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Just before you sleep, you might be brushing your teeth and washing your face. However, just switching on the lights before you go to bed might be ruining your sleep, according to TODAY.

The reason is that the bathroom light is bright and offensive to your sleep cycle, according to Russell Foster, an Oxford neuroscientist. It would jolt the body and make you get up even as it tries to go to sleep.

"Often people will turn their lights down at night which helps to get the body ready for sleep, but then they will go and brush their teeth and turn their bathroom light on," he said during a lecture on sleep at The Royal Society in London.

"That is very disrupting. I often think someone should invent a bathroom mirror light which has a different setting for nighttime," he added.

The disturbance to the sleep systems and the body's circadian rhythms is mainly due to light, says a US study in the Journal of Clinical Sleep Medicine 

It explained recently that if you sit too far from a window for a while, your sleep gets reduced by almost 46 minutes.

"We have this master clock ticking on the brain and each individual cells have their own little clocks, so it's rather like the conductor of an orchestra producing a signal which the rest of the body takes a cue from." said Foster. "There is a beautiful symphony of rhythms," said Foster.

The message is clear, at any rate. If you want to sleep well, then ensure that the lights are off. After all, you don't need to see yourself brushing your teeth, do you?