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If I go to sleep under a couple blankets, I’ll wake up a few hours later as blood rushes into my hands and feet. My hands and feet feel hot and I can’t get back to sleep until my hands and feet cool down. Sometimes this takes hours. Sometimes I go outside in my underwear and walk around barefoot in snow and make snowballs with my bare hands, trying to cool my hands and feet. The rest of my body is freezing cold while I do this. In bed I can pull the blankets up above my feet to cool my feet while keeping the rest of my body warm, but it’s hard to put my hands outside the blankets without my arms getting cold.
Melatonin helps. I’ve also done other things to improve my sleep, such as using orange lights in the evening, going to bed earlier, etc. The hot hands and feet seem to be an effect of a sleep disorder, that causes me to lose sleep.
During the day in the winter, especially outdoors, I get cold hands and feet, even if I exercise and the rest of my body is overheating. Then the blood suddenly rushes into my hands and feet, sometimes painfully, and my hands and feet are warm for hours.
I have Reynaud’s (and in fact just recently posted about my odd experience with it). So I was just searching for ‘hot hands at night’ and found your post. It rings true to me as well. So strange that our internal thermostats are off like this. I feel like I always have to have stuff to heat me up or cool me off!
The problem isn’t bothering me this winter. I think that melatonin has something to do with regulating sleeping body temperature. I switched from a time release melatonin that did little or nothing to the VitaMelts, which are more effective at a lower dose.
I have Raynaud’s and Erythromelalgia, which is a sister syndrome. Instead of the blood vessels constricting (which I do have in colder temps), I experience vasodilation which results in the blood pooling in my hands. My doctor suggested this condition as a possibility and I knew upon reading patient descriptions that this was what I had been experiencing.
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I hope this helps.
Thanks for sharing Zanner. There is a theory being researched that suggests that Raynaud’s and Erythromelalgia may result from similar causes. It is possible for patients to suffer from both Raynaud’s and Erythromelalgia at the same time, so these conditions may in some way be connected. Like Raynaud’s, there are both primary and secondary forms (where the condition is a byproduct of a more serious disorder).
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