How to Create the Perfect Sleep Environment

Where you sleep affects how you sleep – and how you sleep affects how you live. In this guide, we’ll teach you to create the perfect bedroom environment using 4 principles: darkness, coolness, silence, and comfort.

Each of the following tips is science-backed and designed for Australian homes.

Make Your Bedroom Dark

Light is our biggest zeitgeber or ‘time-giver’. When our bodies detect light, we feel more awake – particularly when that light is blue or green. Alertness is a good thing during the day, but not when we’re trying to sleep at night.

Add Soft, Low-Temperature Lighting

For most people, a completely dark bedroom isn’t safe. Instead, set up soft, dim lighting around your room. Aim for the lowest colour temperature you can – red light is your best option, but amber bulbs can also work well. (Some people find red light aesthetically unpleasant.)

Avoid turning on your overhead lights, particularly if they’re harsh, white LEDs. It’s one of the simplest ways to improve sleep latency and increase the amount of slow-wave sleep you get [1].

Remove Screens

All blue and white light affects your sleep, but computers, phones and TVs are particularly bad. They emit blue light, even when they’re on night mode, and we normally stare at them for long periods of time. They’re also mentally stimulating – movies, browsing online, and messaging people are all emotionally arousing (and sometimes stressful) activities that can make us feel more awake.

Instead of scrolling or watching TV in bed, put your screens somewhere else. Make your bedroom a screen-free sanctuary – no chargers, no wall mounting, no computer desks.

Add Blackout Curtains

Street lights, night lights, and hall lights can all increase the light levels in your bedroom. That exposure, in turn, affects your sleep. Studies have shown that even low levels of ambient light during sleep can [2, 3]:

• reduce the amount of slow-wave and REM sleep we get
• increase our resting heart rate
• lower our heart rate variability
• increase next-day insulin resistance
• make our eyes more fatigued the next day.

The solution: make your bedroom as dark as possible. Switch off all passive lighting, install blackout curtains, and, if necessary, use a door snake to block out hallway light filtering in. You can use a motion-detected night light or under-bed lighting to keep yourself safe if you need to get up.

Make Your Bedroom Cool

To fall asleep, we need our core body temperatures to drop. It’s why drifting off when you’re hot is difficult. Excess heat also impacts slow-wave and REM sleep – think about how you often feel groggy and exhausted after a warm summer night.

Other than reducing light, lowering your bedroom’s temperature is the most effective way to support deeper, healthier sleep.

Use a Fan or Air Con

To cool your room, turn on your fan or air con. Both help circulate air, drawing heat away from your body and making it easier to maintain a comfortable core temperature. Everyone is different, so you might need to experiment with different settings. (Women typically prefer a slightly warmer temperature to men.)

Keep in mind that humidity plays a big role in how warm we feel. During summer, you can switch your air con to ‘Dry’ mode and complement it with a fan instead of blasting out 18-degree air all night. Your energy bill and the environment will thank you.

Make Your Sleep Surface Cool

One of the main ways our bodies regulate temperature is through vasodilation – widening blood vessels in our skin to increase heat loss. A fan supports that process by pushing the newly warmed air away, which means our bodies lose even more heat, and so on. (It’s why you might start to feel cold after a while.)

When we lie on mattresses, though, vasodilation is less effective. In fact, heat can actually become trapped between our bodies and the mattress surface, making us feel warmer than we otherwise would. It’s a puzzle mattress manufacturers have been trying to solve for decades.

Today, most higher-end mattresses feature some kind of cooling technology – gel-infused memory foam that absorbs body heat, for example, or aerated coil layers that create a ‘bellows’ effect. If you regularly get too hot during sleep, think about swapping your current sleep surface for one that incorporates more effective cooling.

Make Your Bedroom Quiet

If you’ve ever tried to fall asleep around loud music or noisy neighbours, you know: it’s not easy. Our bodies have evolved to wake up when they detect noises above a certain threshold – a snapping twig in the wild, for example, might signal a predator closing in [4].

In modern settings, though, that same response can compromise our sleep. Making your sleep environment as quiet as possible is a great way to drift off faster and deepen your sleep quality.

Generate Brown Noise

Making your room feel quieter doesn’t mean eliminating all sound. Low, soothing background noise can increase that noise threshold we mentioned earlier. That, in turns, masks sounds that might otherwise interrupt your sleep [4].

White noise is one of the most popular background noises – a low, gentle blur of static that resembles a fan or waves on the beach. Brown noise is also a great option. It’s a lower frequency sound that’s deeper and more surf-like. Both can also help relieve tinnitus (that ringing noise you might hear if your bedroom is very quiet), which can be distracting if you’re trying to drift off.

Block Out Noise

There’s only so much sound masking possible. If you want to create a genuinely quiet sleep sanctuary, you’ll need to block as much external noise as possible.

Start by closing your bedroom door. You might be surprised at how much creaking, humming, and other ‘house noises’ you manage to cut. If you have other people living in your home, a heavy draught stopper (door snake) can help block sound filtering under the door.

If you own your property and live next to a road or noisy neighbours, think about investing in double-glazed windows. They’ll improve your home’s thermal efficiency and help block more outside noise than a regular window.

Make Your Bedroom Comfortable

Getting to sleep hinges upon comfort. A hard bed, a prickly sheet, mental stress – each one can keep you awake and undercut your sleep quality. Here’s how you can make your bedroom as sleep-friendly as possible.

Find a Right-Fit Sleep System

When your sleep surface is too hard, you’ll wake up sore and stiff. If it’s too soft, your body will sag, which can lead to back pain and chronic spine problems. The sweet spot is in the middle – a mattress that feels just right for your body.

Various studies have shown that mattress comfort can [5]:

• increase slow-wave sleep
• reduce sleep fragmentation
• reduce wake events
• improve perceived sleep quality.

A high-quality mattress is a key part of any sleep sanctuary. Most good brands have a working life of around 10 years, so it’s definitely an investment worth making.

If you live with back pain or circulatory problems, it can also be a good idea to think about an adjustable bed. Sleeping positions like the zero-gravity position – the default posture our bodies revert to in space – can help relieve spinal pressure and improve blood flow.

Hide Clocks

Having a clock in your bedroom might seem like a good idea. (How else will you know when to wake up?) If you struggle with getting to sleep, though, a visible clock can lead to ‘clock monitoring’ – constantly checking the time, which interferes with sleep [6].

If you do need to get up at a specific time, use an alarm clock but face it away from your bed. (A better, gentler alternative to traditional alarm clocks is a haptic alarm, which slowly vibrates you awake.) Ideally, though, you should wake up when your body tells you to. Aligning your lifestyle with your circadian rhythm is one of the best things you can do for your overall health.

Remove Stimulating Cues

Mental stimulation is one of the single biggest culprits of bad sleep. Anxiety, stress and overthinking all make it harder to drift off and, in extreme cases, can lead to insomnia [7]. (It’s why the leading treatment for insomnia, CBT-i, is a psychological intervention.)

A common feature of anxiety is rumination – loops of negative thoughts that keep playing over and over in your head. There are many good strategies to help break thought loops, but the easiest is prevention. Remove anything from your bedroom that could trigger negative thoughts. If you have a difficult relationship with a family member, for example, think about keeping their photo in the living room instead. Your sleep sanctuary is your space. Don’t let anyone else compromise it.

Use an Air Purifier

Air quality can make a big difference to how comfortable you feel – especially if you live with asthma or allergies. Almost all bedrooms contain dust, clothing fibres, volatile organic compounds (VOCs), mould, pollen, bacteria, and other pollutants. If you live in a city or suburb, you’ll also be breathing in exhaust fumes and industrial emissions.

To help keep your air as clean as possible, think about investing in a high-quality air purifier. These act like mini reverse air conditioners that suck up the air in your bedroom, run it through ultra-fine filters, and push it back out. They’re a great way to keep your body healthier and improve your sleep.