The Ideal Temperature for Sleep

Are you too hot or too cold when trying to snooze? Maybe you’re trying to be money conscious by keeping the temperature as low as possible in the winter and as high as possible in the summer, but if you didn’t know, your thermostat can make or break your slumber. For some, the temperature has to be just right for an ideal night’s sleep.

In general, the suggested bedroom temperature should be between 60 and 67 degrees Fahrenheit for optimal sleep. When lying in bed trying to snooze, 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 of sleep with the highest brain activity. During this stage, you'll have higher brain metabolism and often dream. There are spontaneous rapid eye movements and minimal body movement. It's usually difficult to wake a sleeper during this stage. .. The stage in which you dream.

It can also help to think of your bedroom as a cave—it should be quiet, cool, and dark for the best chance at getting enough rest. If you’re still a troubled sleeper, in addition to the cooler room temperature, you should try placing a hot water bottle at your feet or wearing socks  . This will help dilate your blood vessels faster and push your internal thermostat to a more ideal setting.

Find out what’s happening in your brain while you’re fast asleep.

Your body may be still while you sleep, but your brain is actually pretty active. In fact, it goes back and forth between two phases: rapid eye movement (REM) sleep, which is when  dreams  typically happen, and non-rapid eye movement (NREM) sleep, which is when the body bolsters your immune system, builds muscle and bone, and mends and regenerates tissues. Your brain first enters four different stages of NREM sleep and then goes through REM, and this whole pattern is considered one cycle. The cycles repeat themselves until you wake up—usually after about five full cycles. Find out what goes on step-by-step, below.

Stage One

This is the lightest sleep stage when you can be easily awoken and where you may feel like you’re falling or have sudden muscle twitches (also known as “hypnic jerks”).

Stage Two

During this second stage, your heart rate slows, your muscles contract and relax, and your body temperature decreases as you prepare to go into deep sleep.

Stages Three and Four

You’ve now entered the deep sleep phases where your brain waves slow down, and it becomes more difficult to wake up.

REM

In this stage, your heart rate, breathing, and eye movement all speed up and your brain becomes more active, processing things that you’ve learned during the day to help you form memories and boost feel-good chemicals, such as serotonin.

What you should and shouldn't wear to bed

Do you know if your bedtime clothing choices are truly helping your body or actually causing one big nightmare?

Are you putting yourself at risk of developing serious health problems the moment you put on your pajamas?

Many women choose to wear a bra to bed each night. In fact, there's a widespread misconception that sleeping in a bra can help prevent sagging in the future. However, when you choose to go to sleep with your bra on, you're really making yourself vulnerable to numerous health issues.

In the first place, bras can be quite constricting, and if you're wearing a bra that fits tightly against your skin, you're actually hindering the circulation in your body. Further, bras can also squeeze and tighten the area around your diaphragm and put unnecessary pressure on your chest, which can make it more difficult for you to breathe throughout the night.

In addition, your bra's underwire, straps, and hooks have the potential to dig deeply into your skin, which can lead to indentations, irritations, welts, and even cysts. And if that's not distressing enough, wearing a bra to bed is also increasing your likelihood of developing a fungal infection, especially if your bedroom is on the warmer side or if you live in a humid climate.

 And when it comes to the quality of your sleep itself, wearing a bra to bed has also been linked to sleeplessness, as it can hamper your ability to achieve a truly deep sleep state.

Your skin-tight nighties are posing a risk to your overall health. First, when you wear constricting clothing to bed, such as pants with an elastic waistband or a binding type of shirt, you're negatively impacting your circulation as well as hampering your ability to breathe normally throughout the night.

And speaking of breathing, it's your skin that also needs to breathe, and wearing taut and tight items each night can lead to skin irritations and even infections.

But if that's not enough to sweat over, wearing binding clothing also has been linked to inhibiting the development of melatonin, which is a key hormone that helps to regulate your sleep cycles. And when your body's natural circadian rhythm is off, the prospect of getting a good night's sleep is off as well. From now on, it's important to remember that your desire to "sleep tight" is just not right.

Remove your makeup

Every woman needs her beauty rest, but wearing makeup to bed is not the way to achieve it. In reality, sleeping with your makeup on actually hinders your goal, as many unattractive and unappealing outcomes can result from this major makeup mistake. When you leave your makeup on all night, the dirt and oil buildup on your face doesn't get washed off, and when your pores are blocked, this is likely to lead to aging.

Disclaimer: The information on this POST is not intended or implied to be a substitute for professional advice. The opinions expressed within this article are the personal opinions of the author. All content, including text, graphics, images and information, contained on or available through this article is for general information purposes / **educational purposes only, and to ensue discussion or debate.

Thank you … Wearing underwear to bed is a common nighttime practice for many women. In fact, the mere thought of going to bed without underwear may make you a little uncomfortable. However, before you put the kibosh on going to bed "commando," it's important to understand why sleeping in underwear can be unfavorable to your health.

On the one hand, covering up your vaginal region during the night can actually create the perfect kind of moist, dark, and warm breeding ground for bacteria. And if you're a woman who has a proclivity for vaginal and yeast infections, sleeping with underwear is practically laying the groundwork to develop these kinds of undesirable medical outcomes, especially if you're a bedtime thong-wearer.

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Many women who go without underwear appreciate the sheer ease and simplicity of sleeping without it, especially since it also can help to increase the intimacy levels between you and your partner. Having less laundry and more closeness is not a bad trade-off.

How often do you wash your pajamas? Since many women prefer to sleep in the same pair of pjs night after night, they may not realize that they're really sleeping in dirty clothing over and over again. When you don't wash your clothes enough, you're actually wearing down your health in a variety of ways. Because the millions of skin cells as well as an approximate quart of body sweat humans lose each day, you're upping your chances of developing bacterial infections when you don't go down to the laundry room to wash your pajamas frequently enough.