Frequent Flier: Flying the Surly Skies, Stay Positive

I GIVE about 100 lectures a year, which translates to about 300 flights. I try to stay positive about everything, which shouldn’t be a surprise considering I’m a researcher, author and educator in the field of positive psychology.

Shawn Achor, chief of Good Think Inc., a psychology consulting firm, on the Italian Riviera.

Q. How often do you fly for business?

A. Two to three times a week, both domestic and international.

Q. What is your least favorite airport?

A. This is tough because I try to think of positive things about each one. But I suppose I’m not a big fan of O’Hare, since it’s tough to navigate.

Q. Of all the places you have been, what is the best?

A. South Africa because of the incredible people, many of whom had nothing, but still managed to create deep relationships with each other.

Q. What is your secret airport vice?

A. Multiple protein bars. I eat these things like crazy at the airport. I don’t lift weights while traveling, but I justify the protein bars because I lift my carry-on.

I do have some things that work that make travel less tedious. I bring a Kindle instead of a book, and that means I gain about 30 minutes each flight during takeoff and landing when I can’t use electronics. I realized I was gaining time to do other things. Now I meditate, go through some Spanish flash cards, write a quick thank-you note to someone I met during my previous business trip and then pick up the airline magazine and learn one new fact about the world. I have a blast.

When you’re traveling for business, it can be hard to remember things that happened on a trip, especially if you travel alone. Researchers found that taking just two minutes to jot down notes in a travel journal about things that you did and how you felt doing those things can make the experience more meaningful to you. I know business travel can be tough, but many of us get to see new things and new places. It’s worth making the effort to try to remember those experiences that we enjoyed.

One time I was delayed at O’Hare for a while. I wound up being thrilled that my flight wasn’t canceled when many others were. When I play badly at tennis, I get frustrated. When I play great, I assume that’s my normal. When my plane is on time, I assume that’s normal. But in the normal world, travel delays happen all the time. As the comedian Louis C.K. points out, we need to keep things in perspective. He says we forget how good we have it, even in our frustrating times.

I worked with a group of critical care nurses in Boston who had a great idea. They make an “In Case of Emergency” folder. They print out pictures of family and friends, as well as great e-mails or notes that made them smile. They put all of this stuff in a folder. Then, when they were having a particularly tough day at work, they would open their folders and be reminded of all of the good things in life. I think it would be a great idea to make a folder like this, or even scan stuff onto a laptop, and then when a flight gets canceled or you’re sitting next to someone who does nothing but complain, you could find a little solace.

Some of my colleagues do give me a hard time sometimes when flights are really late or canceled. I’ll get a comment from them like, “So how are you doing now, Mr. Happy?” All I can say is that I try to find the positive. That’s important because our brains pick up on negativity easily. One of the things we like to do when traveling is a little experiment with “mirror neurons.” These brain neurons show activation when you see someone yawning, for example, raising the likelihood of you doing the same behavior.

Sometimes my colleagues and I will mess with people at the gate and start tapping our feet or looking at our watches, as if we’re anxious to get on board. Within about two minutes, several other people will start to mimic the same behavior. I never do this experiment at my gate, though. I don’t want to be on the plane with a bunch of anxious people. On the other hand, if you smile and act relaxed, people are going to pick up on those behaviors and possibly even create a ripple effect of, well, happiness.

By Shawn Achor, as told to Joan Raymond. E-mail: joan.raymond@nytimes.com

On the Road: Fight for Hotel Bed Supremacy Spreads to the Skies

I’ve deliberately deployed ridiculously martial language there only to underscore a point about hotel bedding, which had been a mundane and boring business among old-line mattress makers until 1999, when Westin Hotels introduced a new mattress and bedding accessories branded as the Heavenly Bed, which was developed by Simmons, the big mattress manufacturer.

Whereupon a couple of remarkable things happened that truly did constitute a big pillow fight, or even a marketing war. First, seeing the overnight (sorry) success of the Heavenly Bed, other hotel companies rushed to develop their own branded high-end bedding, whether made by Simmons or by competitors like Serta or Sealy, which markets hotel-branded bedding through its Global Hospitality Collection, and others.

As hotel companies began buying luxury beds for their properties and also selling them through their own catalogs and online sites, the overall retail bedding industry underwent a revolution. Travelers, and especially a new wave of female business travelers after 1999, came home and decided that their own beds simply didn’t measure up to the ones they were finding in hotels.

After the Heavenly Bed introduction, hotels in every top category “understood that they couldn’t have a bed in the room that was crummier than the one the customer had at home,” said Steve Tipton, the vice president of Simmons Hospitality, the mattress company’s hotel unit. At the same time, hotel-branded mattresses started to be sold in retail outlets like department stores, and high-end mattresses and other bedding in general had become such a market standard that overall sales soared, to about $6.8 billion last year.

“The consumer connection between the bed and the hotel is a big deal” in the overall mattress business, Mr. Tipton said.

By 2006, when one hotel company, Hilton, had already invested $1 billion in new bedding since 1999, the hotel mattress race subsided. But now it’s back on. As hotels recover from the recession and begin aggressively investing again in improvements, Simmons recently introduced a line of hotel bedding called Recharge Beautyrest, positioned to sell upgraded bedding featuring foams that regulate mattress temperature. And even some airlines are now heralding the virtues of high-end mattresses and bedding in international first-class and business-class cabins, where lie-flat beds have become the industry standard.

For example, Delta Air Lines recently began promoting a new “Westin Heavenly In-Flight bedding product” for its BusinessElite cabins on international flights and on domestic flights between Kennedy Airport in New York and Los Angeles, San Francisco and Seattle, as well as between Atlanta and Honolulu. Singapore Airlines advertises private suites featuring luxurious double beds in first-class cabins of its A380s, and Lufthansa Technik, the maintenance and upgrade unit of the big German airline, is marketing its own Flexidreamer bed (“for a heavenly sleep”), first developed for luxury private jets and now available for first-class cabins on commercial airplanes.

While such sumptuous comforts are most definitely not available in the airlines’ increasingly cramped and austere coach cabins, the evolution of luxury bedding into premium cabins on commercial planes reflects what the hotel business learned well over the last 23 years. As Delta’s announcement of the new high-end bedding for its BusinessElite cabins put it, “In recent surveys, customers have told us that the most important part of the in-flight experience is sleep.”

In the hotel business, a good night’s sleep on high-quality bedding is increasingly a top marketing point. For example, Crowne Plaza hotels, a brand of the IHG hotel group, is emphasizing bedding improvements as part of its multiyear initiative to refurbish quality standards at its hotels in nearly 60 countries.

Incidentally, one of the most interesting aspects of the whole hotel bed-wars phenomenon to me has been the impact on the home-bedding market. For most people, buying a home mattress was always an unpleasant chore, “right up there with used cars,” said Mr. Tipton at Simmons.

But starting with the Heavenly Bed, and on through other high-end mattresses that entered the market from various manufacturers, hotels in effect became real-time showrooms for mattresses. No more plopping down uneasily on a mattress at a department store in a futile attempt to try it out. At a hotel, you use the mattress the way you’d use one at home. Then you can purchase that bedding from the hotel company, or from a retail store that sells lines of mattresses branded with whichever hotel they are found in.

“It really takes a lot of the unpleasantness out of trying a mattress out,” Mr. Tipton said.

Green: Progress in Fight to Keep Night Skies Dark

More than half a century after she wrote those words, it has become harder than ever to see the stars, as cities with their 24-hour lights continue to sprawl. Many children learn about the Milky Way only through books or films, a 2010 Council of Europe report warned.

A combination of economics and preservation efforts is slowing the trend toward excessive lighting in a few areas. A “dark skies” movement, aimed at increasing the public’s appreciation of stargazing, has gained strength in recent years, while cities are rediscovering that turning off streetlights can save money.

“Everywhere, light pollution is an increasing problem,” said Andrej Mohar, an amateur astronomer in Slovenia who has lobbied for lighting regulations there. A 2007 Slovenian law aimed at barring light fixtures from sending light upward has made the night sky above the capital, Ljubljana, about 20 percent darker, he said.

An Arizona-based group called the International Dark-Sky Association has led advocacy efforts worldwide for preserving the night skies.

Since 2006, the group has designated 10 “dark sky” parks globally, as well as another four reserves. The idea is to single out areas that offer excellent stargazing and also work to keep night lighting minimal. One of the latest-certified areas, added in May, is the NamibRand Nature Reserve in Namibia, where the dry air and remote location make for clear skies and good nighttime viewing.

The site is the first dark-sky reserve in Africa — or in any developing country. Before receiving the designation, local officials worked to reduce lighting within the reserve’s bounds. That included requiring vehicles traveling on remote roads at night to dim their headlights if moonlight could be used instead.

Asia has no certified dark-sky areas yet, partly from a lack of awareness there, although that is starting to change, according to Scott Kardel, the managing director for the International Dark-Sky Association.

Three of the dark-sky areas are in Britain. The first, designated in 2009, was the Galloway Forest Park in Scotland. It got “massive media coverage” — far more than expected — which invigorated the movement, said Steve Owens, a dark-sky consultant in Scotland. Since then, Exmoor National Park in England and the Isle of Sark in the Channel Islands have also received dark-sky designations, and representatives of a number of other British parks and communities have expressed interest in applying for the status, Mr. Owens said.

In Britain, the dark-sky cause has been aided by fiscal problems. Local governments, like the Somerset County Council, have begun turning off or dimming some streetlights late at night as a money-saving measure. By doing so, they can also earn credits for greenhouse gas reduction.

However, change can be slow, not least because switching off lights may cause the public to worry about crime and roadway accidents. The Somerset government notes on its Web site that such concerns have not been borne out.

Technology is making some changes easier. The importance of minimizing light pollution is “one of many attributes that we think about” nowadays when designing products, said Cheryl English, the vice president of government and industry relations at Acuity Brands, a lighting company. She is also a member of the International Dark-Sky Association.

However, even though the industry follows light-pollution issues, “if it hurts their sales, of course they’re not going to be very happy with that,” said Terry McGowan, a consultant to the American Lighting Association who also serves on a technical committee of the dark-sky group.

In addition to better fixtures, Mr. McGowan said, a key technological improvement is the rise of so-called smart grid systems, which can turn the lights off when sensors indicate no one is around, saving energy as well as light.

The biggest battle of all, of course, involves getting enough people to care, especially because new fixtures and sensors can be costly. That requires intensive campaigns by observatories and stargazing advocates.

“What keeps me going is I see the effort to raise public awareness succeeding,” said Bill Wren, an astronomer and special assistant to the superintendent at the McDonald Observatory in West Texas. Recently, he said, a gas station about 30 miles, or 48 kilometers, from the observatory had planned to use “just awful” globe-style light fixtures. But after discussing their plans with him, they changed to a design that emits half the amount of light.

Last year, despite some concerns from private-property advocates, Texas passed a law that required new subdivisions being built within 57 miles of the McDonald Observatory to minimize the effects of their lighting on the observatory’s operations.

Most dark-sky advocates recognize that they are fighting a tough battle. “Everywhere on our planet is more or less the Wild West” for lighting, Mr. Mohar said, though he argued that Slovenia was an exception.

On the positive side, excessive lighting, unlike many environmental problems, is ultimately reversible, at least in theory.

Light pollution is “not destroying the nighttime sky,” said Ms. English, the Acuity Brands executive. “We can recover it.”

This article has been revised to reflect the following correction:

Correction: October 17, 2012

An earlier version of this article incorrectly referred to Mr. Gowan’s affiliation with the American Lighting Association. Mr. McGowan serves on a technical committee of the International Dark-Sky Association, not of the American Lighting Association.