The Big Question: Cool the Room, or Cool Yourself?

When trying to battle a night that is hot enough to thwart your sleep, you have two choices. You can drop the temperature of the room, or drop your own body temperature. If you’re sharing your room with someone else, it helps to know their tolerance to heat and cold. If your internal thermometers synch, it’s a lot more efficient to cool the room. However, if one of you gets shivery before the other, then you may need to take a solo mission to coolville.

Cool the Room

By far the easiest way to cool down and get some sleep, cooling the room tends to last longer and require less effort on your part. If you have central air conditioning then you’re set. Otherwise, these tips will ice your way to a cooler night sleep.

Open a Window

This is the most simple solution, but also one fraught with the most risk. Keep these things in mind before opening the window, or you’ll be closing the window again soon.

• Is it quiet outside? It’s easy to forget how much noise the window blocks off. With three international airports peppering the Bay Area, it’s likely you live under the flight path of at least one. I used to live close enough to a train station that it’d ratle the walls when the train went by. The 2 AM train would blow its horn every time it came through the station. I couldn’t hear it with the windows closed, but on hot nights I thought I was in an air raid.
• Is it safe outside? I live in a pretty safe neighborhood, on the third floor. Many people aren’t as lucky as I. If leaving your window open is going to open your house up to the stabbies and the stealies (not to mention the rapies and the kidnappies), you’re going to want figure out another method to get cool. It may be unlikely that someone will get in, but the anxiety that you’ll open your eyes to see some psycho in a hockey mask looming over you will keep you awake much more than the heat.
• Are you prepared to get up in the morning and close it again? One of the nicest things about living in a low humidity environment is that the heat doesn’t stay trapped as long. This time of year, you can expect the heat to break a few hours before sunrise. That means that it’s going to get cold again really early in the morning, and if don’t want to spend the rest of your time in bed shivering, you’re going to need to get up and close the window. If you’re the kind of person who has a hard time falling back to sleep, you’ll want to keep this in mind.

Use a Fan

Ahhhh…the good old fan. It might be the old box fan that your parents have had since the early 70’s, a crazy osculating tower that strips the negative ions from the room as it works, or a ceiling fan rattling over your head. Circulating the air around the room can make it more comfortable, but there are a few things to keep in mind before using the fan.

• It wont actually make the room any colder. This is one that most people know in their minds but refuse to believe in their hearts. Circulating the air around the room may help the cooler air reach you, but it wont create any cooler air. If it’s colder outside than it is inside, opening a window will combine with the fan like some kind of cooling Voltron.
• It will rattle your papers. If you have any papers or magazines laying around your room, the fan will scatter them about, causing all kinds of noise and confusion. Secure any loose papers before you get settled in and you wont have to get up again.
• It uses a lot of electricity. While a lot cheaper than cranking the AC all night,  long, it takes a bit of juice to keep those blades spinning. This is a good way to cool a room, but not exactly an economical one.
• Check the switch. Ceiling fans have a winter and a summer setting. The direction the blades spin in will adjust if they push warm air down or sweep warm air up. I don’t know which is which, so if you’re using the fan and it just seems to be making you warmer, check the little switch at the base. Chances are you’re using it in winter mode.

Sleep Downstairs

If you can’t make the room colder, move to a colder room. It’s no secret that heat rises. If you’re lucky enough to live in a place that has two (or more) stories, set up for sleep as low as you can go. When I lived in a townhouse, I would routinely sleep on the futon down in the living room. It’s shocking how much colder it is downstairs. This method is not without its faults.

• Noise. If there’s nothing separating your living room from appliances like the hot water heater or the fridge, you’ll be shocked at how much louder it is in your living room. If you’re disturbed by noise, this may really throw your sleeping style.
• Pets. If you make it a habit to seperate yourself from your pets at bedtime, they’ll take advantage of your relocation for a little togetherness time. I don’t know about you, but my cat is a jerk who loves playing and hates sleeping.Your milage may vary.
• Uncomfortable couch. Sleeping on the couch sucks. Sometimes, it sucks worse than sleeping in a hot room. My girlfriend used to own a couch that I affectionately referred to as “Painbringer” It was a green leather monstrosity covered in metal studs. I’d sleep on the sun before I slept on that thing again.

Cool Yourself

Especially good if you need to change the temperature for just yourself, letting your bedmate stay comfortable. These methods tend to take more work on the outset, but as the outside temperature drops, you’ll naturally begin to normalize your own temperature. This means you wont have to get up early in the morning when it becomes too cold.

Change Your Sheets

If you’re anything like me, you have one or two similar sets of sheets that you use year-round. There’s nothing wrong with that, but if you get a lightweight set of cotton or jersey sheets to use when it gets really hot, you’ll be able to sleep more comfortably. If your bedmate is too cold, they can pile on an extra blanket while you sleep with just the sheet. Silk feels colder at first, but I find that it traps heat in too much.

Take a Shower

This may not be the top of your list when it’s nearly midnight, but a shower is a great way to disperse some of the heat. It’s best to time the shower right before you’re planning on going to sleep, because its effects don’t last very long. There’s some argument about the proper water heat. I argue that a cold shower does more to drop your core temperature, where as my girlfriend insists that the best thing to do is to take a warm shower, so that the outside air feels colder in comparison. Try both and see which one works best for you.

Get a Chillow

These cool pillow inserts get filled with water to chill the core and disperse the heat from your face. They work really well, but I’ve used some that leak, making you get up in the middle of the night to change the sheets. No fun at all.

Keep Hydrated

Fill a water bottle with some cold water and take some sips when you get too hot. Really cold water will drop your body temperature super fast.