How to sleep when it's too hot.
Alright. As someone who has thermoregulation issues due to chronic illness + whose living situation currently is not heat friendly, here’s my favorite heat wave survival sleeping tips. Not saying it will work for everyone at all times but may or may not be worth considering depending on your situation. (Of course take into account any medical safety that may pertain to you specifically)
Fans are often not used to their fullest potential.
To cool yourself, you’ll want to turn the airflow towards you. Well obviously, vroom, I can hear you say. But actually not so obviously, stay with me. This works by helping the sweat evaporates off your skin which is the body’s main heat-thermoregulating system.
That is useful if everything is too hot anyway and you’re just displacing hot air to feel cooler. However, if it’s, say, nighttime and the air outside is cooler than inside or if your room is very hot but the air in the hallway is cooler, you will want to point your fan towards the cooler air from the hotter room.
As in, put the fan in the overheating room, facing, for example, the open window and blow the hot air out instead of trying to blow the cool air in. It works way better to bring the temperature down inside, promise.
For example, my current sleeping situation is : my bed is on top of a mezzanine under the roof with no skylight window. Heat rises so it gets VERY hot up there (like above 30°C). At night I open the window under the mezzanine and instead of moving hot air around up there, I push the hot air out which pulls the cool air up.
Same thing works in front of a window, if the air outside is cooler than the inside, the hot air being pushed out will bring more cool air in.
2. Cooling yourself down before going to bed.
We struggle to sleep when it's too hot because the body needs to drop its temperature to fall asleep.
Very cold showers / baths feel good but they make it worse.
Cold makes your blood vessels constrict, which means less blood to the surface of your skin, which means you're not cooling to your core. It basically makes the surface or your body very cold and traps all the heat under it inside.
It’s better to take a cool or lukewarm shower to cool your body down. Ideally take your time with it to not just superficially cool your skin but truly lower your core temperature. Like several minutes.
If the air where you live isn’t too humid, you can also wet a t-shirt in cool water and wear it (or wet a towel and put it on your skin), especially in front of a fan, to cool your body down before bed if you don't want to or can't take a shower.
Your room is about as cool as it can be and you've taken your lukewarm shower but once you go to bed you don't fall asleep instantly and get hot again and can't sleep? Here's my ultimate tip.
Take a cold pack or freeze a small bottle of water, wrap it in a towel (never put the ice directly in contact with your skin! you can injure yourself) and hold it between your upper thighs. I personally use an ice pack with the provided cover and wrap it around one of my thighs using the strap.
Why ? Because in your thighs, near your groin, are the femoral arteries. And you're essentially using them as a hydraulic cooling system for your body.
It will help keep your body cool and help you fall asleep.
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