Quickly Fall Asleep
As nighttime approaches, our body temperature falls naturally, indicating that it’s time to relax and get some rest. By maintaining your bedroom cooler, you reinforce the natural instinct of your body to sleep. If the room is too hot, it could possibly block the signal and make it take longer for you to fall asleep. Even if we like to warm things up in the winter and cool things down in the summer, your thermostat can make or break your night’s sleep. As mentioned above when we sleep, our body temperatures naturally decrease to allow us to recharge and cycle through multiple sleep stages. In order to get to a deeper sleep more quickly, lowering your environmental temperatures will help you get to sleep more quickly and allow for deeper sleep. Physiological changes begin to occur 60 to 90 minutes before we fall asleep, when we allow our natural waking and sleep cycle to occur. During this time, we begin to lose heat from our central core without even noticing that it can lead to a feeling of tiredness.
During this time period, if your environment is too warm, your body will try to regulate its temperature and you will waste energy, causing you to stay awake or struggle to fall into a sufficiently deep sleep to allow a regular sleep cycle.
Raising your metabolism
Cooler temperatures also affect your metabolism significantly, which is to your advantage. Metabolism is part of a process that gives us energy through what our bodies store. This is a politically correct way to say that sleeping in a cold room can help stop you from getting fat and even help you achieve your goals for weight loss. Cooler sleeping temperatures increase the brown fat we store, which helps us burn calories and eliminate excess blood sugar. Consider this “good fat that we need in order for our bodies to process energy efficiently. Again when your room is set to an optimum, cooler temperature, the melatonin that your body makes will cause your body to store “beige fat,” which in contrast to the name, helps you burn calories instead of storing them.
Studies show that lowering temperatures before you go to bed and keeping your skin temperature comfortable but not warm is the most effective way to achieve your metabolic rate. Who knew that you could burn extra calories while you sleep?!
Reducing your risk of disease
The increase in brown fat is not only good for your metabolism. Since it promotes a healthy body weight, the benefits of this can be reaped in more ways than one. Higher brown fat levels reduce your chances of obesity and the many health hazards associated with it. A leading cause of diabetes, heart disease, and even some cancers is obesity. While brown fats are not the only indicator of a healthy weight for the body, they certainly play an important role in your overall health.
Because it helps to dispose of excess sugar, it also helps fight against diabetes and regulates the use of sugar by the body. Healthy body weights are also less prone to heart disease, and healthy levels of brown fat in adults are suggested to also reduce levels of triglycerides and cholesterol. Although cool night’s sleep is not the only way to support these brown fats, it’s one way to add to the list of healthy lifestyle choices.
Conditions such as type 2 diabetes are on the rise, so our immediate attention is given to any advice about reducing our risk. In addition to the phenomenon of beige and brown fat increasing in cold temperatures and triggering your body to burn more calories, it also increases the sensitivity of insulin, which lowers the risk of type 2 diabetes.
Colder sleeping temperatures also encourage the disposal of glucose, another type 2 risk indicator for diabetes.
Diabetes is not the only disease that can freeze up in a cold room. Because melatonin is a potent antioxidant with the ability to cross the blood-brain barrier, it has been shown to prevent Alzheimer’s and brain ageing.
Supporting your levels of natural melatonin
Not far away was the old adage of needing your ‘beauty rest’ and the benefits of combining sufficient sleep with a cool environment definitely have their health benefits with regard to your looks. It is a scientifically proven fact that the average temperature in the 60’s forces your body to produce more melatonin, a hormone that occurs naturally and is directly related to helping you fall asleep. Melatonin is produced in your pineal gland and released by daylight to help you get ready to sleep.
A recipe for a good night’s sleep is this combination of falling body temperatures and low light levels that triggers melatonin to begin to take effect, and interrupting this process can disrupt the rest of your whole night. Dimming your lights and taking some time away from your screens, which emits blue light and mimics daylight – tricking your brain into thinking it should be awake – is a healthy step in allowing this whole process to take place.
Your body’s ability to protect brain health and fight against certain cancers, diabetes, heart disease and Alzheimer’s has been linked to melatonin levels. The results will become increasingly apparent as your skin is also a receptor for this hormone and can suppress UV damage and make your skin and hair rejuvenate at a faster rate with your body getting what it needs each night to stay healthy.
Okay, so you already know that higher levels of melatonin are equivalent to more sleep and anti-aging. Other benefits of increased melatonin production include regular menstrual cycles, increased moods, weight loss, cancer-fighting properties and increased brain health.
