The color of your quilt really affects your sleep quality! Change it now!

Can the color of the quilt affect your sleep?

——Recently, such a piece of “little-known knowledge” became a hot topic on Weibo.

The blog post said: Even after people fall asleep, their skin can sense the color of the quilt. Red makes people anxious, while blue and white make people calm.

Is this true?

Color does affect sleep quality

First of all, let me say the conclusion. The color of the quilt and the color of the bedroom wall will indeed affect some people's sleeping speed and sleep quality to a certain extent, but it is not because the skin can perceive color.

In the large number of insomnia cases I have seen, the impact of environmental factors on sleep is often ignored, while psychological factors are often exaggerated. In fact, many insomnia symptoms can be treated by improving the sleeping environment.

The impact of environmental factors on sleep is mainly reflected in light, sound, temperature, humidity and touch . The color of quilts and bedroom walls affects people's sleep through light.

The National Sleep Foundation believes that for the vast majority of people, those who paint their bedrooms blue will sleep longer.

Image source: What Colors Are Soothing for Sleep | Sleep.org

The reason is that there is a special photoreceptor cell in the retina of the human eye: ganglion cells, which are most sensitive to blue.

Ganglion cells in the retina transmit blue information to the part of the brain that controls the body's 24-hour rhythm, which affects sleep and the next day's state. In general, blue is associated with a sense of calm and helps lower blood pressure and heart rate, all of which help you get a restful night's sleep.

However, photoreceptor cells are objective, but each person's preference for color is subjective. The fact that blue makes people calm is a mainstream result based on observational statistics and does not apply to everyone.
If you're a firework type and blue isn't your thing, consider going for a cooler, more neutral color like gray or silver to improve your sleep. If you prefer something brighter, consider a pale yellow. In short, choose the color that makes you feel calm and comfortable.

So, if you feel depressed and nervous every time you lie down in bed recently, you can try changing to a quilt cover in your favorite color, or changing the wallpaper in your bedroom.
Please note that the "like" here refers to the feeling of "comfortable" and "calm", rather than the color that makes you "excited" and "passionate".

The skin cannot perceive color

As for the fact that human skin can perceive colors while sleeping, it is a theory made up by a funny blogger, not a serious scientific research.
There is indeed a type of animal in nature that can perceive color through its skin. It is not the chameleon as many people think, but the cephalopod octopus .

The study found that the "chromatophores" on the octopus' skin can respond directly to light, and the sensory nerve cells on its skin produce the opsins needed to detect light. These opsins allow octopuses to detect light of different wavelengths.

However, there are no structures similar to opsins in human skin, and there are currently no high-quality studies observing that human skin can perceive color.
After falling asleep, the colors of the world only exist in dreams.

Formulas to Improve Sleep

Of course, good colors alone are not enough to get a good night’s sleep.

Most importantly, you need to know why you can’t sleep well. I’ll share with you a very useful formula that can be used to express all the secrets of sleep problems:

Power + rhythm - resistance = sleep

In other words, if you have sleep problems, you can first look for the causes from these three aspects.

1. Motivation <br /> Motivation is the driving force for sleep, which is what we often call sleepiness. The more sleepy you are, the easier it is to fall asleep.

How do you feel sleepy? It's simple. As long as you stay awake long enough, your body will naturally accumulate sleepiness . If you sleep too much during the day, it will weaken your sleep drive. So, if you have trouble falling asleep at night, I suggest you try to cancel your daytime nap first.

But sometimes you are so tired but still can’t fall asleep. What’s going on? This is where the second factor to evaluate comes in: rhythm.

Image source: pixabay

2. Rhythm

Rhythm refers to the circadian rhythm. The old saying "work at sunrise and rest at sunset" is the result of the circadian rhythm. The circadian rhythm is like a "physical activity schedule" in your body, and your eating, drinking, defecating, urinating, sleeping and other physiological activities are carried out according to this schedule.

At the same time, this table will also match day and night . The final result is to allow you to maintain the most appropriate state in different time periods of 24 hours, so that you can sleep when you should sleep and stay awake when you should work.

How to hold your circadian rhythm?

The most important thing is to go out during the day and avoid the sun at night. In other words, you have to use the power of light.

Going out during the day means being exposed to outdoor light from time to time during the day.
At the same time, it is very important to avoid light at night. If you always use your phone for a long time before going to bed, it will easily push your rhythm backwards: you will tend to go to bed late and get up late.

In fact, whether it is driving force or circadian rhythm, both are relatively easy to solve. The biggest problem in sleep problems is the third factor: sleep resistance.

3. Sleep resistance

Sleep resistance refers to various factors that hinder your sleep. I compare them to 6 locks that lock the door to your sleep. These 6 locks are: environment, behavior, body, mind, medicine, and sleep.

Environment: refers to the sleeping environment, including sound, light, temperature, humidity, etc.

Behavior: refers to sleep behaviors. Wrong behaviors will interfere with sleep, such as lying in bed for no reason, sleeping too much during the day, drinking alcohol before going to bed, etc.

Body: refers to physical changes, including physiological changes and diseases. For example, women have trouble sleeping during menstruation and pregnancy, and they also have trouble sleeping when they are older.

Heart: refers to psychological and emotional stress, and also includes psychological and mental illnesses such as anxiety and depression.

Medicine: refers to the medicine that affects your sleep. Elderly people have many diseases and often take a lot of medicine. Some medicines will interfere with sleep, so it is necessary to adjust the medicine plan.

Sleep: refers to special sleep disorders. For example, severe snoring, which causes hypoxia. Also, some people may feel inexplicably uncomfortable when lying in bed at night and need to get up and walk around.

You will find that the secret of sleep is that you don’t need to put any effort into sleep itself. As long as you can resolve these resistances, sleep will come naturally.

References

[1]https://www.theverge.com/2015/5/22/8643965/octopus-cephalopods-skin-light-detection

[2]https://journals.biologists.com/jeb/article/218/10/1462/771/Cephalopods-sense-light-with-skin

[3]https://www.sleep.org/best-colors-for-sleep/

Planning and production

Source: Dr. Ou Xi

Author: Yu Zhouwei, attending physician of neurology, author of "Sleep Formula"

Editor: Yang Yaping