Keeping cool while sleeping is the biggest challenge. This is why we all look for answers to the question: How to keep cool while sleeping? And this is also the reason why people are searching for innovative products like Chilipad and similar intelligent mattresses. Everyone is looking to change their routine or bedroom essentials. Whatever sails their boat!
Summer is here, and it means joyful, warm days but sometimes unbearable body heat during the nights.
We all love it when it’s beach season. Everyone keeps yearning for when next they can wear their shorts and dresses. But all this joy fades when the sun goes down, and you cannot fall asleep. The body heat sometimes becomes unbearable.
You try blasting your fan to the maximum, no success at all.
Next, you decide to ditch the blankets, but it still does not work in your favor.
And if you are from some hot region, you know that sleeping with an open window does not always work.
When it’s the hot season, you want to enjoy both the days and nights.
Keeping your body cool while sleeping will also help you sleep faster on those hot summer nights. And lucky for you today, we help you with the proper and effective ways to stay cool during the night. They’re nothing but simple biohacking sleep tips you can practice anytime, anywhere (of course, when you’re crashing on bed). 🙂
What’s The Ideal Temperature To Keep Cool While Sleep?
Getting hot while sleeping is regular. The blame is primarily hot summer nights, but this is not usually the case. Many people fail to sleep well when their core body temperature rises on a nightly basis.
The best temperature for sleep is usually between 60-67 degrees Fahrenheit. When your body temperature becomes higher than this, you will have problems falling asleep.
If you fall asleep with high temperatures by chance, you will not have a night of quality sleep. Deep sleep is associated with cool temperatures (1).
For the right quality and quantity of sleep, you need to learn how to regulate and manage your body temperature while sleeping.
Learn the best tips to stay cool at night below.
How To Keep Cool While Sleeping — 16 Tips
Here are the best tips to ensure ward off excessive heat at night
Use Natural Fibers for bed
Are your sheets and night garments made of synthetic fires? Those could be the culprit.
If you want to stay cool the entire night, especially during the summer months, ensure you sleep in linen or cotton, from your garments to your bedding (2).
Why is cotton your best friend for cool nights? Cotton has strong sweat-wicking properties that will help prevent you from being hot. Besides, cotton is lightweight, which is what you need for staying cool at night.
Avoid Tight Sleeping Clothes
When you wear tight clothes, you limit the airflow your body receives. Decreased airflow increases body temperatures.
Tight clothes will make you hot at night. Furthermore, they make you feel trapped and restricted. If it’s hot, you want to wear loose clothes and feel free.
Freeze your bed sheets
Freezing your sheets is a hack that will help you drift to sleep faster. They will help you stay cool in the first hours of your sleep.
A few hours before your bedtime, place your sheets in freezer bags or a plastic bag and let them stay in your freezer for an hour or two. The cold sheets may not keep you cool the entire night. But they sure will keep you cool enough to fall asleep.
Most people feel hot on the head and face. You could simply freeze a washcloth and just press it to your face to relieve the hot flashes (3).
Freezing socks for hot feet could also help in the lowering of the core temperature.
Freeze a water bottle
Freeze a water bottle alongside your sheets or washcloth. Let it freeze for an hour.
Before you go to bed, take the frozen bottle and use it as a compress. It works excellently against your face, neck and face. A cold compress in the most heated areas will help you sleep better.
Also, you could have one or two other water bottles placed around you to help you stay cool for longer.
Besides still under bottles, you could have a spray bottle with cold water around you in bed. When the temperatures become unbearable, spray a little cold water onto your body.
Go Egyptian to Fall asleep Faster
To keep them cool during the night, people in ancient Egypt soaked their sheets in cool water just before their bedtime. The Egyptian method is no longer that popular, thanks to the fans, which can be used to keep us cool during the night.
However, the few people who still use the Egyptian method, wrap themselves in damp bed sheets while sleeping. You don’t have to use completely wet sheets; you could use your washing machine to wring out excess water.
One thing for sure is, you don’t want to have your sheet dripping with water and carry it to bed. The procedure below will help you reinvent the Egyptian method:
- soak a large towel or sheet in cool water
- manually squeeze out as much water as you can
- place it in your washer and run it through the spin cycle
Your sheet is now ready to hand you a cooler environment without dripping water.
Invest in cooling technology
If you want to go hard with ensuring your sleeping environment remains cool on every hot night, you may need to invest in biohacking products that will help keep your bed cool.
Here are the best biohacking tools that will help you stay cool at night.
How To Keep Cool While Sleeping Tech #1: Chilipad
The concept of a Chilipad is just fantastic when it comes to keeping your bed cooler.
Wondering what a Chilipad is? They are mattress pads that help regulate heat. They have tubes that allow either warm or cold water to run through. If you want to make the room cooler, you will have cold water running through the Chilipad tubes.
When you sleep, the contact between your body and the mattress traps a lot of heat. The circulation of water will help keep you cool by dismissing the trapped hot air between your body and the mattress.
How about the comfort? You won’t feel the tubes when you lie on the mattress pad! The best part is, you can troubleshoot most of the Chilipad problems yourself.
I Want To Sleep Cool Instantly Read Chilipad Review
How To Keep Cool While Sleeping Tech #2: Cooling Mattress
Do you wake up every other night dripping in sweat?
That’s a sign that you might need to upgrade your mattress. A cooling mattress is one of the best biohacking tools you could invest in. When you sleep hot, your body releases heat into the environment, which is now your bedding and mattress. This is your body’s mechanism to stay cool.
If you upgrade to a mattress with cooling features, you may long forget about dripping wet during the nights. Cooling mattresses like Ooler have:
- a cooling gel that will keep you as you sleep
- wool infusions have air channels that allow hot air to escape
A couple of other biohacking products can help keep you cool at night, such as a cooling pillow.
Cooling Mattress, Help Me Please! Read Ooler Review
Don’t Drink Alcohol before bed
Limiting alcohol consumption before bedtime is a top biohacking sleep tip because alcohol is not suitable for sleep.
But there is more to that.
Alcohol causes night sweats and hot flashes. When you drink alcohol, your blood vessels dilate and transfer closer to your skin surface. This movement causes you to sweat more.
Next time you crave a drink before bed, take a glass of warm milk or tea instead of a glass of wine.
Eat Smaller Meals Close to bedtime
Eating heavy meals full of spices, fats and carbohydrates, shortly before bedtime could be the reason your temperatures soar during bedtime. Spices, fats and carbs take more energy for the body to break down.
Stress eating may seem like a biohacking stress tip, but it only makes you hot at night.
Furthermore, spiced foods trigger more sweating.
Before bedtime, stick to light and healthy meals. some of the meals you could consider for a start include:
- salad
- chicken
- fish
- light snacks such as popcorn or dark chocolate
Keep your bedroom Unplugged
If it uses electricity, it also produces heat.
If you want to maintain a cooler environment, consider unplugging your bedroom. Eliminate devices such as mobile phones, tablets, lamps, televisions and overhead lights.
They may seem to be making a minor impact in heating your room, but they could be the culprit.
If you must have these in your bedroom, unplug them hours before sleep time. Minimizing electrical devices before bedtime is one of the biohacking sleep tactics. .
Change Your Sleep Preferences
You could be in need of a change in your sleeping preferences. Here are some sleeping habits that you need to ditch.
How To Keep Cool While Sleeping Preference #1: Sleep Alone
First, if you share your bed, you may want to switch this sleeping arrangement during the summer months.
Sleeping by yourself is a great way to eliminate excess body heat during hot nights.
However, if you have to share your bed, consider not making body contact with the other person. Contact while sleeping is a sure way to increase body temperature, especially if you are a hot sleeper.
How To Keep Cool While Sleeping Preference #2: Change your sleeping Position
How do you sleep? Another thing you may have to change is your sleeping position. If you spoon with your partner, this is something you may want to reconsider during the hot summer nights.
Research shows that sleeping in the spread eagle position is one of the best ways to manage hot nights. In the spread eagle position, you spread your arms and legs to face every single corner of your bed.
It becomes challenging to lay like a starfish when you share a bed.
How To Keep Cool While Sleeping Preference #3: Sleep Naked
Yeah, going all-natural can help decrease your body temperature.
Go nude; you will forget about having to wake up to the disgusting wet pajamas.
How To Keep Cool While Sleeping Preference #4: Sleep Lower
Finally, the lower you sleep, the cooler you stay. If you are experiencing a heatwave, you can shift from the second or third floor to the ground floor. This will help you stay sane during the unbearable heat waves.
Besides, you can move with your bedding to the floor.
Use Fans Smartly
Fan may not be in your top bedroom essentials list because of its old school invention. But it’s more important than your conscious mind can agree. Before installing fans in your bedroom, you need to know that fans cool people, not the air. So, if you are looking to push hot air out, fans could be the wrong move.
Fans work by circulating air in the room, therefore giving cooler air to the people in the room. They do not decrease the room temperature.
But, there is a way you can optimize your fan, for better results, during hot nights. Look below.
How To Keep Cool While Sleeping Fan Tip #1: Hack your fan for extra cooling
For extra cooling, install your fan close to open windows. This makes it easier for the fan to pull hot air from the room and push it out.
Also, be strategic with your fans. If you are installing a ceiling fan, ensure you have them rotate in a counter-clockwise direction. This is a perfect cross-breeze hack that will help drive away warm air.
Another hack to optimize your fan for cooler nights is using ice cubes. You can place a tray of ice cubes between the fan and you.
As the ice melts, it emits cool air. The fan will blow the cool air to you. It is a way to enjoy some cool breeze. Pretty much old school? Yes, but it works like magic.
Air Conditioning
Installing an air conditioner can be expensive, but it will be a long-term solution to keeping you cool. It is especially worthwhile if you live in an extremely hot region.
A lot of people already have an air conditioner, but not just in the bedroom. If you don’t want to invest in another air conditioner, try moving your bed closer to the air conditioner during the hot weather. Also, there are portable air conditioners that function properly; consider them as a cheaper air conditioning option.
However, if AC doesn’t suit you and you still want to sleep cold— you can switch to modern alternatives like Chilipad or Ooler. They’re smart mattresses. You don’t need to cool the entire room. Just the bed would be enough!
Cheaper Alternative To AC I'm Tired Of Night Sweats
Take a Hot Shower to Lower Core Body Temperature
Cold showers are also known to stimulate the body, hence making it difficult for you to sleep. The cold showers may instantly lower the core temperature, but they may make you more alert when you should be drifting to sleep. This is why hot showers are the best resort.
If you want to stay cool at night, a hot shower could work wonders. When you take a hot shower, your natural core temperature will first rise during and just after the shower. However, a few moments after you get out of your warm bath, your body will begin to cool down.
Pro tip: take your warm shower an hour before your bedtime, and not just before your bedtime.
Cool off Pulse Points
If you want to cool your whole body, the secret is cooling the pulse points. Cooling the pulse points will spread the cooling effects to the rest of the body parts.
How To Keep Cool While Sleeping Pulse Points #1: How to cool pulse points
- use ice packs to cool the pulse points.
- Locate the pulse points on the various places on your wrists, ankles, neck, ack of the knees, and front of your elbows.
- Have the ice packs on the pulse points for approximately 20 minutes, and you are good to go.
Drink Ice Water For Cool Sleeping At Night
For those nights with excessive heat, consider having a bottle of ice water by your bedside.
First, if it’s a hot night, you are sweating too much and may get dehydrated. Therefore, a glass of water could go a long way in hydrating you.
ut what we are here for today, if you wake up hot, taking some sip
s of ice water could easily send you back to sleep.
Create A Cross-Breeze For Sleeping Cool
Sometimes, opening the windows at night when trying to get air flowing won’t just work well. What you need to do is get to the ground and have the air flowing by yourself.
To create a cross breeze, you can have your fan directly across the window. This will maximize airflow.
Also, open all your windows for maximized airflow. Windows are not just suitable for natural light; they may help get the areas around your bed cool.
Drink Cool Structured Water Before Sleep
You might feel tempted to drink cool water before sleeping. But how good is your general water purity when you’re surrounded with emf radiations and negative energies?
If you didn’t know, emf and negative energies de-harmonize potable water. It’s not as healthy as you may believe. Instead, you should consider converting impure water into structured water.
Now the question is how? Well, Somavedic devices, especially Somavedic medic green ultra is great for harmonizing water. It helps you get rid of negative energies and allow water to crystalize.
Once your water is crystalized, you can cool it in the refrigerator and drink it right before sleep.
I Have A Right To Healthy Water Read Somavedic Review
FAQS on Keeping Cool While sleeping
When it comes to quality sleep, we love to go hard. This is because we understand the benefits of quality sleep. We answer some FAQs below on how to stay cool while sleeping to help you sleep better.
How To Keep Cool While sleeping Q#1: How Do I Stop Myself From Overheating While sleeping?
First, you need to change some of your habits, and secondly, change your sleeping environment.
For your habits, you need to start limiting alcohol consumption close to bedtime. Also, remember to take small meals, take a hot bath, and not exercise close to bedtime.
To make your sleeping environment friendly, ensure to install fans and air conditioners, freeze your bedsheets, and sleep in natural fibers.
How To Keep Cool While sleeping Q#2: Why Does My Body Get Hot when I Sleep?
Melatonin, the sleep hormone, plays a huge role in body heat regulation at night. It results in heat loss through the peripheral parts of the body. This way, the body temperature falls, but the skin temperature on the surface rises. Besides, as you lose the heat, your mattress and sheets may trap it in, making you feel hot.
Final Thoughts On How to Keep Cool While Sleeping
Staying cool while you sleep all night long is a dream come true for everyone, especially when the outside begins to get hot. Thankfully, you can help your body maintain a lower temperature during the night. Incorporate these tips when the heat rises beyond normal. You will long forget about struggling to stay asleep during the hot nights. Remember, deep asleep goes hand in hand with a cool sleeping environment.
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Sources:
1 https://www.cnet.com/health/sleep/how-to-stay-cool-while-you-sleep/
2 https://greatist.com/happiness/how-to-cool-down-a-room#sleeping-in-the-heat
3 https://www.insider.com/how-to-stay-cool-at-night