While treating sleep hyperhidrosis, we need to think about how our anatomy normally dissipates heat while we are sleeping.
Two of the mechanisms our bodies employ to reduce heat are radiation and convection. This post will help you understand these two methods and better utilize them to reduce night sweating.
Sweating is a function of the nervous system as well as a part of your brain called the hypothalamus. When the hypothalamus feels it needs to reduce your temperature quickly, it triggers your sweat glands in order to help reduce the heat on the surface of the skin and bring your temperature down.
Just as a fireplace exudes warmth through heat transference from the fire to the air near it, so do our bodies radiate heat, albeit to a lesser degree. Radiation is one of the methods our body utilizes to eradicate heat.
To help combat the night sweats alcohol creates, you should allow your body the opportunity to emit body heat but not trapping that heat right against your skin. If the temperature of the air and fabric around your body rises to about the same temperature of your body or skin, the transference of heat can’t take place and so the compounded temperature of the area continues to increase.
So to increase your body’s use of radiation to eliminate heat, you must offer it plenty of room to breathe for that transference of heat to take place. Use natural, breathable fabrics for your bedding and sleepwear. Wear loose pajamas and try not to envelop yourself snugly with your sheets.
If a table or ceiling fan circulates air around you and you feel cooled, you are experiencing your own body’s natural convection. That fan probably isn’t blowing a breeze that is much cooler than the temperature of your body, but it still elicits a a cooling feeling using convection.
If you want to increase convection while you are sleeping, you might want to try a bed fan to push a gentle flow of air all over your body underneath your sheets.
So do your best to use convection and radiation to help keep you cool without triggering night sweating. These techniques don’t call for expensive medicine or other remedies. Merely a little common sense and possibly a bed fan or two.