brain injury, and older patients diagnosed with sleep apnea. Some even focused on cancer patients and those coping with heart disease.
But regardless of the type of person at hand, the review indicated that those who took a timely warm bath or shower effectively set in motion a process known as “water-based passive body heating.”
And doing so reduced the time it took to fall asleep, also called “sleep onset latency.”
The total time patients were able to spend asleep also went up. And warm baths appeared to serve as a booster of “sleep efficiency,” meaning the amount of time a person spent in bed sleeping, relative to the amount of time spent in bed trying to sleep.
Sleep researcher Adam Krause, who was not involved in the study, said the sleep-promoting power of a