You eat well, exercise regularly, and drink plenty of water. But how’s your core body temperature during stage 3 non-REM sleep? Here, we walk you through the scientific reasons to sleep cooler.
Cool temps help you fall asleep and stay asleep, period.
As you sleep, your brain goes through four or five full sleep cycles per night. One cycle includes three non-REM (rapid eye movement) stages, plus one REM stage. In the first stage, you sleep lightly, your eyes move slowly behind your eyelids, and your muscle activity slows down. In the second stage, eye movement stops completely and as the body begins to prepare for deep sleep, your body temperature drops—this is important because it means that you can’t enter the third sleep stage, slow wave sleep or deep sleep, without a significant internal cooldown.
Sleeping cooler regulates your hormones.
Third stage sleep, or slow wave sleep, is where the magic happens: Human growth hormone and prolactin are released during slow wave sleep. These hormones regulate your body composition, muscle and bone growth plus recovery, immune system, and metabolism… total superstars in the world of hormones! On the other hand, a lack of slow wave sleep causes your body to release excess cortisol—the stress hormone that, when overabundant in the body, can lead to weight gain, anxiety, and other unpleasant symptoms. Essentially: you need to sleep cooler to enter slow wave sleep and stay there long enough to keep your hormones in check.
Cooler sleep helps your body recover.
Your core body temperature drops anywhere from 0.9 to 1.8 degrees Fahrenheit over the course of a night, partially because your body is doing a lot less: for example, your skeletal muscles stop moving and your heart rate drops. It’s worth noting that your brain also stops regulating body temperature while you’re in deep sleep, so you have to rely on your mattress and bedroom temperature to keep you cool. Once this overall cooldown occurs, your body restores glycogen, its primary muscle fuel.
Sleeping cooler helps your brain function more optimally, too.
When you don’t spend enough time in deep sleep, your concentration, creativity, and memory are severely impacted. During slow wave sleep, connections between your brain cells are formed and strengthened, transferring information from short-term to long-term memories. But remember, at this point, your brain is too busy making these connections to keep you cool, and you need to stay cool to remain in slow wave sleep. This means your environment, i.e. your mattress, bedding, and room temperature, need to do the job of keeping you cool.
This is why, at Molecule, we’re passionate about creating a mattress that helps regular your body temperature during slow wave sleep, keeping your body temperature appropriately cool so that you can focus on the important work of rest and recovery. Invest in a Molecule mattress to stay cool, snooze soundly, and enjoy a greater sense of health and wellbeing once you wake.