Issues with temperature

[u/Man32945273]

For a long time I have been having issues with heat impacting my sleep. I don't know whether its just a problem for me or whether its my room.

I have a digital thermometer I keep in my room to track the temperature. The issue I've been having is that my room heats up rapidly when the sun rises and the rapid rise in temperature wakes me up and stops me going back to sleep. A lot of the time this results in me getting less sleep then I require and thus I end up tired all day. There is a slight possibility its just the high temperature thats waking me up but im like 80% sure the specific problem is rising temperature and not just high temperature in general. My room has floor to ceiling windows, so an entire wall is basically just windows. I do have curtains but they are not very good curtains that have gaps in them so for example my curtains can be closed but if its sunny it'll be bright enough that I can still see everything in my room without needing to turn on the light.

I will give an example of today. I wanted to sleep till 8am, I woke up at 6:30am after tossing and turning for a while and feeling too warm. The sky was somewhat overcast, my thermometer said it was 17.5 degrees Celsius (63.5f) while the weather app on my phone said it was 13 degrees c outside (55.4f). Im not sure why there's a difference but its a thing i encounter a lot. As I was messing around on my phone writing all this down, so like 2 - 5 minutes, I watched as the thermometer climbed to 17.9 degrees c (64.22f). Again i think its the rising heat that wakes me up not so much the high heat. I did have the AC on but it goes down to 18 at the lowest so it probably stopped the heat from going up too high but doesn't stop it from rising from whatever the low point in the night was.

From my testing I've found that 13 degrees is my ideal sleep temperature. I do have AC but it only goes down to 18 at the lowest. I've found that when it is 13 degrees in my room, something only achievable in winter when it just naturally gets cold in my room, I not only sleep great but can also sleep in (something that im not able to do normally as i just end up tossing and turning in bed without falling back asleep).

I think its rising heat thats the issue rather than straight heat because on days where I wake up early due to the heat, I can always nap fine during the day (when its even hotter than the morning). I think my blanket is made of wool.

I don't really know what to do. I've already tried to sleep earlier so I can be fine with waking up earlier but it only sometimes works. According to google the ideal room temperature should be 15.6 to 19c, which maybe means my room is behaving normally and its just me that for some reason needs things to be colder than usual. But then I don't know how to make that happen.

Specifically the questions im asking is:

1. Is my room unusually warm or does it heat up unusually fast? and if so how do I stop it?
2. How do I stop the heat/rising heat from waking me up?

[u/Jaded_Special2182]

floor to ceiling windows is the killer here, that's basically a greenhouse setup. the sun hits it and your room turns into an oven in minutes. even with overcast it'll warm up more than a normal room

get yourself some proper blackout curtains with thermal lining, the kind that actually block light and insulate. makes a massive difference. also 17.5 is way too warm for sleep, google's wrong on that one, most people sleep better around 16-18 and you clearly need it colder

maybe try a cooling mattress pad or one of those bed cooling systems, since your AC can't go below 18 that might be your best bet for getting the bed itself cold enough