Why does the first night in a riad feel unsettling?

You've arrived. The riad is stunning. The courtyard is quiet. The bed is good. And at 2am you're wide awake with your heart racing, certain that something is wrong.

Nothing is wrong. Everything is just different enough to trigger the part of your brain that hasn't evolved past sleeping in caves.

Start with the silence. Your nervous system is calibrated to the ambient noise of home — the hum of a refrigerator, the drone of traffic, the white noise of climate control. In a medina riad, those sounds don't exist. What replaces them is a silence so complete that your brain interprets it as a signal to stay alert. Silence, in evolutionary terms, meant the predators had gone quiet. Your amygdala doesn't know you're on holiday.

Then the sounds that do come. A cat screaming on the rooftop — mating calls that sound like a child in distress. A door slamming somewhere in the medina, amplified by stone walls. The call to prayer at 4:30am, enormous and close, from a minaret you can't see. Each sound arrives without context, and your brain, unable to categorize it, files it as threat.

The shadows don't help. Riad courtyards are lit by the sky, and at night the sky is the only light source. The courtyard below your room becomes a well of deep shadow. The arches, the carved plaster, the plants — all of it takes on unfamiliar shapes. Your room opens directly onto this space, often without a solid door, sometimes with only a curtain. The boundary between your sleeping space and the open courtyard is permeable. You are not sealed in. You are sleeping at the edge of an open space in a city you don't know.

Jet lag weaponizes all of it. If you've flown from North America, you're arriving with a circadian rhythm that's six to eight hours off. Your cortisol — the stress hormone — peaks at the wrong time. Your body wants to be awake precisely when you need to sleep. The unfamiliar environment plus the hormonal misfire produces anxiety that feels emotional but is entirely chemical.

The second night is better. The third night you sleep through the call to prayer. By the fourth night, the silence feels like the point. Your nervous system has recategorized the riad from unknown territory to home base. The anxiety was not about the riad. It was about your brain doing its job — scanning a new environment for danger, finding none, and slowly standing down.