Why you should consider sleeping in a cold room

We don’t often think about the temperature of our bedrooms unless it’s the blistering middle of summer and we’re trying everything we can think of to get comfortable.

What you might not have considered is that it’s beneficial to keep our bedrooms cold year round. Not only does it help improve the quality of our sleep, but it can also prevent disease and even slow down the aging process!

In this article, I’ll share the top benefits you can experience by keeping your bedroom cooler, as well as a ton of tips about how you can cool down your room without cranking up the air conditioner.

I’ll also answer your burning questions about the health risks of sleeping in the cold and whether or not you can expect to experience nightmares.

Benefits of Sleeping in a Cool Room

Fall Asleep Quickly

As nighttime approaches, our body temperature naturally drops, signaling that it’s time to slow down and get some rest. By keeping your bedroom cooler, you’re reinforcing your body’s natural instinct to sleep. If the room is too hot, it could potentially block that signal and cause it to take longer for you to fall asleep.

Improves Sleep Quality

Your body temperature bottoms out right before bed, and will rise naturally as you get closer to waking. This rise in body temperature can cause people to feel like they’re “sleeping hot.” If you’ve ever woken up in the middle of the night drenched in sweat, you know how disruptive that can be. If you keep your bedroom cooler and regulate the temperature throughout the night, you’ll find that your overall sleep quality improves.

Another way that keeping your room cold can improve the quality of your sleep is by stimulating melatonin production. It turns out that rooms with temperatures in the range of 60 to 68 degrees stimulate the production of melatonin, which encourages sleep.

Anti-Aging

As mentioned above, rooms between 60 and 68 degrees encourage the body to produce melatonin. In addition to promoting sleep, melatonin is also a powerful anti-aging hormone.

Improves Melatonin Levels

Okay, so you already know that higher melatonin levels equate to more sleep and anti-aging. Other benefits of increased melatonin production are regular menstrual cycles, enhanced moods, weight loss, cancer-fighting properties, and increased brain health.

This hormone is a powerful tool in our health arsenal!

Prevents Metabolic Disease

This is a politically correct way of saying that sleeping in a cold room can help prevent you from getting fat, and even help you with your weight loss goals. Again, when your room is set to an optimal, cooler temperature, the melatonin your body produces will cause your body to store “beige fat,” which contrary to the name, helps you burn calories instead of storing them.

Who knew that you could burn extra calories while you sleep?!

Decrease Risk of Disease

Conditions like type 2 diabetes are on the rise, so any tip about decreasing our risk gets our immediate attention. In addition to the phenomenon of beige and brown fat increasing in cooler temperatures and causing your body to burn more calories, it also increases insulin sensitivity, which lowers the risk of type 2 diabetes.

Colder sleeping temperatures also promote glucose disposal, another indicator of type 2 diabetes risk.

Diabetes isn’t the only disease that a cold room can freeze out. Because melatonin is a powerful antioxidant with the ability to cross the blood-brain barrier, it’s been shown to prevent Alzheimer’s and aging of the brain.

Prevents Insomnia

A stressful day and an overactive brain aren’t the only things keeping you awake at night. Studies show that people who suffer from insomnia tend to have a warmer core body temperature before falling asleep than so-called normal people.

Remember that our bodies cool off at night in anticipation of sleep. But if your body automatically runs hot, you’ll have to alter your environment to cool your temperature down enough to signal that it’s time for bed.

Enhances Mood

There are a couple of ways that sleeping in cold rooms can enhance your mood. The first and most obvious one is that since a cooler room improves the quality of your sleep, you’ll wake up more rested and feel better overall. No one will accuse you of needing a nap for acting like a grumpy toddler!

The other reason has to do with the link between melatonin and serotonin. Serotonin is a known mood-enhancer, and it’s also the precursor for melatonin, meaning that melatonin is made from it. When we have enough of both of these hormones in our brains, we rest better and feel happier.

Reduce Stress Levels

Similar to the mood enhancing effects of colder temperatures in the bedroom, you’ll also find that getting a higher quality of sleep reduces stress all day long.