When you come home after a long day, you should attempt to switch off by relaxing and unwinding to get a good night’s sleep. If you don’t get enough sleep, your immune system will find it harder to fight infections, you may find it harder to function at work, and a lack of sleep can affect your mental health. One way you can help improve your sleep quality is by creating a relaxing environment in your bedroom: lighting can help you achieve this!
Creating a soothing environment in your bedroom will help you fall asleep more easily, help you get enough sleep, and refresh you for the next day.
Lighting plays a significant part in setting the mood in a room. It can help you unwind, relax, and create a soothing environment before you fall asleep. At Castlegate Lights, we can help you create a relaxing bedroom environment using lighting if you have trouble getting to sleep or switching off. In this guide, we offer tips on the ideal lighting brightness, colour, and fixtures to help curate the ultimate sleep space in your bedroom.
Table of contents:
- Understanding lighting in setting the mood
- Choose the right light fixtures
- How to create relaxing lighting for the bedroom
- Creating a bedtime ritual with lighting
- What colour light is most soothing for sleep?
- Practical tips for creating soothing bedroom lighting
Understanding lighting in setting the mood
It’s commonly known that lighting can significantly impact a room’s mood. Using brightness and colour temperature, you can alter the mood and ambience of a room. With the correct lighting, you can make a room feel light, airy, refreshing and invigorating, or you can use lighting to make a room feel cosy, inviting and warm.
The key is to know which lighting to put where to create the perfect lighting scheme for each room in your home.
When planning your bedroom lighting, it’s also important to know you may need different lighting moods depending on the time of day. In the morning, you may want bright, invigorating light that mimics natural daylight to help you wake up. Then, in the evening, you will need a more mellow brightness and softer colour temperatures to help let your body know it’s time for sleep to help keep a healthy circadian rhythm and sleep cycle.
Here, we will primarily focus on creating a relaxing environment in your bedroom for winding down in the evening using light.
Choose the right light fixtures.
First, decide which light fixtures will help you perfect your wind-down routine. Here are some of our top recommended types of lighting.
Overhead lights
Overhead lights usually don’t contribute to a cosy atmosphere in a bedroom because of the stark downwards light beam. To amend this, ensure the bulb has an encompassing shade to diminish the starkness of the naked bulb. Use soft fabric shades on a pendant light or glass opal shades to diffuse the light and create a relaxing atmosphere.
Floor lamps
Floor lamps are a great alternative to overhead lights when you need ambient light to illuminate the whole room but don’t want stark light shining from above. The shade of the floor lamp will diffuse the light across the room but create a more mellow atmosphere.
Bedside lamps
Bedside lamps are also a fantastic way to create a soothing bedroom atmosphere. Lampshades can mellow the bulb light and channel the light beams up and down, creating shadows across the room. The shaded light helps to let your body know it’s time for sleep.
String lights
Hanging warm white string lights around your bedroom can create a cosy atmosphere that will make you feel warm and sleepy, mimicking the twinkling stars in the night sky.
Reading lights
If you like reading before bed, choose a concentrated light that will illuminate your page without illuminating the room, so you will eventually feel sleepy. We recommend specific reading lights for reading in bed. You can get clip-on reading lamps or wall lights with attached reading lamps.
How to create relaxing lighting for the bedroom
Although your bedroom is primarily for sleeping, you might also use it for other tasks, like working or gaming. Therefore, you might need a layered lighting scheme to help you wind down. A layered lighting scheme is a set of lights that creates different moods depending on what ambience you need.
You might have bright ceiling lights when you want to feel awake in the morning, but these don’t work when you’re trying to get to sleep. So, to create a relaxing lighting scheme, install multiple lights to alter the ambience or install dimmable lights or touch-operated lamps to get varied light levels, including soft ambient light when you want to relax and wind down.
Creating a bedtime ritual with lighting
If you’re struggling with sleep or feel awake when it’s time for bed, incorporating light into your sleep routine can help! Here’s how
- Set achievable time goals for when you want to be in bed and asleep.
- Put your phone away or on do not disturb mode one hour before your set bedtime. The blue light from your phone will prevent your brain from producing the sleep hormone melatonin and stop you from feeling sleepy.
- At the same time, turn your bedroom lights to relaxation mode. Turn off any big bright lights and switch on your bedside lamps or reading lights.
- If you’re not feeling sleepy, read a good book instead of scrolling on your phone, and you’ll be sure to fall asleep in no time.
- Use a sleep tracker to monitor the time you fall asleep and track your sleep progress.
What colour light is most soothing for sleep?
You can also help create a relaxing environment in your bedroom with the correct bulb colour temperature. The Kelvin scale (K) measures light colour temperature and ranges from red to white to blue light.
If you’re wondering what colour light is soothing to create a cosy atmosphere in your room, use bulbs with a 2000-4000K rating for a warm white light effect. A warm white light range will allow the production of melatonin, the sleep hormone, and make you feel sleepy, whereas 5000K upwards will have the opposite effect. Exposure to blue light or bright white artificial bulbs can prevent melatonin production and disrupt your sleep and natural circadian rhythm.
However, some deep blue coloured lights can also have the same sleepy effect, often used in baby nightlights. So long as they are dim and have a deep, dark blue, the light can create a soothing atmosphere in a bedroom, mimicking the deep blue sea or night sky.
With developments in LED lights, you can get bulbs that produce an extensive range of light colours. So, if you’re trying to soothe yourself before sleep, turn on your dim, warm light lights for the best light colour for sleep.
Practical tips for creating soothing bedroom lighting
Here are some of our top tips on how to create soothing bedroom lighting
- Place lights low down. Using nightlights plugged into outlets near the floor offers a mellowed ambience that isn’t bright or dazzling to help you feel sleepy.
- Use shades. Shading any naked bulbs will help defuse any stark light and help create a soothing atmosphere in your bedroom.
- Use warm white bulbs. An easy way to create a more soothing ambience in your bedroom before bed is to swap your bulbs for ones that emit a warm white light.
- Get the right lamp size. If you have a bedside lamp, the last thing you want is the light blinding you as you sit in bed. Ensure your bedside lamp sits on your nightstand at the right height and doesn’t shine into your eyes.
Soothing bedroom lighting at Castlegate Lights
We hope you now understand the importance of light when creating a relaxing and soothing environment in your bedroom. Whether you’re having trouble sleeping or want to illuminate your bedroom to create a calming atmosphere, lighting can help with the optimal shade, brightness and light colour temperature.
If you’re looking for relaxing light for your bedroom, browse our bedroom lighting collection for an extensive range of lights perfect for bedrooms. You can also replace your bulbs with warm white light bulbs from our bulb collection to transform your bedroom into a calming oasis without breaking the bank.