Is sleeping with the air conditioning on good or bad for you?

After a whole day of trudging through a city sticky and sweating, a shower and air conditioning can bring you back to life. There are few combinations of words more appealing during an Italian summer than: ‘I have air conditioning.’ Sleeping with air conditioning is a bit of a thing, because although you would naturally prefer to doze off feeling fresh, it is often said that sleeping with air conditioning can be bad for your health. But is that really true?

Sleeping with air conditioning
Okay, to get straight to the point: in fact, sleeping with air conditioning is not bad for you, but it is not so strange that many people end up with cold symptoms. Air conditioning blows cold, dry air into your sleeping area. Falling asleep this way is much easier than when you are sweating and tossing trying to catch the train to dreamland, but what many people forget is that your body temperature drops during sleep to about 36 degrees.

In the cold air-conditioned climate of your bedroom, you can easily catch a chill while you sleep. If you wake up in the morning with a dry mouth, throat, or nose, it could be because your air conditioning has been running all night. Also, drastic temperature changes, from extremely cold to extremely warm, can make you more susceptible to infections, as tiny hairs in your airways stop working when there is a drastic difference.

Ideal bedroom temperature
Should the old familiar fan make an appearance again? Although you may have less trouble with the (cold) mentioned above with a fan because the air is less cold, it is also possible to catch a cold with a fan. So it actually makes little difference.

The solution is that you can indeed sleep with the air conditioning on, but the temperature should not be too low. According to research, the best sleeping temperature is between eighteen and twenty degrees. So as long as you don't set it lower than that, it should be fine.