Have you ever experienced tossing and turning in your bed because the sweltering heat and humidity makes it difficult for your body to cool down and be comfortable enough to fall asleep? Experts suggest that the most conducive temperature for sleep is around 65 degrees Fahrenheit (or around 18.3 degrees Celsius), but when the room is saturated with moisture, our body becomes unable to cool down and it feels stuffy inside the room.
So, according to Matthew R. Ebben, an associate professor of psychology and clinical neurology at Weill Cornell Medicine, and Rafael Pelayo, a clinical professor at Stanford University's Sleep Medicine division, the best ways to get good, comfortable, deep sleep during the summer when temperatures and humidity can stay high even at night, are: 1) to make your room cool, and 2) to cool your body as much as possible.
Making the room cool can be as simple as having an AC in the room and turning it on while you sleep. Keeping the temperature at around the high 60s and low 70s would be the best setting to ensure that you will have the right room temperature throughout the night, helping you to have deep and uninterrupted sleep.
Of course, in keeping with energy efficiency standards, some experts suggest to set the AC temperature to around 78 degrees, and simply add some fans and wear light clothing to save on energy consumption while still making the conditions suitable for your body to cool down and get some good REM sleep.
To keep your body cool, it is best to take a cool shower one to two hours before your intended time to go to bed. For those who prefer working out in the evenings, it would be a good idea to do so at least three hours before bedtime, since it would slow down the process of lowering the body temperature. Drinking water before going to bed is also a good practice.
Despite the concern that one might suddenly wake up in the middle of the night to go to the bathroom, Pelayo says that healthy sleepers typically don't get up to urinate. However, there may be some underlying reason or external cause for people who frequently get up during the night, outside of the need to go to the toilet.
Finally, you may also want to check out cooling pillows or a cold compress placed around your neck to aid in your body's cooling process. If you still find it difficult to sleep even after doing all of these things, you may have to speak to a doctor since it is possible that something like thyroid disease or sleep apnea is causing your heat intolerance and inability to sleep comfortably.
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I know a bunch of northerners who don't feel comfortable sleeping without some sort of blanket, like the model in the picture used in the article. Instead, learn to sleep on top of the bedclothes, or under the thinnest sheet you have. The article mentions cotton PJs (or sleeping nude) - our family all slept in our underwear, which wasn't mentioned.
The classic pre-A/C option for northerners was to spend the summer in the mountains. Now that A/C insulates us from the climate, there's more pressure to stay in the city and work.
Living in Miami w/o A/C worked because I was in a 1940s house designed to co-exist with the heat. The vernacular Florida cracker style, for example, uses design elements to let the breeze through, which is incompatible with running A/C in the heat, where you want a well-insulated house. Having some airflow really helps, both for its cooling ability, and to keep the humidity down. Sure, in winter when it was 40F outside, it was also 40F inside, but frigid temperatures like that only lasted for a week or so.