Our culture is really starting to understand that health is about so much more than just nutrition and exercise. While those two components are a big part of a complete wellness routine, there’s several other factors that go into being ultimately healthy. Things like stress management practices, our overall purpose in life, the quality of relationships, our mindset surrounding our finances, and sleep are all major factors that tie into our health.
When it comes to sleep in particular, there has been a huge wave of information lately in our society. I think for a long time it was thought that in order to be successful we needed to sacrifice sleep. In order to have the life we want, we need to have more waking hours in the day to get more done. But the truth about it is, sleep is so vitally important for, not just our well-being, but our productivity as well.
While living in a world that tells us we always need to be doing something to get results, sleep is the complete opposite. We literally do nothing to get results. Doing nothing is so hard for a lot of us to do! Not to mention wrapping our heads around the thought of doing nothing actually being beneficial for us. However, sleep must serve some sort of purpose, right?
Thought about logically for a moment, if sleep weren’t beneficial for us as humans we probably would’ve evolved out of it a long time ago. It is the time we are most susceptible to danger. We are completely unaware of the world around us, leaving us more vulnerable and increasing our chances of death. So with that logic in mind, sleep has to serve a purpose.
But what about the lack of sleep? We ultimately feel the short term consequences of sleep deprivation when we miss a few hours of sleep. We feel lethargic, brain-fogged, irritable, and the ever popular “hangry”. It’s no secret that short term sleep deprivation has many negative side effects that we feel immediately.
But is anyone asking the question, “what about chronic, long term sleep deprivation”?
This is a lot more common and not many people are aware of the potential risks it has. We have been led to believe that if we just get the magic eight hours of sleep per night then we are getting adequate amounts of sleep. While getting more sleep for a large part of the population is most certainly a good start, where I tend to spend more of my focus is improving the quality of sleep people are already getting.
Because as we live our day-to-day lives, it’s very common for people to assume they are getting adequate sleep, when in all actuality, they aren’t. We wake up feeling the same day after day, but never realize the “normal” we are feeling might not be the best we can optimally feel. When we get so used to feeling a certain way, we don’t realize that we can feel even better and have a new “normal”.
It’s very prevalent in today’s society to go many years to decades while getting low quality sleep each night. This can set up a cascade of problems with our health - less time to repair, out of whack hormones, inability to properly detox our brains, and many other things. Topped with a poor diet and lack of exercise, we wonder why we have aches, pains, hormone issues, weight gain, and other lifestyle created illnesses.
So you may be wondering how to get better sleep at night, right?
While there are so many things you can do like eat good sleep nutrients, watch your caffeine intake later in the day, exercise appropriately, and get more daily sun exposure, one of the best ways that I’ve found that consistently helps me get better deep sleep at night is sleeping cool.
When I realized that the poor sleep I was getting for years wasn’t something inside me that was the problem, but rather my outside environment, that’s when everything changed. If you are looking to optimize your sleep (not necessarily sleep more, but rather just optimize the hours of sleep you are getting) a lot of it comes down to changing the environment around you.
We have evolved into the humans we are today because of the environment we grew up in. As Albert Einstein once said, “The most important decision we make is whether or not we believe we live in a friendly or hostile universe.” Our environment shapes us. Our family, friends, and culture we grow up in completely mold us into who we are.
The same goes for our sleep. Over the span of human existence, we have evolved to have a certain sleep environment. We were connected to the earth, while rising and setting with the sun. The light we expose ourselves to (or lack thereof) triggers certain hormones to be produced at certain times. This is known as our circadian rhythm.
We have also adapted to sleeping in a very cool environment. While you may have heard of the 98.6 degree F temperature that we should maintain to be optimally healthy, this number is largely an average. Actually, our core body temperature deviates depending on the time of day. We cycle about a degree in either direction on a typical day. At night our body temperature naturally lowers in order to prepare ourselves to get that deep, anabolic stage of sleep we need to do the detoxing and repair from the day’s activities. This is what’s known as thermoregulation.
If we are too hot at night (from working out too close to bed, sleeping in a hot environment, eating certain foods, etc.) then that can inhibit our ability from entering that deep stage of sleep, as well as cycle through all of our sleep stages appropriately.
We can most definitely fall asleep if we are too hot, but we aren’t going to cycle through those important sleep stages like we should. This is the reason we can get 8-9 hours of sleep and still wake up feeling rough. Yet, have you ever gotten 5-6 hours of sleep and felt pretty good? It’s because the quality of that sleep was dramatically better.
That’s what I’m really about is optimizing your sleep quality, rather than just focusing solely on quantity. When it comes to quality, nothing is more important to me than getting nice, cool sleep.
There are actually a lot of amazing health benefits that sleeping cool can give us in the short, and long term. Let’s check them out!
1. Get Deep, More Restful Sleep
Like I briefly touched on earlier, we go through what are called sleep cycles. We have REM and non-REM sleep. Stages 1-4 are our non-REM sleep stages and each one takes about 15-20 minutes to cycle through (under ideal circumstances). After we go through about an hour of non-REM sleep, that’s when we transition into REM (rapid eye movement) sleep. This is where a lot of our memory consolidation and dreaming occur.
The thing with sleeping too hot at night (we can sleep hot and not even realize it), we won’t enter stages 3-4 appropriately. This leads to not repairing properly, inability to detox our body and brain, as well as many other negative side effects.
I wear my Oura ring to bed every night and it tracks my stages of sleep and my body temperature all night long. I can tell that when I sleep too hot my overall sleep score is severely diminished. Most of the time I don’t wake up throughout the night from feeling too hot but I can physically see on the Oura app I didn’t enter my deep sleep like I should’ve. Instead I stay in stages 1-3. While I’m physically unconscious, my body isn’t repairing like it should.
By choosing to sleep cool (taking control of my temperature) I get a much higher quality of sleep and consistently spend 1-2 hours more in that deep, rejuvenate sleep we all need.
2. Increase Sleep Latency
Sleep latency is our ability to fall asleep fast. A lot of the time people lay awake in bed thinking about life and what they need to do the next day. While there are many solutions to help with this like morning exercise, writing down your thoughts before bed, and meditation, sleeping cool has scientifically shown to drastically improve sleep latency.
Research done by The American Academy of Sleep Medicine showed that individuals with insomnia who slept cooler (by using a cooling pad) fell asleep faster than “normal” individuals (1). If you have sleep troubles, whether that be insomnia, a racing mind, waking up too many times throughout the night, you may want to look into how you can cool your environment.
3. Improve Melatonin Levels
Melatonin is essentially the “get good sleep hormone”. If melatonin is out-of-whack, then you’re not going to get great sleep at night, even if you are physically unconscious.
In our world today of synthetic lights on 24/7, melatonin is severely depressed in a large part of the population. Like I talked about earlier, our circadian rhythms control a lot of our hormones. Have you ever wondered why you are so sleepy when you very first wake up, but after an hour you’re pretty much awake and fully alert? While there’s a lot going on, it’s primarily due to our body’s rise in cortisol and decrease in melatonin.
These two hormones work synergistically with one another. When cortisol is high, melatonin is low. When melatonin is high, cortisol is low. Things that stimulate cortisol production are light, food, air temperature, caffeine, movement, among other things.
So by waking up when the sun rises and allowing that light to shine in your eyes, you’re signaling to your body it’s time to wake up for the day. Naturally, that cortisol level should peak around noon and gradually decline as the sun starts to set throughout the day. Conversely to this, melatonin should be at its lowest point in the mid-morning when cortisol is at its peak. Melatonin should then rise throughout the day and be at its peak in the middle of the night when we are sleeping.
However, if we are bombarding our bodies with tv lights, cell phone screens, and other artificial lights that are on way past sunset, that can keep our cortisol jacked up and melatonin suppressed. We can surely fall unconscious with depressed melatonin, yet we are going to cycle very poorly through our stages of sleep.
Cold exposure is also a very good way to elevate melatonin at night.
Throughout our evolution as a species humans would have risen with the sun, enjoyed its warmth throughout the day, and adapted to the drop in air temperature in the evening. Modern day science is showing that this drop in air temperature is a prime way for our body to properly produce melatonin and get ready to get great sleep (2).
Cold exposure essentially up-regulates melatonin genes AANAT and ASMT, which are important enzymes for melatonin biosynthesis. You don’t need to understand this biochemistry in depth, but instead a simple application of cooling down your environment can do you a world of good!
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4. Decrease Insomnia
It’s been reported that 1 in 3 individuals have some type of insomnia (3). How crazy is that in this world that ⅓ of people have a sleep disorder? Odds are if you’re reading this currently, you may have a form of mild insomnia - and not even realize it.
But it doesn’t have to be that way. Your body expects to get good sleep. Just like your body expects to be healthy and work optimally, your body is trying to get great sleep. But we have to give it what it’s asking for. And when it comes to sleep, it’s as simple as changing the environment around us.
Changing our bedroom to a more peaceful, serene environment can be a great way to signal to your body you’re going to bed each night.
You can also eat great sleep boosting nutrients from food, watch your caffeine intake later in the day, enjoy nice morning workouts, and get a hefty dose of sun exposure in the early - middle part of the day. These have all been scientifically shown to improve our sleep quality and lessen insomnia-like symptoms (4).
When it comes to individuals with insomnia, it’s been shown across the board, on average, they have a higher core body temperature when trying to sleep. Yet, when introduced to cooling caps, cooling pads, or setting the thermostat to a chilly 60-68 degrees F, they slept perfectly fine throughout the night.
It seems too good to be true, right? Why isn’t this what doctors or the media telling us to do when we have sleep problems? It’s, unfortunately, not what sells. Sleep aids like Lunesta and Rozeram can be patented and made out to be a quick fix. We love quick fixes because they are easy and require no more effort on our part. It’s human nature to look for the easy win.
But these drugs are far from an easy win. While sleep aids do a great job at causing us to fall asleep, they aren’t promoting deep, restful sleep. Instead, they are promoting sedation and sedation is not the same thing as sleep (5).
5. Improve Restfulness Throughout The Night
When your body is the same cool temperature throughout the night, your brain knows exactly what to do. It’s been shown that the brain actually shrinks up to 30 percent while we are sleeping in order to repair and detox itself properly (6). In fact, neurodegenerative diseases like Alzheimer’s is believed to be a lack of the brain’s ability to detoxify itself.
So by choosing to take control of your environment, sleeping cool and allowing your brain to detoxify itself, you can live better in the short term and protect yourself from lifestyle diseases in the long term.
What are some great ways to sleep cool at night?
Here are my favorites:
Set the thermostat between 60-68 degrees F
Sleep naked
Open a window
Use a chiliPAD
Drink water before bed
Take collagen before bed (collagen is rich in an amino acid called glycine which has shown to support normal thermoregulation while sleeping) (7)
Invest in blackout curtains
Use a fan or two
I like to stack all the conditions in my favor and utilize all of these methods. You can too!
While a lot of these methods are great, there is an awesome hack that ensures you can get cool sleep every single night. That is the use of a Cube Sleep System with Chilipad® Cool Mesh™.
The chiliPAD is like a mattress topper that goes under all your sheets. It contains little tubes that have water that flow throughout the pad. The pad is connected by a hose to a little box that sits next to your bed and you can select the desired temperature you want. If you prefer to sleep slightly colder, you can set it at a blistering 55 degrees F. Or if you prefer to sleep slightly warmer certain nights, you can choose to set it to 110 degrees F.
You don’t even notice it’s there, but it keeps you a cool, consistent temperature all night long.
That’s not all, though!
If you have a partner and you both prefer to sleep at different temperatures (like Bethany and I do - she likes it warm and I prefer it cool), then their patented OOLER® Sleep System with Chilipad® Cool Mesh™ is your best option.
The “cool” thing about the OOLER is you can customize your sleep schedules.
Just set your ideal temperature range from 55°-115°F to sleep in any season. Using the OOLER App you can create personalized sleep schedules to keep you at the perfect temperature throughout your entire night. Never go to sleep hot and wake up tired again!
Couples love the ability to schedule their specific temperature for their side of the bed, so they both can have the deep sleep they dreamed of.
I have worked out an awesome deal with the team at chili to bring you a discount on all products at chilisleep (even their weighted chiliBLANKET).
You can grab yours and get epic discounts by using these codes below:
chiliPAD — code ‘chiliPAD20’ = 20% off chiliPAD
OOLER — code ‘OOLER15’ = 15% off OOLER
chiliBLANKET — code ‘chiliBLANKET10’ = 10% off chiliBLANKET
