When I go to sleep I feel comfortable, but when I wake up I’ll be cold. I’m in a dorm room so it’s a small area and the temperature stays pretty well regulated (about 74 or 75), but I wake up cold. Why is that? Does my body temperature drop that much when I’m sleeping?
This has been bugging me, so a big thank you to whoever can give me the (correct) answer.
From http://www.stanford.edu/~dement/temp.html:
Body temperature, contrary to the common belief, is not uniformly 98.6°F. That is merely an average. Temperature cycles from about 1 degree below to 1 degree
above this average over the course of the day. For healthy young adults who sleep at night, body temperature usually is lowest around 4 to 5 a.m. Most sleep
episodes occur in a window from about 6 hours before the daily low to about 2 hours after it.
Sleep specialist have long debated whether the nighttime drop in temperature induces sleep or follows it. One theory is that is simply the result of lying down and
curtailing physical activity.
So there you have it. Although we don’t know why exactly, your body temperature does generally fall during sleep.
-Ben
There could be a number of factors at work here.
Yes your body temperature does drop when you sleep. Added to that the muscles are relaxed and hence not generating the heat they would be when you’re awake. Even just standing around generates considerable amounts of heat energy. There’s also the fact that quite often you sleep quite a short period after eating, and digestion generates heat by itself. This will have slowed down after 8 hours asleep.
Of course even a drop of 1 or two degrees in room temperature is enpugh to take you from being reasonably conmfortable to being too cold to sleep…
Have you considered investing in a blanket?
Cecil addressed this as well, at http://www.straightdope.com/classics/a2_300.html
Relevant quote: