What is the best temperature for sleep?

Neuro Athletes!

The last month I have been focusing heavily on provided content around the physiology of sleep. Why?

Sleep is probably the greatest legal performance enhancing drug that few athletes are abusing enough. On the outside, sleep doesn’t exactly appear to be all that productive. You’re sprawled out, eyes closed, pretty much unconscious and totally dead to the outside world. To most, sleep seems like an evil habit that robs us off our precious hours of potential when you could be getting stuff done.

But..

Here are a few reasons why you want to be optimising for sleep:

1. Sleep gives your brain a deep clean through a system known as the glymphatic system

2. Sleep facilitates information storage

3. Sleep can enhance motor skills and learning and is essential for optimizing cognitive performance, such as your reaction time and decision-making.

4. Sleep deprivation of 6 hours of less for only 1 week shows an impaired function of 711 genes (that is 3% of your human genome)

5. Sleep deprivation impairs glucose regulation

The list goes on…

There are a number of ways to get into a good sleep habits and optimise for better restorative sleep and in today’s newsletter we are focusing on temperature.

Our bodies are designed to be cooling down for sleep, which starts in late afternoon and continues until the evening hours. This is part of the process called thermoregulation, which operates on a 24 hour circadian cycle and adjusts your core body temperature. Lowering your body temperature at night helps you fall asleep and stay asleep. 

In the morning, a rise in the temperature signals the body to move into a state of alertness, and then you wake up.

Studies show that much of the benefit of the cooler temperature is in the quality of your sleep measured by the electrical brainwave signature.

When humans sleep we fall into 2 sleep stages:

1. Non-REM

2. REM (Rapid eye movement- based on the bizarre horizontal shifting eye movements)

When our core and brain temperatures are in rapid decline we are most likely to choose to sleep, and if we dissociate from this cycle of body cooling we experience insomnia 1 . In humans, immersion in hot water prior to, but not immediately before, the sleep period decreases sleep latency and increases sleep depth. This is the known as the ‘Warm Bath Effect’ 2 and increases slow wave sleep (SWS), increases NREM consolidation and decreases REM sleep. This effect embodies a key connection between temperature and sleep. Warming, at the right time, is causatively associated with sleep initiation. However, sleep initiation occurs within the decline of circadian temperature and NREM is associated with further reductions in the temperature of both core and the brain.

Simple Solutions

First, it is important to understand that the optimum room temperature for sleeping is around 65 degrees or about 18 degrees Celsius. Keep in mind, room temperature is the temperature of the air surrounding us.

Here are a few simple solutions to ensuring that your body is prepared to sleep once you get to bed.

• Allow your body time to adjust to prepare for sleep. Give your body two to three hours before bed to begin cooling down. If you are going to take a hot show or a soak, be sure to do it about 2-3 hours before bed.

• If you can, look into investing in a performance mattress that helps you auto thermoregulate the temperature as you move into different sleep stages

• Keep the room cool to keep your body cold throughout that middle section and later section of sleep. 

• Set your thermostat to rise in the last 15 minutes of your sleep so you will wake up easier and feel less groggy.

I hope this email helps you on your journey to optimising for better sleep so. you can perform better, think faster and live longer.

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