The Problem: Light Streaming Through the Gap in the Curtains

It happens all the time… Lying awake in your hotel room because a bright beam of white light from the 3 million watt halogen light in the parking lot is streaming through the tiny gap in the curtains and directly across your face. Guess it’s going to be another sleepless night on the road.

Well not anymore! We have the solution!!! The Coat Hanger Curtain Clip!

Light Affects Your Sleep… BIG Time

We all know the importance of quality sleep and it’s been proven over and over that sleeping in an extremely dark environment helps you fall asleep and stay asleep. But if there is even a little light in the room, our system responds to the cue by thinking it must be dawn so it shuts down melatonin and puts the body into a wakeful state. So the nuisance of that tiny gap in the curtains actually translates into terrible sleep.

Why Don’t The Curtains Close?

There is a fundamental flaw to hotel room curtain design… they don’t overlap when they close. Instead they just meet in the middle which seems to ALWAYS create a gap, letting the light back into the room. So for any hotel architects out there, please start including overlapping curtains in every hotel room from now on. (As well as more electrical outlets everywhere!) Thanks!

The Solution: The Coat Hanger Curtain Clip

For years I just lived with the curtain issue. I assumed it was one of those crappy things about travel that you just have to deal with. Until I was exchanging travel tips with a friend of mine and he mentioned how he solves this problem, with a simple coat hanger. Now I don’t know if he came up with it himself or heard the tip from another traveler but it’s brilliant!

So I thought let’s name this the Coat Hanger Curtain Clip!

How to do it:

Step 1 Grab a coat hanger from the closet with the spring loaded clamps on it.
Step 2 Fold over some material on the curtains.
Step 3 Clip it in place with the coat hanger clamp.

That’s it! Simple, fast, effective!

Why this is soooooo brilliant…

For starters, it works every time and is really easy to setup. But the real brilliance of this technique is that it uses something that is in virtually every hotel room across the planet, the coat hanger with clamps. This means you don’t have to take anything else with you, weighing down your bag to fix this problem. And it has a HUGE affect on your sleep, how you feel the next morning and your entire trip!

So before you head off to bed, clamp those curtains closed and start sleeping better tonight!