Throughout history, people have timed their bathing for a number of important purposes. Some cultures have showered in the morning to purify the spirit before prayer, while others preferred the evening bath as an opportunity to socialize and clean their grimy bodies before bed.
Shahab Haghayegh just wanted to get a better night’s sleep. “I tried various methods including melatonin pills to move my bedtime back,” he says. “Nothing worked.”
[time-brightcove not-tgx=”true”]What finally did the trick? Switching his shower from morning to evening. “When we take a nighttime shower at the right time and temperature, it helps us fall asleep,” says Haghayegh, an instructor at Harvard Medical School and Massachusetts General Hospital. His experience inspired him to study how warm nighttime showers support slumber.
So which is best? That depends on your goals. Here’s how to time your shower for the biggest mental and physical benefits.
Nighttime sleepiness
Haghayegh points to research, including his own, suggesting that nightly showers can optimize sleep by aligning body temperature to circadian rhythm, or the body’s biological 24-hour cycle.
Every night, your body must cool down to sleep well. This makes sense if you think about evolution. Ancient humans lived outside, where it got colder at night, dropping body temperature—and so we’ve evolved to sleep in cool environments. But these days, our controlled indoor climates keep us toasty at night. The additional degrees of comfort can backfire by undermining sleep.
A warm shower—counterintuitively enough—can help. The warm water signals a hot environment to your body, and it reacts by sending warm blood from your core to the skin. The heat escapes. You cool down, syncing up with your circadian clock.
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The result is that you may fall asleep faster and rest more deeply through the night. “Research has found it reduces sleep latency and improves sleep quality,” says Matthew Ebben, associate professor of psychology in clinical neurology at Cornell University and diplomate of the American Board of Sleep Medicine. “It’s thought that you can manipulate your ability to sleep through body temperature.”
There’s a right way and a wrong way to do this, according to Haghayegh. He found the ideal length of the nighttime shower is at least 10 minutes, and the best timing is 1-2 hours before bed. If you shower closer to bedtime, you’re not giving the body enough time to cool before you hit the sack. Aim for comfortably warm water, about 104°F, Haghayegh says.
It’ll take a few days of nighttime showering for your circadian rhythm to adjust. “The body clock doesn’t change that easily,” Haghayegh says. To reform his own night owl ways, he showered several nights while gradually moving his bedtime earlier by 30 minutes each evening.
It won’t work for everyone, Ebben warns. “When you read sleep advice on the internet, it helps about half the people, and it damages the other half,” he says. “It’s all about finding the right fit for the individual.” He thinks that, when it comes to sleep-supporting behaviors, keeping a consistent bedtime is most important.
If you try it for a week, call it a win if you feel more rested in the morning, suggesting better sleep.
Creativity
Taking showers at night could improve creativity.
Several studies suggest that showers provide fertile ground for relaxation and free association—keys for creativity. Relatedly, many people become more open to spontaneous thinking in the evening, when the brain is less focused and inhibited.
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For creative insight, nighttime showers could be like fishing at dawn: you’re more likely to catch something unexpected and valuable when the conditions are naturally right. Just as the fish rise to the surface when the water is calm, your best ideas may surface when your mind is tranquil and wandering during an evening shower.
Cleanliness
Evening bathing could also benefit personal hygiene. “Nighttime showers allow for cleaning the dirt of the day,” says Dr. Ranella Hirsch, a Boston-area dermatologist. That includes dust, allergens, sweat, and pollution. Go to bed without rinsing them off, and they may irritate the skin and transfer to your sheets.
Hirsch notes the scarcity of studies comparing evening to morning showers for hygiene; there’s no scientific verdict. But she points to potential downstream effects of nighttime showers as at least intriguing. Theoretically, it could give the skin cells a chance to repair overnight, she says.
She adds that nighttime showers may work best if you have very oily skin, which doesn’t fare well overnight when dirty. To keep your morning shower, though, you could just do some skin cleansing before bed, Hirsch says.
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Meanwhile, “morning has the ostensible benefit of washing off any nighttime shedding,” she says. People shed about 200 million skin cells every hour. This activity revs up at night during sleep, and a morning shower can help wash away the dead skin cells.
For hygiene, as with sleep quality, other factors trump the importance of when you shower, Hirsch adds. “Even if you shower regularly in the morning, but sleep on filthy sheets, you would lose much of the potential benefit.”
Ebben has become a morning bather mainly because he wants to smell good at work. But he notes some of these preferences come down to just how dirty you get during the day. He grew up in a working-class household where everyone showered after returning home from hands-on, blue-collar jobs. “Time of showering is more about your profession than anything else,” Ebben says.
Practicality
Sure, sleep and cleanliness are nice. But so is efficiency. Many people prefer morning showers because, without them, their hair is a wreck unworthy of public display.
“Some people prefer to wash their hair in the morning so they can style it more easily,” says clinical psychologist Dr. Shelby Harris.
Morning alertness
Morning showers could also make you more alert. Harris notes the large market for shower steamers with energizing scents that help people wake up. Lavender and rosemary may especially increase alertness. (Just be mindful of potentially unhealthy chemicals in some of these products.)
The effect of morning showers on alertness syncs with your natural wakeup. In fact, Haghayegh thinks they can reinforce your early-day circadian rhythm—just like pre-bed showers help at night—if they’re approached in a certain way.
Recall our ancestors living in the wild. As they got up with the sunrise, the temperature began to warm. Thus, the human body evolved to wake up as it warmed up. Indeed, just as our body temperature naturally drops and stays low overnight, it increases in the early morning.
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Your shower can boost this process. “Now we do the opposite of what we did at night,” Haghayegh explains. “We take a cold shower, so the body thinks it’s in a cold environment.” The body tries to retain heat. Post-shower, you warm up, and at least in theory, you will feel more energetic. Small studies suggest people feel more active with better moods after cold baths.
Haghayegh says it comes down to what you want. If you’re having sleepy mornings, try the cold shower. Or, if you’re a true champion of circadian-aligned showering—and perhaps have some extra time on your hands—go with a warm shower at night and a cold one in the morning.
Pick a side
Whether you shower morning, night, or both, be consistent. Your body is looking for cues around sleep, and if you maintain your shower practices, they’ll become one of these cues. “Anything you do around sleep can become a conditioning factor,” Ebben says.
Don’t overdo it. There’s no need for two hours of wind-down and wind-up rituals, but “I always encourage these kinds of habits,” Harris says. “We need routine.”
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