Upon fact checking this claim, I found numerous articles with the same or similar statement that sleeping with the heater on is overall bad for your health. But I figured simply copying and pasting the claim into Google introduced some bias, so I Googled “sleeping with heater on”. The results I found were articles that questioned the statement, as well as a few articles stating not to sleep with the heater on because of its negative health consequences (basically agreeing with the claim).
After reading the article linked in the claim, I found “According to sleep experts, going to bed with your heating on can actually be bad for your health, while a GP claimed there are even some long-term health risks you might not expect from sleeping with the heating on” (Eklund) as it can lower the quality of sleep you get overall and impact the body’s natural body temperature and circadian rhythm. The article also mentioned that sleeping with the heater on can dry out the air around you, leading to risk of dehydration and respiratory infection. This led to a handful of negative health consequences, which overall agreed with the claim. However, I was a little skeptical about their source. The article got these claims from “sleep expert Martin Seeley from MattressNextDay”, which is a mattress selling website and not a medically reviewed source. The article overall is from a UK news express posted by a social news reporter. While this article was straightforward about not sleeping with the heater on, I was curious as to what other sources had to say, since sleeping with the heater on is something that is so overlooked especially in the winter; I felt that it was a common routine households did, so if sleeping with it on was so bad I felt like it would have been more discouraged by society.
I found a medically reviewed article from 2019 by scientists at the University of Alabama, and Dr. Cameron Van den Heuvel stated sleeping with the heater on “results in a state of heightened arousal that prevents them from falling asleep when they go to bed, because they have to wait for their bodies to lose the heat that's keeping them awake” (Joyner). The article then continued on to preface that it mainly causes sleeplessness as it messes up the body’s sleep cycle since we must lower our body’s temperature in order to fall asleep. The article also linked 21 products to help people fall asleep at the end of the article. While this article was not the best in terms of medical reasoning, the majority of articles under this topic are not medical, but rather social. Overall, this claim is true in that sleeping with the heater causes negative health consequences.
