Hannah Berner showers every night and does her best thinking there. Dermatologists and sleep researchers say she has landed on something real.
The comedian Hannah Berner has a rule she does not break. “I find that if I don’t shower at night, the oils from my hair affect my skin, so I shower every single night,” she told Who What Wear. “That’s where I get all my thinking done.” It is the kind of small, absolute personal habit that sounds like a quirk and turns out to be supported by a decent stack of evidence, because the question of when a person showers, long treated as pure preference, has a more interesting answer than the culture assumes.
Most Americans shower in the morning. A 2024 Harris Poll found that 60 percent do, against 33 percent at night. The morning shower has cultural momentum on its side, the ritual of waking up, the practical matter of hair and presentability before work. But when dermatologists and sleep scientists are asked which timing does more for the body, several of them lean, gently and with caveats, toward the evening.
What a night shower does for your skin
The skin argument is the strongest, and it rests on a simple observation about what accumulates on a body over a day. “If someone has seasonal allergies, sensitive skin or eczema, showering at night can help wash off pollen, dust, sweat and outdoor irritants before bed,” the dermatologist Shamsa Kanwal told Reader’s Digest. “This may reduce irritation on the skin and also keep allergens off pillows and sheets.” The dermatologist known online as Dr. Dray, Andrea Suarez, made the same case to GB News, framing the pillow as the overlooked problem. Skipping the night shower, she noted, means “you end up shedding” the day’s dead skin cells “into your bed linen. And guess who loves that? Dust mites,” which are themselves a trigger for allergy sufferers. Berner’s instinct about the oils from her hair reaching her skin is, in dermatological terms, correct. What sits on the hair migrates to the pillow, and the pillow sits against the face for eight hours.
There is one important caveat, and it applies whenever the shower happens. Kanwal warns to “keep it warm rather than hot,” because “very hot showers may feel relaxing in the moment, but they can strip natural oils and leave the skin dry, itchy or more sensitive.” And Alok Vij, a dermatologist at the Cleveland Clinic, offers a corrective to anyone who thinks a bedtime rinse keeps the sheets pristine on its own. “Regardless of when you shower, you should wash your sheets on a regular basis,” he said. “You’re still going to deposit a lot of dead skin cells, accumulated overnight sweat, bacteria and oils.”
The sleep science
The second benefit is one Berner did not mention but is probably enjoying anyway. A warm shower before bed helps a person fall asleep, and the reason is a quirk of thermoregulation. The body cools itself in the hours before sleep, and warming the skin paradoxically speeds that cooling by drawing blood toward the surface. “Our body starts to naturally cool down in the hours leading up to bedtime,” Eric Zhou, of Harvard Medical School’s Division of Sleep Medicine, told Reader’s Digest. “The shower potentially helps this process along because the hot water stimulates blood to flow to your extremities, thereby allowing your body to cool faster.”
The effect has been measured. Researchers led by Shahab Haghayegh at the University of Texas at Austin reviewed more than 5,000 studies and found, as the university reported, that a warm bath or shower at 104 to 109 degrees Fahrenheit, taken about 90 minutes before bed, could “hasten the speed of falling asleep by an average of 10 minutes.” Ten minutes may sound modest until it is measured against the alternative, which is lying awake thinking about how much sleep remains.
Why it still comes down to preference
None of this makes the night shower universally correct, and the most honest voice on the subject is careful to say so. “There’s no definitive answer for the global population on whether to take an evening vs. morning shower,” Vij said. “But for each individual, there tends to be a right answer. And it’s all based on preference.” A person with oily skin who wakes up greasy may genuinely do better rinsing at dawn. Someone who exercises in the morning has an obvious reason to shower then. The evidence tilts toward evening for the specific benefits of clearing daytime allergens and easing the slide into sleep.
Berner landed on the habit by feel, noticing her skin behaved better with a nighttime shower. The research, as it turns out, was already on her side.
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