Have you noticed the temperature of your room at night? You may be negatively impacting your sleep by having it at the wrong temperature. A warm room may feel cozy, but the benefits of sleeping in a cold environment vastly outweigh it.
Keeping your room on the cooler side is something you will want to consider, as it will have a tremendous impact on the quality of your sleep. As tempting as it is to keep things warm, this may do you no favors. This article will look at why you shouldn’t keep your room warm but more on the cool side.
Why Is Sleeping in a Cold Room Better for You Than Sleeping in a Warm One?
A warm room may feel soothing and make you drowsy, but it’s not optimal for deep restorative sleep. You may fall asleep relatively easily, but a room that is too warm will make it difficult to stay asleep. This disrupted sleep will leave you feeling unrested and irritable for the rest of the day.
The other big problem with sleeping in a warm room is that it doesn’t allow your body to release melatonin. You may have heard of melatonin from the supplement, but it’s a natural hormone secreted by the pituitary gland in the brain. Melatonin helps you fall asleep and stay asleep.
Melatonin is also important for keeping your circadian rhythm properly engaged. When it isn’t released – because of a warm room – it can throw your biological clock out of whack.
Melatonin is also an anti-aging hormone, so it is important to keep it functioning as much as possible. This is one of the many benefits sleeping in a cold room has – melatonin production.
Here now are 5 other benefits of sleeping in a cold room:
1. You May Lose More Weight
When it comes to sleeping in a cold room, you may not have expected this benefit. When the temperature is lower, this becomes more optimal for expanding the amount of brown fat in your body. You have brown fat and white fat, and the brown version is actually good for you. The simple way to look at this is that white fat stores calories and brown fat burns it.
When you have more brown fat, you make it more likely to raise your metabolism and burn off the white fat. Sleeping in a colder room helps to accomplish this. A study looked at this with its participants sleeping for four months in a temperature-controlled room. In the first month, they set the thermostat at 75 degrees Fahrenheit or 23.8 celsius. They then went to 66 degrees for month two (18.8 Celsius), 75 again for month 3, and then 81 for the last month (27.2. Celsius).
The subjects that slept in the 66-degree room produced double the amount of brown fat compared to the other three months. So lower that temperature at night and you may lose some weight!
2. You’ll Fall Asleep Faster
The idea of sleeping in a colder room may make it seem like you will never drift off. You may envision yourself chattering and too uncomfortable to fall asleep. We’re not talking about a frigidly cold room, but one that is at least cooler than the other main rooms in your house.
When you fall asleep, your body temperature naturally drops. You can help speed up the ability to fall asleep by keeping your room colder. This way your body doesn’t have to take as long to transition into its natural lower temperature state. You’ll fall asleep quicker and be able to stay asleep longer.
3. You Will Lower Your Stress Hormones
Stress hormones – specifically cortisol – play havoc with your body. Long-term stress can lead to a lot of nasty conditions and diseases. The best way to get rid of these stress hormones is to sleep. This is when your body burns them off, allowing your body to function at its best. If you’re going through stressful times, feeling rundown, or sick, make it a priority to get more sleep.
When you don’t sleep, your body assumes some sort of trauma must happen or else, why would you be awake? This raises your stress hormones, even more, leaving you to fight an uphill battle. So if you’re feeling swamped and run down, don’t feel guilty about getting extra sleep. You need it to feel your best, and a colder room allows you to get that deeper restorative sleep you need.
4. A Cold Room Can Lead To Better Mental Health
Certain conditions that affect how your body functions can be controlled by sleeping in a colder room. Symptoms that can cause cognitive issues can be decreased when sleeping in colder temperatures. Not only does deep sleep help to enhance creativity, imagination, and focus, cold sleep can help eliminate issues that cause don’t allow your brain to work at its best.
Anxiety and depression can also be alleviated when you get proper restorative sleep. Failing to do so can exasperate these conditions.
5. You Can Cure Insomnia
Insomnia affects millions of people, and this is one of the big benefits that come from sleeping in a cold room. It’s hard to pinpoint the exact causes of insomnia, but one big one may be the inability to regulate body temperature. When your body temperature is properly regulated, you can fall asleep faster. This means getting your room to a cooler temperature to combat anybody’s temperature raises you may experience.
Your body also doesn’t have to work as hard to fall asleep, and this can help you relax and fall asleep easier.
How To Get Your Room Cooler
One of the optimal sleeping temperatures looks to be around 66 degrees Fahrenheit or 18.8 Celcius. You can set your thermostat to this setting, but it may be hard to get your bedroom to that exact temperature. You may have to play around with keeping your window open, but your bedroom should be colder than the rest of your house.
This may include sleeping without blankets or having air conditioning in the room. You’ll know your room is in the right temperature range if your sheets feel cool to the touch when first lying down on them.
Final Thoughts
People often wonder what the secret is to get healthy and if there is a magic pill they can take to do so. Well, this pill exists, and it’s called sleep. Sleep is the absolute most important thing to enhance all areas of your health and wellness. Without it, you can expect to run into a lot of problems.
Sleep needs to be a priority and to get the best shut-eye possible, you want to keep your room cold. When you sleep in a cold room, you will reap the health benefits that go along with it.
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good and healthy info ….thanks