Maybe you’ve seen the memes: “people who sleep with socks on can’t be trusted.” But — from a scientific point of view — they may be doing it right.
Sleeping with socks on can help your body temperature drop before bed, something that’s key for falling asleep. But you don’t need socks to make this happen if you prefer to sleep barefoot.
Below, we’ll dive into how sleeping with socks on can help you sleep, the drawbacks of wearing socks in bed, and which socks to choose. Plus, we’ll cover how the RISE app can help you improve your sleep hygiene to get a good night’s sleep with or without socks.
“Sleeping with socks on could help you fall asleep as warming your feet helps to reduce your core body temperature," says Dr. Chester Wu. "But this can be done with a warm shower or bath before bed. My advice is to wear them if you like them, and skip them if you don’t.”
Dr. Chester Wu is double board certified in Psychiatry and Sleep Medicine, and provides sleep medicine services, medication management, and psychotherapy to adults at his private sleep medicine and psychiatry practice.
There’s not much research into sleeping with socks on, but here’s what we know about the potential benefits.
It sounds too good to be true, but socks may help you drift off.
One asked participants to sleep with and without socks on and measured their sleep with a wearable device. The results showed that sleeping with socks on led to:
But, while this study looks promising, it only included six participants who were all male. They also slept in a room at 23 degrees Celsius (73 degrees Fahrenheit) — which is above the often-recommended 65 to 68 degrees Fahrenheit.
Other research does show similar results, though. One found sleep latency (the time it takes to fall asleep) was reduced when participants wore both normal socks and heatable socks after the lights were turned out.
And on the flip side, shows those with chronically cold hands and feet take longer to fall asleep. More on the science behind why this happens soon.
Beyond all the science, you may just feel more comfortable with socks on — either because that’s what you’re used to or because it’s cold where you live and cold feet keep you up.
If your feet are cold at night, your core body temperature may increase as your body sends more blood flow to your extremities to warm them up. If your body temperature is high, you may struggle to fall and stay asleep.
The most important thing is getting enough sleep each night, so if wearing socks helps you do this, go for it!
Raynaud’s disease, or Raynaud’s phenomenon or syndrome is when blood vessels in your hands and feet narrow and restrict blood flow. This can leave your hands and feet feeling cold, numb, and — when blood flow returns to normal — you may get tingling, throbbing, or pain. If this happens at night, it can be hard to fall and stay asleep.
are often triggered by cold, so people with it are advised to stay warm, and wearing socks in bed may help you do this.
Speak to your healthcare provider if you think you have Reynaud’s syndrome, you have chronically cold feet even when it’s warm, or you have circulation problems causing cold and painful feet.
The list of benefits of sleeping with socks on goes far beyond getting better sleep. Some believe wearing socks in bed can:
While more research needs to be done to confirm these claims (particularly the orgasm ones), there’s certainly no harm in wearing socks if you’re trying to improve your sex life, sleep better with menopause, or look after your heels. Just be sure it doesn’t stop you from falling asleep.
RISE users on iOS 1.202 and above can click to view their sleep debt.
Socks could help you fall asleep faster, but what exactly is causing this? Here’s a quick science lesson.
Your body temperature fluctuates throughout the day and night as part of your circadian rhythm, your body’s roughly 24-hour internal clock. You're at your and coolest around 4 a.m. — although the exact timing will depend on your chronotype (whether you're a natural early bird or night owl).
As night approaches, , your temperature starts to fall and your body produces the sleep hormone melatonin. If you’re too warm, your circadian rhythm and melatonin production can get thrown off, and you may find it harder to fall and stay asleep.
One way to help promote the drop in body temperature needed at bedtime is by wearing socks.
It sounds counterintuitive, but it’s all part of something called distal vasodilation, or the opening of blood vessels at distal locations like your hands and feet. When blood vessels open in your feet, heat is lost more quickly, and this cools down your core body temperature.
The we mentioned earlier found when participants wore bed socks to sleep, their foot temperature was about 1.3 degrees Celsius (2.34 degrees Fahrenheit) higher than without socks.
The value in the distal-proximal skin temperature gradient (DPG) was also higher for those in socks. In non-science speak, DPG measures blood flow and temperature in proximal body sites (like the head or stomach) and distal sites (like the hands and feet). It essentially shows heat loss from your core to your extremities.
There’s plenty of research showing how a drop in body temperature can help you sleep. For example, states that direct skin warming can help you fall asleep faster and promote NREM sleep, or non-rapid-eye movement sleep, which includes light and deep sleep. The research states these sleep benefits may be due to vasodilation and body cooling.
And other states, “the degree of dilation of blood vessels in the skin of the hands and feet, which increases heat loss at these extremities, is the best physiological predictor for the rapid onset of sleep.”
Distal vasodilation runs on a , increasing in the early evening to promote sleep. But this can be promoted further with warm showers, footbaths, and socks, as they warm up the feet.
Even the simple act of promotes distal vasodilation as heat is redistributed from your core to your extremities. Turning out the light is a signal for vasodilation, too. And, finally, as natural melatonin production is associated with vasodilation, taking melatonin supplements may also promote it.
On the other side of things, shows those with vasospastic syndromes such as Raynaud’s syndrome, where blood flow is limited to the hands and feet, take longer to fall asleep, both at the start of the night and fall back asleep if they wake up during the night.
There’s even some to suggest that impaired thermoregulation, especially a reduced ability to dissipate body heat from your hands and feet, could be behind some types of insomnia. More research is needed on this theory, though.
Want more science behind temperature and sleep? We’ve covered why you get so hot when you sleep here, and why it’s so important to stay cool at night.
While it looks promising that sleeping with socks on could help you fall asleep, we can’t say for sure.
There’s not a lot of research on the topic, and the studies that have been done are small (this only has six participants!), use subjective data or different sock materials, or were done on subpopulations like older adults. So, it’s not clear whether socks could help everyone.
There’s also the simple fact that the perfect temperature is subjective. Sleeping with socks on may cause some to overheat and others to cool down enough for sleep.
Our best advice? Experiment. We know you need a drop in body temperature to fall asleep at night. If wearing socks helps make that happen, and you find them comfortable, great!
But if you find socks make you feel too warm, or you just don’t like the feel of them, it’s not worth sacrificing sleep by wearing them. Instead, you can have a warm bath or shower before bed and focus on good sleep hygiene (more on that soon) to get the temperature drop you need for a good night’s sleep.
And finally, for a sleep doctor’s take on the matter, we asked our sleep advisor and medical reviewer, Dr. Chester Wu, what he thinks about socks in bed:
“Sleeping with socks on could help you fall asleep as warming your feet helps to reduce your core body temperature. But this can be done with a warm shower or bath before bed. My advice is to wear them if you like them, and skip them if you don’t.” 51 Medical Reviewer Dr. Chester Wu
Once again, there’s not much research into sleeping with socks on, but there could be some drawbacks. Here’s what you need to know before you don a pair of socks to bed.
As we’ve covered, body temperature — and the drop of it — is key for falling asleep. If you wear thick wooly socks at night, especially in a warm bedroom, this may make you too hot and make it harder to fall asleep.
Heat can also affect your sleep after you’ve drifted off. shows heat exposure can decrease slow-wave sleep (also known as deep sleep) and rapid-eye-movement sleep (REM sleep).
To reduce the risk of overheating, set your thermostat to 65 to 68 degrees Fahrenheit, the ideal room temperature for sleep.
Falling asleep can be hard to do at the best of times, so you don’t want uncomfortable socks adding to the problem. You might find certain materials itchy, feel too restricted in socks, or just prefer the feeling of wearing nothing at night.
If socks make you uncomfortable, and therefore keep you awake, they’re not good for you. You can get a good night’s sleep without them.
Wearing socks and heating your feet before bed may not help everyone get to sleep.
For example, shows that while socks help some fall asleep faster, this benefit isn’t seen as much in older adults.
Older adults without sleep problems could fall asleep faster if they slept with socks on after lights off or had a warm footbath before bed. But for older adults with insomnia, socks (both heated and normal) and warm footbaths didn’t make a difference in their sleep.
Heads-up: If you’re suffering from a sleep disorder or any sleep problem, you’re better off examining your sleep hygiene as a whole (more on that soon) and getting medical advice than relying on socks.
The best type of socks to sleep in are whichever socks you find most comfortable. Experiment with different thicknesses, styles, and materials to find socks that help keep your feet warm and don’t irritate your skin.
Wool socks may be better than polyester or cotton socks, however. One found Merino wool sleepwear — so, importantly, not socks — reduced the time it took to fall asleep.
This benefit was also seen in older adults, and wool improved their sleep fragmentation, or how much they woke up during the night. For poor sleepers, they woke up less often
