Cold and heat exposure are commonplace for muscle and joint treatment, but recent studies are showing they can play a meaningful role in our wakefullness and sleepiness.
Taking a warm bath or shower before bed helps you sleep. It is not that you get warm and toasty ready for bed. When you get out of the bath or shower, all of the blood races to the surface of your skin. As a result, your core body temperature plummets, enabling you to fall asleep faster and stay asleep more easily.
This is backed up by science, studies show that your body’s core temperature needs to cool down by 1 to 3 degrees C to sleep, you continue to cool the body throughout the first and middle parts of the night, enhancing the ability of individuals to stay asleep more soundly, increase the amount of deep sleep, and boost the electrical quality of that deep sleep.
External ambient room temperature impacts our sleep at night. The optimal temperature for sleep at night for the average adult is between 16-18 degrees Celsius, although everyone will be a little bit different, of course.
As you move into those late morning hours of sleep, particularly as you start to enter the REM sleep-rich phases of your sleep cycle later in the morning, your central brain temperature rises significantly. An optimal room temperature when waking is 21 degrees Celsius.