Follow these tips to help you stay cool through the night and have better quality sleep in summer. 

How it works 

• Melatonin: Melatonin is one of the most important hormones to regulate good sleep. When you’re too hot at night, you can’t produce melatonin, and your sleep is negatively affected. By staying cool at night, you can produce more melatonin and have better sleep quality. 
• Ideal temperature: For a good restful sleep, your bedroom should be cool. Once your bedroom temperatures go above 26°C your sleep can be negatively affected. Reducing your bedroom temperature below this limit, and ideally below 20°C, is a great way to improve your sleep quality overall.
  

Advantages

• Mental and physical health: Good sleep can have huge health benefits. It can improve your mood, boost your energy levels and lower your risk factors for conditions like heart disease. 
• Concentration and focus: Feeling well rested can improve your concentration and focus throughout the day. This can improve your work performance more broadly. 
  

Limitations 

There are no real drawbacks to improving your sleep quality, however, there are some limits to these tactics.  

• Some prep involved: Many of these tactics will involve ongoing habits rather than a 'set and forget' approach. 
• Cools you, not your home: These tips won’t help to cool your home overall, but will help to keep you cool when you sleep 
• Treatment, not prevention: These tips are more effective in a home you’re cooling in other ways. We would recommend combining these tips with other recipes, like Blackout Curtains and Throwing Shade. 

Cooler sleep hacks

1. Cold night showers: Have a cold shower before going to bed. This is a quick, effective way to cool your whole body. You can combine this tip with a fan to help create some evaporative cooling. For added benefit, you can sleep with wet hair so the evaporative cooling effect can last a bit longer. This may have limited benefit in humid environments.
2. Ice pack in bed: Cool your bed by putting ice packs under your sheet and skipping on a doona. The cool from the ice packs should reach out under the sheet and help keep you cool
   
3. Gel cooling mat: Buy a gel cooling mat to put on top of your mattress and sleep on directly. These mats are designed to stay cool for prolonged periods, and will help you to fall asleep. You can also buy pet cooling mats to help your pets stay cool. Be sure to check out Facebook Marketplace for cheap, second-hand options before you look to buy them new!
   
4. Sleep with damp clothes and less of them! Your body is much better at shedding heat with fewer clothes. Wearing less clothes at night can allow for more evaporative cooling between your skin and the surrounding air. You can also make the most of your PJs by spraying them with some water to create evaporative cooling from your clothes and skin.
   
5. Wet sheets: For another evaporative cooling option, you can wet your top sheet with a spray water bottle. This will help to keep you cool long enough to relax into sleep.
   
6. Frozen sheets: Another option which may work especially well in humid environments is to put your sheet in the freezer. This will help your sheet to feel very cool, even if your bedroom is too humid for effective evaporative cooling.
   
7. Turn the fan on before you sleep: If you find the noise from fans to be too loud when you’re sleeping, you can turn them on about an hour before you go to sleep to cool your room down, and turn them off before you go to sleep (see Fan Hacks). If you have a ceiling fan, these can be very quiet and use even less power than other types of fans, making them ideal to run through the night. DC fans also tend to be quieter than alternatives.
   

What to avoid 

• Running your fan all night while pointed at your face: This can blow dust and allergens which can irritate your airways ⁠— particularly if you suffer from asthma or hay fever. Check out our Fan Hacks for better use of your fans. You can also consider cleaning the blades on your fan every so often, to reduce the amount of dust and allergens being blown around.  
• Running aircon all night: This can be a very expensive and inefficient way to cool down during the night. 
• Having bright light in your room at night: Avoiding screens and bright light before you go to sleep can help improve your sleep. 
  • If you have ambient street light coming in from outside, consider using Blackout Curtains to block external light. 
  • You can also consider sleeping with an eye mask for a cheaper alternative.