A Country Too Tired to Dream: How India’s Work Culture Is Fueling Sleep Tourism
By- Dr Sourya Rongala, Asst. Professor, Paari School of Business, SRM University, A.P
India is becoming a country that works through the night but remembers little about how to rest. In metros, employees step into offices before sunrise, respond to emails past dinner, and apologise for taking weekends off. The most common sentence across corporate WhatsApp groups might be: “Sorry, just saw this — was asleep.”
Sleep, once an invisible bodily rhythm, is now a luxury object — chased, purchased, measured by apps, and lost again. Surveys estimate that more than half of Indian working adults routinely sleep less than six hours. But statistics alone do not reveal the silent cultural revolution underway: people have started travelling simply to rest. Not sightseeing, not adventure but to sleep.
This phenomenon has a name in travel circles: sleep tourism. Around the world, it refers to journeys built around better sleep — blackout rooms, guided sleep therapy, aroma rituals, and digital isolation. In India, it has arrived without fanfare. It is visible in the sudden popularity of “no-itinerary retreats” in Goa, ayurvedic sleep-reset programs in Kerala, and mountain lodges that offer what urban India has stolen from itself — silence.
For many Indians, a trip has now become the only acceptable excuse to pause. Sleeping all day at home might invite judgement, whereas sleeping at a resort for ₹30,000 is labelled “wellness”. This paradox tells the real story: we cannot rest without permission and payment.
The Culture That Keeps Us Awake
To understand sleep tourism, one must first understand what keeps Indians awake. In many workplaces, the line between dedication and self-neglect is blurred. Being reachable late at night signals “commitment”. Long hours are disguised as ambition. Burnout is treated as a personal flaw rather than a structural design failure.
Gig workers, call-centre employees on US shifts, and delivery staff navigating midnight orders don’t have much scope for managing their overall wellbeingand are among the most sleep-starved workforce. When sleep tourism grows without acknowledging them, it risks turning sleep tourism into a market reserved only for those who can afford to buy it.
India’s Untapped Advantage
India has millennia-old science built around sleep. Ayurveda’s calming oils, yoga nidra practices, moon-milk recipes, chanting for sleep, and traditions of mid-day napping once defined India’s relationship with the body. Today, we have abandoned our own wisdom and watch foreign spas resell diluted versions back to us.
If developed thoughtfully, India could become a world leader in sleep-based wellness. But that requires intent — and support.
Three Questions India Must Ask
Before we commercialise sleep tourism, we must confront uncomfortable questions:
- Can a nation that glorifies exhaustion ethically sell sleep as a premium experience?
- Will sleep tourism challenge toxic work culture — or merely profit from its consequences?
- Can recovery be made universal — or will it remain another privilege of the high salaried class?
Without these reflections, we risk building a lucrative industry that does nothing to heal the society from which it emerged.
What Real Leadership Would Look Like
Corporate reform matters as much as tourism strategy. If we want a nation’s citizens to lead their lives with good wellbeing, we need systems that honour boundaries: true weekends, outcome-based work instead of constant online presence, and HR policies that treat rest as a right, not indulgence. Recovery cannot be outsourced to resorts.
For tourism planners, the challenge is storytelling. India must learn to position itself not just as a land of monuments and beaches, but as a land where one can breathe, slow down, and feel time again. That requires destinations built around stillness, community meals, low-stimulus design, and environments where sleep comes not from exhaustion — but from ease.
The tragedy is not that India is tired. The tragedy is that tiredness has become ordinary, even celebrated.When sleep must be bought, something fundamental has been lost.As a nation with 4th largest GDP in the world, we might also ask a quieter question — can a nation that never sleeps truly progress, or does progress require something far softer: the right to close our eyes?
