Sleep Hygiene September || Take 2 Tips: Check your thermostat

FEB 22 || WALL STREET JOURNAL
The Best Temperature for a Good Night’s Sleep
"Temperature is one of the recurring reasons why we have trouble falling asleep or why we wake up during the night."

AUG 1 || MAKE USE OF
4 Health Benefits of Monitoring Temp & Humidity at Home
"As it turns out, recent research shows that sleeplessness could be caused by sleeping at the wrong temperature. Most people think that colder is better, but too hot and too cold can harm sleep quality."

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SLEEP HYGIENE TIP OF THE WEEK: Watch your thermostat

People pay good money to sleep in cold rooms! Fortunately, you don't
have to sleep in an ice hotel in order to benefit from a lower thermostat.

Despite our desire to feel warm and toasty to get us through the winter, our bodies need a cooler room to sleep in. We set our household thermostats to a warmer setting without realizing that the ambient warmth at night might be creating a challenge for our own personal thermostats.

The National Sleep Foundation (NSF) recommends between 60° and 67°F. 

From the NSF website:

"Your body temperature decreases to initiate sleep—and the proposed temperatures above can actually help facilitate this. If your room is cool, rather than warm, it will be much easier to shut your eyes for the night. Thermostat settings far lower or higher than what’s recommended could lead to restlessness and can also affect the quality of REM (rapid eye movement) sleep, the stage in which you dream."

Does this sound too cold for you? You can adjust your household thermostat while also making adjustments to your personal thermostat so you don't have to shiver all night.

The best solution is to have a cool room temperature but use several layers of blankets to adjust throughout the night. Start with a bottom sheet, a thermal or fleece blanket, then a comforter and then add or subtract according to your comfort level. Some people like wearing socks to bed as well, or filling a hot water bottle and placing it at the foot of the bed.

Do the NSF recommendations sounds too warm for you? If you wake up in the middle of the night, lighten your layers of sheets and blankets to help correct any overheating, then pull them closer when you feel sleep returning.

Sometimes simply sticking your foot outside your bed coverings allows it to cool down; this also helps to correct whole body thermoregulation.

If you are someone who lives in a household where the temperature is much higher than you prefer, you can also drink a glass of ice-cold water at bedtime (or at any time you wake up in the night and feel overwarm), as this can quickly adjust your body's core temperature to one more amenable to sleep.

Alternatives || Sleep Hygiene Tip of the Week: Move, to rest

Image courtesy Etandel.

From the National Sleep Foundation comes this gem:

"People sleep significantly better and feel more alert during the day if they get at least 150 minutes of exercise a week, a new study concludes."

What kind of improvement are they boasting? A 65 percent increase in sleep quality. That's no small thing, given how tired Americans are.

That boils down to 20-25 minutes a day of your favorite exercise, the equivalent of a brisk indoor or outdoor walk daily, or 3 days at the gym or pool or elsewhere for 50 minutes. And it doesn't haven't to include exercise in the formal sense, it could be some heavy lifting out in the yard, or your lunchtime walkabout during the week, or a dip in the pool with your kids on the weekend, or a challenging yoga class, or a night at the community center playing volleyball.

The idea is pretty simple: cardiovascular activity sharpens one's focus, improves daytime productivity and eliminates daytime sleepiness as well as leads to easier sleep onset at night and more restful sleep overall.

Perhaps the best way to look at it is this statement from the NSF: "“Increasingly, the scientific evidence is encouraging as regular physical activity may serve as a non-pharmaceutical alternative to improve sleep.”

If you could replace your sleeping pills with a brisk daily walk to prevent insomnia, wouldn't you?

Some tips for making exercise work for your sleep habits:

1. Reconsider exercise right before bedtime. Exercise releases hormones such as adrenaline (epinephrine) and cortisol, which will lead to extended wakefulness following the workout. Try to put three hours between the end of your workout and bedtime, if you are able.

2. That said, some people can exercise right before bed and not suffer from delayed sleep onset. In fact, this might be the only time some people CAN get their exercise. If you aren't sure how it will affect you, keep a sleep diary that captures how long it takes for you to fall asleep on nights when you've been visited with insomnia. You can also swap muscle-building exercises for high intensity aerobics activities in order to ease into sleep more smoothly.

3. Keep an exercise routine to help establish good sleep patterns overall. Your body likes regularity... in exercise, sleeping, eating... more regularity means less stress.

4. Exercise in the morning outside is the optimal opportunity to not only get your sleep-worthy exercise, but to also re-entrain your brain to daylight, thereby giving your circadian rhythms a boost.

5. Focus on your breathing as you exercise, and try to find a pattern you can stick with comfortably. The respiratory boost of mild exercise can be an excellent way to instill calm in the body afterward.

6. If you shower afterward, try not to use overly hot water if you are heading off to bed. Your body needs a cool down at bedtime if it is going to fall asleep. Keep your shower warm, then follow with a glass of cold water. Sleep in a cool room with layers of blankets you can adjust so as not to be overwarm.

SOURCES

• CNN: Can exercising at night hurt your sleep?
• Mental Health and Physical Activity: Association between objectively-measured physical activity and sleep, NHANES 2005–2006
• National Sleep Foundation: Study: Physical Activity Impacts Overall Quality of Sleep

A friendly reminder that links to websites offering products does not imply endorsement by SleepyHeadCENTRAL.com.

SleepyHeadCENTRAL strongly encourages people with ongoing sleep health problems to approach a medical professional to determine appropriate differential diagnoses and treatment. This post, like all other posts on SHC, is not intended to substitute for medical advice.  

VISIONS OF SUGARPLUMS || Sleep Hygiene Tip of the Week: 10 foods to avoid eating right before bed

If you are going to eat late at night, such as at a party or for a midnight snack, you could do better by avoiding the following 10 foods. Consuming these could lead to problems with overstimulation, repeated trips to the bathroom at night, gastroesophageal reflux disease (GERD) or heartburn and/or low metabolism leading to weight gain and potential obesity. 

1. Bacon and other smoked meats contain high levels of the amino acid tyramine; consuming these triggers the release of norepinephrine in the brain, leading to wakefulness rather than sleepiness. 
2. Celery is a natural diuretic. What this means is, if you eat a bunch of celery at bedtime, you may need to get up to use the bathroom as your body processes it. 
3. Chocolate has caffeine in it and this will, naturally, stimulate your brain and keep you awake. Studies also show that candy bars right before bed can lead to nightmares. 
4. Cheese before bedtime is going to be a troublesome gut bomb. Just because it is dairy doesn't mean it will be good for you like a glass of warm milk will be. 
5. Citrus fruits are high in acid, which is not the best thing to consume right before going to bed, especially if you also consume something that is high in fat. Fat and acid in the stomach while you sleep do not mix well and can lead to troublesome reflux. 
6. Fatty meats like hamburger and steak may have good quantities of sleep-promoting properties like tryptophan, but the fat and general texture of these foods will slow down digestion and lead to indigestion and heartburn if eaten too close to bedtime. 
7. Ice Cream's high fat is harder to digest, will relax the esophageal sphincter, leading to potential reflux, and the sugar bomb will keep you awake before leading to a hypoglycemic crash. On top of that, the sugar will not be burned off as energy; the body will convert it to fat as a result. You can't win.
8. Nuts may consist of healthy fats, but they are fats, nonetheless and will be harder to digest and potentially lead to heartburn. 
   
9. Pizza's combination of high acid and high fat products is practically a guarantee of heartburn at bedtime, and many people overeat this highly popular food. Best to save your pizza cravings for earlier in the day.
10. Spicy foods do a couple of things to the body: first, they stimulate all kinds of processes, which can disrupt sleep, and second, they inspire the body to generate a higher temperature. Your body, when getting ready for sleep, actually wants to cool down, so this late-night thermal boost can make it hard to sleep.

Sleep Hygiene Tip of the Week || Stay Cool!

"Kawasaki Electric Fan," 2004. Credit: CC BY-SA 3.0

It may seem obvious that warm weather makes it hard for many to be comfortable enough to sleep during the summer, especially if they don't have air conditioning or good air circulation in their homes. But keeping a proper temperature in your sleeping space at every time of year is important for more than just comfort.

Part of your body's circadian system relies on your body's careful regulation of its temperature. A general reduction in core temperature helps to facilitate sleep. You achieve your lowest core temperature about four hours into your sleep period and this low point helps reset your rhythms for the day.

By no means does this suggest you make your efforts at body temperature reduction extreme, as being too cold can also keep you from sleeping. But generally speaking, the human body has a thermal pattern that includes a cooling off period at night which helps make you sleepy.

So there's a heat wave on where you live. What then? If the ambient room temperature in your sleeping space is uncomfortably high, you will end up sweating, tossing and turning because your body isn't going to achieve the lower core temperature required to become drowsy.

While there isn't a perfect room temperature conducive to sleeping for all human beings, being in a sleeping space that's 54-75 degrees Fahrenheit is one's best bet. Therefore, if you don't have air conditioning or even a fan to help move air and make you feel cooler, and it's very warm in your sleeping area, you may need to cool your core temperature with cold fluids at bedtime or even take a sponge bath using cool (not icy) water to help cool yourself off before going to bed.

Research has shown that insomniacs generally have a higher core body temperature, no matter what time of year, which could be part of their sleeping challenge. One way to help drive that drop in core temperature for them might be to take a hot bath right before bed. I know, it seems counterintuitive! But once out of the hot bath, the body naturally cools in a cooler space and this could lead to the drowsiness that can elude some insomniacs.

Also, if you wear too many blankets at any time of year and sweat a lot during the night because of it, this could hamper your efforts to more quickly fall asleep, so you might think about turning down your room temperature if you can't get rid of the blankets, or try for lighter blankets so you can better facilitate your own good sleep.