Sleep experts recommend a dark, cool, and quiet environment for your best sleep. With the heat and extended daylight of summer, that can be a challenge; however, making a few adjustments to your bedding and maintaining a year-round bedtime routine can help protect your sleep.
How Can You Get Yourself and Your Bed Ready for Summer Sleep?
Switching to summer bedding and sleepwear can help you to maintain a cozy, yet cool, sleeping environment during even the hottest summer months. Preserving your bedtime routine, with small adjustments to address the longer days and increased hours of sunlight, can help, too.
1. Choose Cotton Sheets for Breathability and Comfort
No matter what we like to believe, we all drool and sweat at night. Cotton pulls the heat and moisture away from your body so it can evaporate. That’s why we manufacture our sheet sets of 100% cotton and why we choose to sleep in cotton sheets all year round.
Fresh, clean sheets support a good night’s sleep. They’re one of the reasons guests report sleeping so well when they visit hotels. To keep your bed hygienic, particularly in summer, you’ll want to wash your sheets regularly. We suggest once a week. Cotton sheets, particularly those like ours that are made with long-staple cotton, are durable and easy to launder in your machines at home. Airing out your bed for some time in the morning allows moisture to evaporate before making your bed. However, it doesn’t eliminate the need for regular laundering.
Summer is the season you can take advantage of line drying your sheets. Line drying takes some effort, but it naturally leaves the lovely scent of the outdoors.
2. Switch to a Summer-Weight Comforter
Heavy bedding can make it difficult to sleep cool in the summer. Keeping a lightweight, breathable comforter on the bed is important to maintaining a cozy, yet cool, sleeping environment during even the hottest summer months. We recommend summer-weight comforters that are cool and breathable but still provide a luxurious night’s sleep.
If you’re looking for a lighter-weight summer comforter, you’ll begin by deciding whether you prefer down or down alternative fill. Our lightest comforter with natural fill is our tropical lightweight down and feather comforter. We also offer our hotel-quality essential and premium white goose down comforters in summer weight.
For those who prefer something other than feather and down, we created our aquaplush® line of down alternative comforters. They offer the same cozy comfort without the down and feathers. We offer our aquaplush® lite with the lightest amount of our signature aquaplush® fill and our aquaplush® air with vented mesh inserts for those who sleep hot or live in a warm climate.
3. Dress for Sleeping Comfortably through Warmer Nights
If you sleep hot, you might want to look for a night shirt or pajamas in a lighter, moisture-wicking fibers like bamboo or cotton. They can be woven into breathable and sweat absorbent fabrics that are perfect for sleeping.
We created our sheet pjams™ pajamas to satisfy our own desire for comfortably cool sleep shirts that would work for day or night. The jersey nightshirt with pockets is as comfortable for lounging as it is for sleeping. Made from 100% cotton jersey, one of the softest fabrics on earth, it’s breathable and non-irritating. The bamboo-cotton nightshirt is a cozy combination of 60% bamboo and 40% cotton. The bamboo fabric is antibacterial and sweat absorbent so it’s perfect for hot sleepers or sleeping in the summer.
4. Swap Your Winter Robe for Something Lighter
The robe you choose depends on the reasons you wear a robe. Do you use a robe to dry off instead of a towel? Do you wear a robe while you get ready to go out? Do you throw on your robe to get out of your work clothes as soon as you get home? Do you wear a robe to the pool or beach? No matter what your reason for wearing a robe, you might want to go lighter during the summer months.
We recently introduced our waffle collection, which includes a kimono robe and spa wrap. Crisp and cool, the 100% cotton waffle fabric is absorbent and quick drying. In your choice of cloud white, sand beige, and sky blue, the robe is as perfect when stepping out of the tub as it is for heading to the pool or beach. The spa wrap keeps you cool and covered while getting ready to go for the day or out for the night.
5. Maintain Your Bedtime Routine During the Longer Days
The repetitive activities of a bedtime routine during the 90 minutes before you lie down to sleep can drastically improve your sleep. Whether your routine involves relaxing in the bath, drinking tea, reading, or breathwork, you can benefit from continuing that routine during the summer.
The early morning sunlight of summer can benefit your circadian rhythms, the 24-hour cycles of the body’s internal clock that promote sleepiness before bedtime, initiate sleep, and promote wakefulness before it’s time to wake up. These cycles of wake and sleep are affected by external cues, the sun being the strongest. In studies, getting morning sunlight soon after waking not only advanced the time of falling asleep but also increased the duration and quality of sleep. However, you may want to avoid exposure to light late in the day.
In the absence of blackout curtains, an eye mask is a simple approach to eliminating natural, as well as ambient light from electronics, that doesn’t create a hazard should you get up to use the bathroom or attend to a family member during the night. If you haven’t already added an eye mask to your bedtime routine, summer is the perfect time to consider doing so. You can read more in our article “5 Ways Light Can Affect Your Sleep,” linked below.
Enjoy the warmer weather of summer without sacrificing your sleep.
-Team at down etc
Read more:
What Is It About Sliding into Fresh, Clean Sheets that Feels So Good
5 Sleep Tips for the Summer Months
Why Summer-Weight Comforters Support Healthy Sleep
Are There Benefits to Line Drying My Sheets?
Is It Time to Replace Your Robe? We’ve Got You Covered
5 Ways Light Can Affect Your Sleep
About down etc
For over twenty years, down etc has worked with hoteliers and professional housekeepers in hotels around the world to manufacture and provide pillows and bedding that will offer hotel guests memorably great sleep. Through our retail website, we seek to provide products that will result in the same quality sleep for our customers at home. We believe in the restorative power of a great night’s sleep, whether at home or away. That’s the reason down etc wrote the book on it, Roll Into a Perfectly Made Bed: All You Need to Know About the Art of Bedmaking.
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