You probably shower in the morning. Hot water, waking up, completely ready for the day.
But that exact same shower does something very different to your body in the evening. It makes you sleepy, and that’s because of something most people have backwards.
To fall asleep, your body actually needs to cool down, and the fastest way to cool down is to warm yourself up first.
Why cooling down is the starting signal
Your core temperature, the temperature deep inside your body, follows a fixed rhythm all day long. It’s high during the day, drops in the evening, and reaches its lowest point somewhere in the middle of the night.
That drop of about a degree is the starting signal your body waits for to fall asleep. If your temperature doesn’t drop, your body stays stuck in daytime mode and you lie there tossing and turning while your brain has already been tired for hours.
What the shower does
Warm water sends blood to your skin, especially to your hands and feet. The blood vessels there dilate, and that is exactly how your body loses heat to the air.
When you step out of the shower, that system is wide open. Your skin is warm, your blood vessels are dilated, and your core cools down faster than it would on its own. So you push forward the drop you already needed by quite a bit.
Warm hands and feet in bed usually mean this is exactly what’s happening. Your body is releasing heat.
The timing where it goes wrong
The hour after your shower does the work. That’s where most people get it wrong.
If you shower right before getting into bed, you’re still lying between the sheets at your warmest and that heat still has to leave your body. Then you’ve taken a hot shower and gained nothing from it.
Allow sixty to ninety minutes between the shower and the moment you lie down. Then the deepest point of the cooling lines up with your bedtime.
What you can do about it
Move your shower to the evening, about an hour and a half before you go to sleep. Warm, not scorching hot, and ten minutes is enough.
If showering at that time doesn’t work, just doing your feet works too. A basin or the edge of the bathtub with warm water, for ten minutes. You get the same effect through the same route, because your feet are your biggest heat loss point.
Keep your bedroom cool after that. All the effort is wasted if you then step into a room of twenty-two degrees, because your body can’t get rid of that heat anywhere. Around eighteen degrees works for most people.
Stay off your phone during that hour in between. Otherwise you’re working on your temperature with one hand while turning your brain back on with the other.
If you still have trouble falling asleep after this, or if you do fall asleep quickly but still wake up tired, it could be down to how you breathe. Breathing through your mouth makes your night less deep without you noticing it. Mouth tape keeps your mouth closed and nose strips keep your nasal passage open with a splint, so your body keeps breathing through your nose.
The habit for this week
Shower in the evening this week instead of in the morning, about an hour and a half before you go to bed. You don’t need to change anything else.
If it doesn’t work out one evening, put your feet in warm water for ten minutes while you sit on the couch. Feels a bit like a grandma remedy, but it actually works :)
Pay attention to how long it takes you to fall asleep. That’s the first thing that changes, usually within just a few evenings.
1% Better Every Night.
Guy Veeke
PS: Do you fall asleep quickly and still wake up tired?
Then it’s about how you breathe. The combination of nose strips and mouth tape keeps your nose open and your mouth closed, so the hours you put in actually pay off.
