5 Reasons Why Heat Makes You Sleepy

Heat and sunlight are important for maintaining a good wake cycle.  However, heat and light are problematic at night when we’re all trying to sleep.

Heat and light is that they make you tired.  There are several reasons for this:

• Dehydration.  Often, instead of the heat itself making you tired, it’s simply the way your body reacts to it.  Loss of body water and salt quickly leads to dehydration, which causes drowsiness.
• Keeping yourself cool.  Like sweating, your body expends energy in an effort to cool itself down.  Just like any activity, expending energy causes you to become more tired.
• Light exposure. Heat is associated with sunlight, which interrupts the sleep/wake cycle.  Obviously, this isn’t a bad thing. In fact, people who don’t get enough sunlight often suffer from insomnia.  However, our bodies know that daytime is for activity and nighttime is for sleeping.
• Heat tricks your brain.  Because your body associates heat with daytime, it causes your brain to make itself feel awake when your hot.  Then, when you enter a cold environment, all the fatigue hits you at once.
• Chemical changes in the body.  Heat and the sun cause a cascade of chemical changes, including sunburn, tanning and wrinkles.  As your body is affected in this way, it is sapped of energy.

Heat and light cause fatigue in this way whether you are awake or asleep.  They keep you tired – even as you sleep – causing a restless night and making you fatigued the next morning.

For the perfect sleep/wake cycle, you need light during the day, and an adequate reduction of heat at night.  Best Mattress offers the perfect solution to help you create the ideal sleep environment.

While there isn’t anything wrong with these phenomena during the daytime, they can make for disastrous sleep.  With this in mind, Best Mattress is prepared to keep you cool. If you feel like you need better sleep, look into cooling sheets, cooling blankets or cooling pillows.  We also have cooling mattresses which includes the iComfort Hybrid that’s top layer is cooling memory foam. Visit one of our 22 locations today to try it out for yourself and start changing your sleep habits for good!