Wearing socks in bed may not be the pinnacle of erotic allure . But if you have your sleepy eye on recuperation rather than procreation , they might be just the tonic .
For sleep to come and stay our core body temperature needs to drop in comparison to our extremities ( 4 ). Sleeping in a really hot room can be hard because our core body temperature may even rise . But having cold feet and hands so that the temperature of our extremities is colder than our core body temperature can be just as detrimental to sleep .
But if you are a player or a sexual free spirit , if you consider a night without sex to be a night wasted , fear not . You don ' t have to go to bed each night in mittens and hiking socks .
You really don ' t , and neither do your clients .
I ' ve found , as long as the bed is not too cool or hot , getting clients to visualise their hands and feet becoming warmer has an amazingly soporific effect . Of course , this may simply be thanks to the sleep encouraging effects of visualisation ( mirroring the REM dream state ), but it might be at least partly an independent effect . What we do know for sure is that body temperature is important when it comes to sleep .
You could ask your client to imagine shivering in a cold , snowy place , but then finding comfort around a warm open fire . They could imagine warming their hands and feet . You could describe the way the air around their hands begins to heat up the hands themselves .
Or you could ask them to visualise heat taking a physical form , such as streams of orange or yellow flowing into their hands and feet . This is likely to be even more effective if you combine this with an explanation of how the body ' s core and extremity temperatures relate to sleep onset .
Sleep is your lifelong companion . Through your childhood , adolescence , and adulthood , it was a constant friend and it always will be . It has great and generous gifts of health and wellbeing to offer us . But we in turn need to protect it .
For some of us , it can feel tempting to shun sleep , to try to maximise our waking time to manage all the challenges life throws at us .