How the Clothing We Wear Impacts Our Sleep

Sleep is a crucial time for your body to reset, repair, and restore your bodies systems. Your body uses this time to detoxify waste, repair muscle and tissues, store memories and make room for new ones, rebuild your bodies organs, make new growth hormones, regulate hunger hormones, strengthen your immune system, and so much more.

How fascinating it is that our body does all of these functions while we are sleeping! The health benefits we gain through sleep is vital to our wellness. Therefore, we must support our body in every way possible to get the best sleep we can. Many factors affect our sleep; from the activities we do before we go to bed, noise, light, electromagnetic frequencies, our eating and drinking habits, medications, physiological and medical conditions, temperature, and environmental toxins.

The last two factors that I mentioned (temperature and environmental toxins) are what I will further discuss in this article. There are many elements to temperature and environmental toxins that can affect us while we sleep. Regulating your body temperature and clearing your house from environmental toxins takes more than adjusting the thermostat and having an air purifier. Temperature regulation and environmental toxins can also be impacted by the type of mattress we sleep on, the linens we have on our beds, and the clothes we wear when we sleep.

Mattresses, bedding and our clothing should be made from natural fibers and free from added chemicals. Natural fibers allow our bodies to breathe and detoxify properly which is one of the main duties our body performs while we are asleep. A great deal of mattresses, linens, and clothing are made with synthetic fibers which hold heat, suffocate our skin and blanket our body in chemicals. These chemicals leach onto our skin and into our environment, including the air we breathe. Besides chemicals from synthetic fibers, clothing can contain a wide range of dangerous ingredients including those from toxic dyes, pesticides from inorganic fibers, and finishing agents to make products fireproof, wrinkle resistant and stain proof. All of which are extremely dangerous to our health.

If you choose to wear clothing to bed, wear apparel that is made from natural fibers and free of added chemicals. Intimate apparel is of most importance as it is the closest garment to our skin. Organic apparel such as those made from organic cotton would be the best choice as the fiber is grown without the use of harmful pesticides and chemical fertilizers and also manufactured into clothing without the use of toxic dyes and chemical finishes. These fibers allow our skin to breathe properly and regulate our normal body temperature, thus allowing our systems to carry out their natural duties.

It is imperative to be aware of our sleep environment as it can greatly influence the quality of our sleep and our overall health and well-being. Getting the optimal amount of sleep (8 to 9 hours uninterrupted) will allow you to boost your immune system, brain function, and energy levels, and increase your life expectancy among many other benefits. Not getting the proper amount of sleep can affect your physical, mental, emotional and social health; causing you to be more susceptible to poor health conditions such as reduced mental clarity, depression, diabetes and advanced aging just to name a few.

Hopefully this awareness will lead you (if you do not already do so) to surround your body in pure fibers when you are ready to catch your zzzzs. Getting the proper amount of sleep can be just as important as our diet is to our health. So cheers to deep and restorative sleep!

“Disease exists if either sleep or watchfulness be excessive.” ~Hippocrates

References:

http://www.prevention.com/health/what-happens-during-sleep

http://worldsleepday.org/environmental-sleep-factors

http://healthysleep.med.harvard.edu/healthy/science/how/external-factors