Should You Sleep in a Cold Room?

You probably don’t spend too much time thinking about the temperature of your room – unless it’s in the middle of summer and you can’t get to sleep because it’s so hot.

Benefits of Sleeping in a Cold Room

You may not have even heard of the benefits of sleeping in a cold room. In fact, it’s beneficial for your health to sleep in a cold room whatever time of the year it is. Not only can it help you sleep better, but it can also be beneficial to your health and even prevent a bit of aging, too.

Let’s take a bit more of an in-depth look into why it’s beneficial to sleep in a room that’s cool.

You’ll Fall Asleep Quickly

As evening falls and you begin to wind down, your body temperature starts to drop. This is your body telling you that it’s time to unwind, relax and get some much-needed rest. By keeping your bedroom nice and cool, you’re encouraging your body to do what it wants to do, naturally.

If the room you sleep in is too warm, it could potentially act as a block to this signal, and you could end up tossing and turning for quite a while.

Sleep Quality Improves

We’ve talked about how your body temperature gets cooler as you go off to sleep, which means that it comes back up as you get close to waking up. This is going to be the time when you feel that it’s too hot to sleep. If you’ve ever woken up in the middle of the night and you’re covered in sweat, you can relate to how disruptive this can be to your sleep cycle.

If you’re keeping your bedroom nice and cool, there’s less chance of you waking suddenly in the night. In addition, maintaining a cool room actually encourages the production of melatonin, the sleep hormone, so the cooler your room is, the better your quality of sleep is going to be.

Prevents Aging

Because sleeping in a cool room can help to produce the sleep hormone melatonin, this can also serve as an anti-aging tool. This is because melatonin is also responsible for slowing down the aging process in our bodies.

Increases Melatonin Levels

We’ve already talked about how melatonin can slow down the aging process and help you fall asleep a lot quicker. You may be surprised to know that melatonin has a number of other health benefits, too.

These include weight loss, helping with menstrual pain, helping with your mood, increased brain health and even helping to fight cancer. Needless to say, this is the kind of hormone that you want as much as you can get.

Helps Prevent Metabolic Disease

In layman’s terms, sleeping in a cold room can actually help you keep the weight off. This is because melatonin helps your body to store the right type of fat that encourages the rest of the body to burn more calories. The more calories you burn while you’re sleeping, the easier you’ll be able to keep the weight off.

Decreases Your Risk of Disease

Health issues like type 2 diabetes affect a large number of people, so figuring out how to prevent issues like this is always at the top of our list. Sleeping in a cool room can actually increase the bodies ability to be sensitive to insulin, which reduces the chances of developing type 2 diabetes. Another way that sleeping in a cold room prevents health issues like type 2 diabetes is that it promotes the disposal of glucose, which is another cause of type 2 diabetes.

Surprisingly, diabetes isn’t the only disease that sleeping in a cold room can help prevent. Because melatonin has the ability to travel through the brain-blood barrier, it’s shown signs of being able to prevent Alzheimer’s and aging of your brain.

Helps to Prevent Insomnia

You may have a lot of stress left over from the day, and you may find your brain struggles to stop when you finally want to try and get to sleep. While both of these things are significant factors in not being able to sleep at night, not sleeping in a cold room can also be preventing this as well.

Interestingly, people who do suffer from insomnia actually have a warmer core body temperature than people who don’t. This means that if you’re someone with a naturally warmer core body temperature, you’ll have to figure out other means of cooling it down, like sleeping in a cold room.

Increases Mood

There are actually a couple of ways that sleeping in a cooler room can help increase your mood. The first and very obvious one is that because you’re now sleeping better, you’re waking up feeling more rested and therefore in a better mood.

The other reason is a bit more scientific and involves the connection between serotonin and melatonin. Serotonin is a hormone that’s known for positively affecting our moods, but what you may not actually know about it is that it is responsible for producing melatonin. This means that when our brain is fed a healthy dose of both, we are bound to feel healthier and happier.

Decreases Stress Levels

Similar to the reasons why sleeping in a cold room can increase your mood, it can also help lower your levels of stress.

How to Make Your Room Cooler

Use a Gel Mattress Topper

While memory foam mattresses may be comfortable, they don’t do a lot for temperature. This is because they can trap heat, which is immediately going to make you hotter throughout the night. Instead, try sleeping on a gel mattress topper instead. It has cooling properties that will make sure you’re nice and cool throughout the night.

Try a Fan

A fan not only circulates the air in the room, but it can also help regulate the temperature as well. Another reason why a fan is good is that it will prevent any sweat from staying stuck to your body as you sleep.

If you like your room to be even cooler, you can try placing a bowl of ice in front of it. The fan will blow air through the ice, creating an extra cold blast of air.

Try Sleeping Naked

Sleeping without any clothes on is a great way to cool down and regulate your body temperature. Word of warning, though – if you sleep with a partner and they also sleep naked, try avoiding too much skin on skin. This can increase your body temperature.

Open a Window

Similar to a fan, having a window open can help the air to circulate.

This is not the only reason to leave a window open, though. Having a window open can actually have a positive effect on the carbon dioxide levels in the room. Open windows lower the amount of carbon dioxide in the air, which in turn can help you to stay asleep throughout the night.

Try Drinking Water

While you may not want to drink too much water before you go to bed, drinking some water can be beneficial for your sleep because it can regulate your body’s core temperature.

Keep Your Feet Out

Sleeping without socks on and keeping your feet out from under the covers is another way you can help regulate your core body temperature throughout the night. This is because we can easily lose a lot of our body heat through our extremities.

Use Cooling Sheets

When thinking about which sheets to use, the thinner, the better. Thin sheets are the best option when working out how to stay as cool as possible while you sleep. We recommend avoiding synthetic or flammable materials, too, because they won’t breathe.

If it’s really hot, you can even put your sheet in the freezer for a few minutes before you go to bed. This will immediately cool down your core temperature.

Avoid Incandescent Lights

If you sleep in a room that has incandescent lights, there’s a good chance that they are contributing to the heat. This is because lightbulbs like these generate an impressive amount of heat, which will make your room harder to keep cool.

Sleep on the Lower Floor

As you may already know, heat rises. This means that if your bedroom is on one of the lower floors, you’ll have a much easier time keeping it cool throughout the night.

Buy Blackout Curtains

Melatonin is the sleep hormone – but it has an Achilles heel. The more light that you’re exposed to, the harder your body finds it to produce this sleep hormone. This means that if your bedroom is nice and dark, you’ll have a much easier time producing melatonin and falling asleep as a result. Another thing you may not know about blackout curtains is that they’re great at keeping the heat out.

Keep Your Blinds Closed

In the summer months, heat can build up in your room throughout the day, making it difficult to get rid of at night. If you keep your blinds and curtains shut throughout the day, less heat will build up which means your room will be much cooler at night.

Are There Health Risks?

So, are there any risks to your health if you sleep in a cooler room? The answer is no. For maximum benefits, try to keep the temperature between 60 and 68 degrees.

Keep in mind that being too cold can also prevent you from getting a good night’s sleep, so make sure that you aim for this perfect temperature. Also bear in mind that if you have a baby sleeping in the room with you, you’ll need to adjust the temperature accordingly. The ideal temperature for babies sleeping in a room is between 68 and 72 degrees.

Can Sleeping in a Cold Room Cause Nightmares?

The well-known myth that sleeping in a cold room can cause nightmares will continue to be believed by some. However, there is no proof that this is the case.

However, remember that any room that isn’t comfortable to sleep in can disrupt our sleeping pattern and REM cycle, potentially causing disturbing dreams.