The science of us sleep Institute presents a helping foot. Okay, so you can't sleep, you've tried everything warm glasses of milk counting sheep laying off the late-night binge watching all the usual tips.

But have you tried sticking one of your feet outside your blankets, it's the weirdest life hack⁽¹⁾, but it can legitimately help you fall asleep.

It's all about body temperature, researchers have found a link between high body temperature and alertness including improved memory attention and reaction times.

But the opposite is also true your body naturally gets colder right before your usual bedtime, and that drop in temperature seems to make people feel sleepy.

What this means is anything you can do before bed to help that cooling process along will likely signal to the brain and body that it's time for bed.

This is where your feet come in, their ideal tools for cooling down, the bottoms of our feet are unusual parts of our body in two crucial ways.

For one thing they're hairless, but even more importantly they contain specialized vascular structures that help regulate heat loss.

Specifically, the hands and feet contain blood vessels called the arterial venous anastomosis which are pretty much perfectly designed to help dissipate body heat.

These blood vessels supply blood to the veins located just below the skin surface, and if the skin of your feet is exposed to cool night air.

The blood there cools down when that chilled blood recirculates through your body, your core temperature gets cooler and you drift closer to Dreamland.

So, if you're an insomniac stick your foot out tonight, yeah, there's no shame in it you'll need a helping hand every now and then, and sometimes we need a helping foot.