes. I’m always woefully looking around at the other passengers all wrapped in their airline blankets, asleep. I’m a seasoned traveler — I’ve visited more than 50 countries and have even been a passenger on the longest flight in the world (New York to Singapore). All without sleep on the ride.

I recently flew home from Vancouver on a red-eye, boarding at 12:30 a.m., and knew I needed to figure something out to get at least a little sleep on the four-hour flight. Then, I saw a brilliant tip from TikTok user Klea Mulla who showed others how she’s able to fall asleep more easily on flights, and I decided to try the trick out for myself. 

In the video, Mulla says that when she goes to bed at night, she uses a pillow spray that helps her fall asleep in seconds. On a recent flight, she tried using the same spray on her neck pillow. Apparently, it worked just as well as it did at home.

Even sleep experts agree this could be a viable solution for sleeping on a plane, thanks to what’s called olfactory conditioning. “The more we use a pillow spray when it is time to sleep, the more our brain starts to associate that scent with sleep time,” says Andrew Colsky, behavioral sleep medicine clinician and founder of the National Sleep Center. “If we use it regularly, our brain associates the scent with winding down and relaxation for bedtime.”

Colsky also notes that continually using the same pillow spray to sleep can help slow your heart rate and lower anxiety. “Our brain can recognize a calming scent as an anchor for our attention and by focusing our attention on the calm sensation, it can reduce and interrupt racing thoughts,” he says. “By using the same scent on our pillow at home and on a travel or hotel pillow, our brain recognizes the familiar scent and carries the same associations with us to new pillows. Perfect for prompting sleep on planes.”

Let me save you all the mystery: I did not sleep on my flight. But it wasn’t the spray’s fault.

I don’t use a pillow spray at home, but I do use an essential oil spray to help myself relax, so that’s what I brought with me to replicate the soothing sensation while in the air. (It was under 3 ounces, too!)

Before I boarded my flight, I went to a quiet area of the airport without a lot of passengers and sprayed my travel pillow. Many people can be sensitive to certain smells, so it’s better (and safer!) to spray your pillow when you’re not surrounded by others, or worse, already on the plane. 

When it was time to board, I was primed for success. I was exhausted, it was my regular bedtime, my pillow was spritzed, and I was flying United, which has a whole sleep and relaxation section of its in-flight entertainment. And then I met my seat neighbor. When the first thing he did was take off his shoes and socks, I could sense my dreams catching some sleep slipping away. 

I put on classical music, which usually helps me sleep at home, and leaned back into my neck pillow to breathe in all the relaxation I could get from the spray. Every time I would start to get cozy and dozy, though, my seat neighbor would shove his elbow into my arm or readjust in a way that would shake me out of my drowsy state. Eventually, I just put on a movie to try and ride out the annoyance for the rest of the flight. When I got back home, I slept the entire next day.

This little experiment did have some upsides, though. I noticed I wasn’t as frustrated by my neighbor as I would have been otherwise, and I attribute that to the calming qualities of the spray. I also realized that it helped me calm down so much that I think I should try using it on my pillow to sleep at home. So overall, I call it a win.