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Since the 2020 pandemic began, more people have reported experiencing more sleep issues, with the necessary medication prescriptions increasing by 20%. As the vaccination programmes are ongoing all over the globe, many people are in between a rock and a hard place.

You are undoubtedly familiar with the feeling of thirst: the parched feeling at the back of your throat and the need to drench that dryness with cool and refreshing water. Especially on humid and physically demanding days, it is severely tempting to guzzle water.

In Charles Dickens’ Barnaby Rudge (1840), there is a sentence that suggests that people used to sleep for two separate sleep periods. The text reads:

“He knew this, even in the horror with which he started from his first sleep, and threw up the window to dispel it by the presence of some object, beyond the room, which had not been, as it were, the witness of his dream.”

Sleeping between six to nine hours every night is a restful and restorative activity for people of all ages. Not only is this activity essential for growing children, but also for adults who have daily responsibilities to their family and work. However, modern life in a post-pandemic world, means that many of us do not get the high-quality sleep that we need.

In 2022’s The YouGov Sleep Study, researchers found that an average person (age 18 or older) gets about 6.66 hours of sleep every night. While city-dwellers tend to get less sleep than those living in rural areas, the numbers are still close to the bare minimum hours of sleep the body needs.

When the sun goes down, experts have noticed that your circadian clock readies your body for bed around two hours before you go to sleep. The more scientific name of circadian rhythm is actually the suprachiasmatic nucleus (SCN). This is a cluster of cells in your brain, directly connected to your retina that wakes you up or makes you drowsy depending on the amount of light in the room. That is also why you may have a difficult time falling asleep when the lights are left on at night.

Our bodies are very complex structures, and turning all of it off for sleep requires effort. In short, we actually have to work at getting rest, and the key to getting there faster has been the challenge that the sleep industry has worked towards solving ever since their inception.

There are plenty of factors that can help or prevent you from getting good sleep - diet, sleeping issues, psychological state - and each industry tries to solve this problem in their own way. One common solution is simply affecting the temperature of the sleeper when they fall asleep, but this isn’t as easy as you may think.

Do you know what goes up and down without having to move? Something we have but rarely notice?

In the hustle and bustle of our everyday lives, we are more often than not, simply attentive to details that we consider important or see as a priority. As the riddle implies, monitoring our body temperature is not always top-of-mind when it comes to improving our physical health, nor is it a daily element we think of.

The only time we ever pay attention to our body temperature is when we feel our body shiver from an oncoming fever.

Millennials have become famously branded as the “burnout generation,” unable to find time to clear out their thoughts and stop working for the day. Because of this, they are more likely to develop stress-induced illnesses and mental health issues. In a study under the Health and Safety Executive (HSE) of the United Kingdom, scientists found that people who are stressed more often are more likely to get sick.

Imagine that you’ve just arrived home from a long day at work. You crash on the couch and indulge in an episode from your latest Netflix show before making yourself a quick dinner. From there, you freshen up and get ready to hit the sack by curling up with a comfy blanket.

But then your thoughts start to wander. You find that the more you force yourself to sleep, the more active your mind becomes. Frustrated, you end up staring blankly at the ceiling and end up resorting to browsing through your phone in search of tips to help you sleep.

Cold feet might usually just be an annoyance, but in some cases can be a real problem—such as when it keeps you from having restful sleep. In bed, as elsewhere, cold feet can be caused by a mix of cold exposure and poor microcirculation. When considering how to keep warm in bed, most solutions focus on the reducing cold exposure, but it’s important not to forget about circulation, too.

Reducing cold exposure usually means covering up and trapping heat, but it can also mean providing a source of heat—in this case, a portable one that you can bring with you into bed. Here, we’ll take a look at some ideas on how to keep warm in bed, in winter, or in other situations, as well as the things to remember when following each method.