YES, SEX REALLY DOES PUT YOU TO SLEEP...

‘FOR perimenopausal and menopausal women, it may well be a very good idea to sleep naked because they experience huge temperature changes and the rise in temperature can wake them up,’ says Professor Russell Foster, director of the Sleep and Circadian Neuroscience Institute.

The temperature changes are due to a fall in oestrogen: the hypothalamus, the area in the brain that regulates body temperature, can then become overly sensitive.

Separately, men can often benefit from wearing little in bed, because they tend to have a higher muscle-to-fat ratio than women, and muscle generates more heat than fat, Professor Foster explains. ‘This is why other nationalities — Germans in particular — have separate duvets when they share a bed, often with different thicknesses.’ If you wear pyjamas, they should be made of a natural, cool fibre such as cotton, so sweat is not trapped between your body and the material, making it trickier to lose heat. Meanwhile, if you’re struggling to sleep well, sex may help. In a study in the Journal of Sleep Research, 250 men and women kept a diary recording their sleep quality and the time it took them to fall asleep for two weeks.

The research, in the Netherlands, found that sex with orgasm was associated with significantly reduced time to fall asleep and increased sleep quality.

‘Orgasms are linked with hormones such as oxytocin and prolactin, which can have calming effects, helping switch off the stress response that is necessary for goodquality sleep,’ explains sleep scientist Sophie Bostock.