A doctor on TikTok said that wearing socks to sleep makes it easier to fall asleep. It’s true!
Dr. Jess Andrade is a third-year pediatric resident doctor who takes to TikTok to share medical tidbits and facts.
She recently posted a video pointing out that wearing socks helps you fall asleep faster and her viewers agreed.
“I wear socks to bed so don’t come at me I’m not weird,” she wrote under the post.
“So wearing socks makes your feet warm up and this opens up the blood vessels that cool the body down,” Andrade said. “The body being cool tells the brain that it’s time for bed. So actually people that wear socks tend to fall asleep faster.”
Andrade spoke to Insider and mentioned a 2007 study at the Netherlands Institute for Neuroscience.
That study found that people who warmed their feet before bed fell asleep faster than people who did not.
The doctor also pointed to a study in Korea from 2018, which found exactly what she posited: socks help you fall asleep. In that study, six males from 2 to 22 were observed. Sock-wearing-folk fell asleep 7.5 minutes faster!
“I feel like every bit of sleep counts, especially for me when I’m working so hard,” she said.
“So I know anything that I can do to help myself sleep, I’m always willing to try.”
Andrade said that her followers are divided—some don’t want to wear socks to sleep and others have told her that the tip helped.
Other medical professionals have also studied the issue. Dr. Roxanne Prichard, who is a professor of psychology and neuroscience at the University of St. Thomas in Minneapolis, has spent thirteen years observing how college students sleep. She told Insider that the same result can come from other methods. At its core, the hack is about opening blood vessels that cool the body.
“The socks to bed — or any number of other tricks to warm up the peripheral body, but simultaneously drop the core body temperature like a hot shower followed by a cool bedroom, or a cup of hot, stimulant-free herbal tea before bed — works by accelerating the natural drop in core body temperature that helps signal ‘time to sleep,'” Prichard said.
There is also, Prichard pointed out, a psychological effect of having a “bedtime routine.”
“There’s a pretty large component of placebo in our sleep rituals,” she said. “So if you swear by a cup of chamomile tea and Brahms before bed, and that’s your ritual, both of those signal ‘time for bed’ psychologically, and if you believe they do something to help you sleep, they likely will.”