For anxious, stressed-out New Yorkers, there is a spa treatment that offers the luxury of an emotional and physical cureall few thought money could buy: a brief, cocooning nap when you need it most. Step into Yelo, a new sleep salon on West 57th Street, and you will be escorted to a YeloCab, one of seven private hexagonal pods, each containing a leather reclining chair, a blanket of Nepalese cashmere and soporific sounds and lighting to lull you into the land of Nod. When time is up, the chamber lightens gradually, mimicking the dawn.

Nearby, another sleep spa, called MetroNaps, provides chairs encased in spherical hoods for a high-tech hibernation.

At Yelo and Metronaps, the shut-eye costs £8-£10 for 20 minutes. It is apparently a price that not just New Yorkers are willing to pay. According to Spa Finder, a company that compiles spa directories for Europe and the US, sleep is predicted to be the top spa trend this year. Research at the London College of Fashion indicates that sleep spas will become mainstream in the next five years.

“Most people think they need more sleep and the more places they can do that, the better. Some hotel chains in London already offer rooms by the hour so you can have a nap, but sleep pods are the next big thing,” says Tiffany Brown, who is heading the college study.

Susie Ellis, the president of Spa Finder, says there was a threefold increase on its website last year in user requests for information on spas with sleep programmes. “More clients are talking about it and more spas are offering treatments,” Ellis says. “Spas are offering sleep education programmes. Lounges are being offered for postmassage naps and many spas are encouraging guests to have a lie-in rather than get up at dawn for a hike.”

One pioneer in the provision of a daily nap as a health treatment was the Canyon Ranch spa, a celebrity bolt hole in Arizona. It introduced a doctor-led sleep programme 12 years ago. It is only recently that others have begun to see sleep as an upmarket commodity.

Victoria McClelland, the director of Wellbeing Escapes, a travel and wellbeing service run by spa experts in the UK, has noticed “a definite move towards more European spas and hotels following the American lead in focusing on sleep”. The Cucumba Spa, in Central London, offers a Snoozebooth; a massage followed by 30 minutes of shut-eye in a darkened room, for £27.50. “It is for Londoners who really need to sleep so much that if they didn’t call in here they would fall asleep at their desk,” says Vivienne Nweke, the director of Cucumba.

The Royal Spa in Tunbridge Wells, Kent, has a bedroom for clients at the nonresidential spa to catch up on their sleep, and the Spa at Pennyhill Park, Surrey, a favourite of Jodie Kidd and the England rugby team, has launched a spa sleepover night during which clients sleep on handmade mattresses and select from a pillow menu for “the ultimate in nurturing”. Elsewhere, the Ronacher Wellbeing Hotel, in southern Austria, has “silent rooms” where guests can escape for slumber.

Marcus DeGuingand, the UK marketing director for MetroNaps, says that a sleep pod is already installed at the Lawn Tennis Association’s London headquarters for elite tennis players and staff. “Some City businesses are using them and a leading gym chain is looking to install them in the next few months,” DeGuingand says.

The trend is also helping people who have sleep problems, too. The Danubius hotel in Budapest offers treatments to alleviate insomnia and tiredness. Other hotels feature a “sleep concierge”. At the Benjamin Hotel, in New York, guests consult the sleep concierge, Joe Rauer, to select from a “pillow menu”, which includes lavender aromatherapy and a 5ft body cushion. The Chiva Som spa, in Thailand, features a specific insomnia treatment and sleep-inducing therapy in its antiageing programme.

Sleep therapies, spas and their spin-off products — hypoallergenic pillows, lavender bed linen sprays, memory foam mattresses — have almost certainly been bolstered in popularity as a result of emerging evidence from the relatively new science of sleep medicine. Scientists studying sleep — or the lack of it — are proving that sufficient rest is indeed restorative and worthwhile. Recent findings have shown that the sleep-deprived are less efficient at work, fatter, more likely to take time off sick, can struggle with relationships, and are at increased risk of being involved in traffic or other accidents.

A state-backed study in France is under way to find out whether a 15-minute, postlunch siesta might encourage the population to sleep more and better. Xavier Bertrand, the French Health Minister, says that “sleep must not be trivialised” and “if the study enables us to confirm the positive effects of concentration and quality of work, we must not hesitate to promote the concept”.

Nicolas Ronco, the entrepreneur who opened Yelo in January, believes that consumers will come to view sleep as they do bottled water, an essential health aid. “I see sleep pods in airports, malls, corporate offices and train stations,” Ronco says. “I see 25 Yelo centres in New York, and then in every crazy, low-quality-of-life city where people lack space.”

For more information: www.yelonyc.com; www.metronaps.com; www.spafinder.co.uk; www.cucumba.co.uk

Snooze control How long should you power nap? "Fifteen to twenty minutes is enough to be refreshing without giving you grogginess afterwards,” says John Shneerson, the director of Britain’s largest sleep clinic at Papworth Hospital, Cambridge. “Employers should make it possible for people to have short naps in their lunch hours in areas where it’s quiet.”

How to increase your chances of sleep

Shneerson suggests not having a TV in the bedroom; getting a new bed if yours is ten years old or more; “ avoiding caffeine in the evening; going to bed earlier to get a full seven hours sleep.

Sleep to your heart’s content

A midday nap might help to prevent heart disease, a six-year study found recently. People who took a 30-minute siesta at least three times a week had a 37 per cent lower chance of a heart attack, said Dr Dimitrios Trichopoulos, the lead researcher from the Harvard School of Public Health.

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