Sleep Strategy #3 is all about temperature. Studies have shown that your body prefers to sleep in cool or cold environments. This is one of the reasons why you might find it hard to fall asleep if it’s too hot in your room or if you’re in a climate that’s too warm.
So, what you can do to aid your ability to fall asleep at night is to keep your room as cool as possible. You can try closing the blinds during the day or opening the windows at night or having a fan in your room, doing what you can to keep your room cool and cold will help you fall asleep at night.
Now, there’s a few other tricks that you can do to hack your way into this sleep strategy. The first is about taking hot or warm baths at night. Now, it might seem a little counter intuitive. You want to stay cold so why should you take a hot bath? Interestingly, when you take a hot bath, it actually helps cool the body down. When you’re in a warm bath, what happens is your blood vessels dilate in a process called vasodilation and this helps release more heat from the body. So, it actually cools you down when you take a hot bath.
Similar to this, another thing you can do is actually wearing gloves and socks into your bed at night. When your fingers and feet are warm, it gives the signal to your body that you’re too hot and so in the same process, your blood vessels will dilate and you will lose a bit more heat from the body.
So, these are two ways that you can mimic this process and allow your body to cool down faster.
So, in summary, keep your room cool, keep your body cool and it will help you fall asleep at night.