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As you attempt to address sweating at night, you should always remember the different approaches your body exercises to eliminate heat and moderate your body temperature, even as you are sleeping.

Your goal will be to take advantage of your body’s regular systems for decreasing its heat to curb your night sweats. In this article I will identify how to maximize convection and radiation.

Our sweating is a direct result of a trigger from an area of your brain known as the hypothalamus. This part of our brain works a bit like our own private temperature regulator. If it thinks your body body must be cooled quickly, it broadcasts commands to your sweat glands to relieve the heat and cool the surface of your skin.

Just as a fire produces heat using heat transference from the fire to the air near it, our bodies also radiate heat, albeit to a smaller degree. Radiation is one of the simple mechanisms our body uses to get rid of excess heat.

The radiation of heat requires a heat transference. When the surfaces or spaces around your body aren’t cooler than your own body temperature, it makes it hard for your body to best use radiation. Therefore trapping the heat it radiates only raises the immediate temperature around your body and thus may increase the temperature on the surface of your skin.

You want to try to vent some of that heat and prevent it from accumulating close to you. This requires the use of breathable, light materials and utilizing some method for circulating air into your sleeping area to increase the dissipation of your radiating heat.

Convection occurs when you transport heat from your body by air passing over your body’s surface. This works a bit like the way you try to cool your steaming food by blowing air on it. You also achieve this effect when you direct a fan at your face while you are too warm. The fan isn’t cooling air, it’s causing your body to get rid of the heat using convection.

To increase the use of convection while you sleep at night, you should try a bed fan to push a gentle breeze around your body below your bedding.

So to avoid having your hypothalamus trigger perspiration, try to help it employ radiation and convection from the start. By helping your system just do what it knows to do with these bodily functions, you can greatly decrease night sweats.

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