How to sleep in a heatwave

It's too hot to think, much less sleep. We try to survive the night of relentless heat, and yet find ourselves sweating at 3am, wishing for a bit of relief.

Is there actually a way to sleep well in a heatwave? Our answer is yes, kind of. While it's unlikely that we will be able to achieve the same quality of sleep, we can certainly try and do things that will make the hot nights more bearable.

And so, for the tried and tested things that have made hot nights more bearable for us...

5 ways to sleep better when it's hot

1) A nice, cool shower, just before bed.

Keep that temperature low right before you get into the sheets. 

Now, we have seen advice to the contrary. We have tried it and we have hated it. It's quite hard to cool down when you start out from the place of already being too hot! 

2) Make sure your sleeping position isn't making you sweat

Do not lie on your stomach nor on your back. While it may seem like it won't make much of a difference, stomach and back sleeping ensure that maximum body area touches the bed. We don't want more heat to be sucked in - we want to give it as much skin space as possible to escape. 

Side lying is your best friend, not only because of the surface area touching the bed, but also because after your forehead, the second part of your body that gives off the most heat is around the sacral area (around the bottom of your spine). Back lying would trap all of this heat. 

3) Ditch memory foam 

It looooooves nothing more than absorbing your body heat. While it isn't ever ideal for your spine, it might seem cosy in the winter to sleep in what feels like a hot bowl of soup. It certainly will not feel cosy in the heatwave.

Memory foam is also much more difficult to move and turn on than other materials, like Levitex foam or latex, requiring more energy to toss and turn through the night, increasing the heart rate and making you feel even more hot. And let's be honest - we wish we could tell you there won't be tossing and turning, but that would be a lie. There is still a heatwave and the sleep is still not going to be so great; we are simply trying to take it up a few notches on the bearable scale. 

4) Be comfortable

This might seem so obvious, and yet, we often don't connect the dots. The more comfortable you are, the less you will toss and turn. The less you toss and turn, the cooler you stay. How can you be more comfortable? Look to address how you lie and what you lie on. A stomach sleeper who sleeps in the heavy lifter position for example, might toss and turn all night due to the pain building up in their lower back that's building up thanks to the pressure the position puts on that particular part of the spine. 

What you lie on is of course a longer term issue and it would be silly to suggest swapping out your mattress for the heatwave. But if it is memory foam... See above! 

5) Go to bed later

Counterintuitive to a better night's sleep? Might sound so, but it is not! The later it gets, the cooler it is outside. If you usually go to bed at 10pm, moving your bed time to midnight will allow for a real difference in how cool your bedroom is, with colder air entering. This is particularly true in the UK, where our bedrooms tend to be right under the roof and have been warming up all day.

If you're going to be tossing and turning in the heat, you might as well skip that part and go to bed when the bedroom feels less like stepping into a preheated oven.

Finally...

We can't help with how hot it's going to be, but we can certainly help with upgrading your sleep surface when you're ready. Shop our sleep posture mattress and sleep posture pillow now.