Before anything else, today is September 11. Twenty-five years on, I'm holding space for everyone who lost someone that day and everyone still carrying it. Be gentle with yourselves today.

When life feels heavy, one of the best things you can do for yourself is to focus on your sleep. So that's where I want to spend our time this week.

Soon the nights here in Cincinnati will be cooling off and every year that shift reminds me how much of my sleep comes down to one thing I ignored for a long time. Temperature.

We talk endlessly about screens and magnesium and winding down and those matter too. But the lever most people never touch is the simplest one. Your body literally has to cool down to fall asleep and stay there.

Here's the physiology in plain terms. In the evening your core body temperature starts to drop and that drop is part of what signals your brain that it's time for sleep. It keeps falling through the night and bottoms out a few hours before you wake. When your room or your bed is too warm, you blunt that natural cooling and the result is trouble falling asleep, lighter sleep and those maddening wake-ups in the small hours.

This is true for everyone, at every age. So before you buy another supplement, work the temperature first and check my full articles on better sleep and how to get more deep sleep.

First, cool your room. The sweet spot for most people sits somewhere in the mid 60s Fahrenheit, cooler than a lot of us keep the house. Nudge your thermostat down at night for a week and see what happens. It's the easiest sleep experiment there is.

Use the warm bath trick. A warm shower or bath about an hour or two before bed sounds backwards but it works. Warming your skin pulls blood to the surface and when you get out of the tub, your core temperature drops faster than it otherwise would, which helps you fall asleep. The bath may be warm, but the effect is cooling.

Warm up cold hands and feet, this one sounds a little backwards too. When your hands and feet are cold, the blood vessels in them tighten and hold heat inside your core, which keeps your core temperature up. Warm them, with socks or a quick foot soak and those vessels open so your body can release that heat and let your core cool down. If you're someone who lies awake with icy feet, this is a simple fix.

Rethink your bedding. Heavy, heat-trapping sheets and a too-warm comforter quietly work against you all night. Start with breathable natural fibers and a lighter layer you can kick off, which costs a lot less than most sleep gadgets. If you want to go a step further, there's bedding built specifically to manage temperature. The one I recommend is Slumbercloud, which uses a material called Outlast, originally developed for NASA, that absorbs and releases heat as your body warms and cools through the night. It also wicks moisture, which is exactly what you want if you run hot or sweat in your sleep.

​Watch the late-night wine and I say this as someone who enjoys a glass. Alcohol close to bedtime raises your body temperature and fragments the back half of your night, which shows up clearly on my wearable the next morning. You don't have to quit, although that is really best for optimal health, just move it earlier.

Now, the part I get asked about quite a bit.

If you're in perimenopause or the menopausal transition or your partner is, temperature isn't a minor tweak, it's everything. Hot flashes and night sweats are your temperature regulation misfiring and they wreck sleep for most women who go through them. They sure did a number on me! There is nothing worse for sleep than waking up in a puddle of sweat night after night.

In a review of the research in Sleep Medicine Clinics, hot flashes show up in roughly 70 percent of women and insomnia affects almost 60 percent of women after menopause. If you've felt like your sleep fell off a cliff and no one warned you, you are not imagining it, and you are very much not alone. I put together a full rundown of what's happening in the body here.

All the tips above still apply to you, just more so. Cool room, cooler bed, breathable everything: this is exactly where an actively cooled bed can go from nice-to-have to seriously life changing.

Which brings me to the tool I've leaned on for over five years. It's a water-based pad that goes under your sheet and actively cools (or warms) the bed to a temperature you set, and holds it there all night. I started on an older model and now use the current one, and it's one of the big things that's helped me most with night sweats and just running hot in general, in addition to getting my hormones optimized.

It is a real investment (although can quality for HSA/FSA funds), so I'm not going to pretend it's for everyone. If you're curious whether it's worth it (spoiler alert, it is!) and how it stacks up against the other big name in this space, I wrote an honest side by side (including where the other option nickel-and-dimes you with a subscription).

Whatever you try, start with the free stuff first. Cool the room, run the bath, fix the bedding. You may be surprised how far that alone gets you.

Hit reply and tell me your worst sleep stealer right now. Falling asleep, staying asleep, the 3am wake-up, or something else entirely? I read every response and I write back.

Take care this weekend, Cheryl

P.S. If you already know you run hot at night (or cold for that matter) and you're done fighting it, the cooling/heating pad I use is here and this link takes 8 percent off. I've used mine for years, night sweats and all and I'd buy it again in a heartbeat.