How Exercise Affects Your Sleep

By Staff Report
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Updated: March 11, 2021

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Exercise has been proven to aid our quality of life in so many different ways. The list of benefits is countless, that is for sure, but one of the biggest benefits of exercising, has actually been linked to better sleep for the individual who has partaken in physical activity of exercise. It has been addressed as the one thing to lift you out of a slump of tiredness, and also the remedy and cure for those that have sleeping difficulties.

We all know that sleep is essential for us to feel more energised, but also huge when it comes to regulation of weight loss and fat burning. If you choose to incorporate sleep with diet and supplements like fat burners, it will help you lose weight! So, the moral of the story here is, you need sleep-it is essential. The more things you can do to make sure you get the right number of zees at night, the better you will feel for it. Exercise is very much the key!

How Does Exercise Actually Help Sleep?

This is the big money question obviously! But the answer is plainly shown through research and the clinical trials that have been done over many, many years. The science that backs up the reasoning alongside the clinical trials include many reasons, such as how daylight actually naturally sets your body to a natural clock. When you exercise outdoors, you are giving your body the openness and opportunity to establish a sleep-wake cycle, as this is what natural light does to alert your body and make it tune in, with itself essentially.

Not only does it help you tune in with your body, it will also be a great anti-anxiety relief, meaning you will be able to relieve any underlying stress that happens to be lingering in your thoughts and energy. Sometimes those thoughts that make us anxious and stressed are the very reason as to why we cannot sleep and lay awake at night, tossing and turning. Exercise tires your brain out and makes it slow down and relax, due to the feel-good endorphins that flood your brain, post exercise!

Exercise will of course tire you out when it is of high exertion, and demands much endurance from you. When you put physical effort into exercise, your muscles and body will be wanting to drive you to bed to rest up and of course heal that high impact that the exercise actually had on your body. But the key thing to remember is, when you exercise, try not to push your body beyond the means of which it can actually manage. Pushing too hard can cause injury, and unfortunately injury cannot be healed by just sleep!

Is Exercising During the Night Bad?

Many do believe that exercise at night actually makes you not able to sleep and can give you too much energy-essentially counteracting what it is supposed to do, which is to make you tired! The answer is, this is a myth. This has never been scientifically true. The reason this myth began, was due to the idea of exercise raising your core body temperature. Many thought you would not be able to sleep until your body regulates back to normal levels. Yet more research has in fact discounted this theory, as there has been no evidence to support it, from the countless trials with multiple test objects. There was no correlation whatsoever.

Yet it is suggested that if you want to do high intensity training, it may be best to keep that for the morning, as that can boost your energy for the rest of the day, which is always a plus factor. Keep gentle low intensity sports for later on in the day, something that is subtle, gentle and will not overwork you massively. For those that personally find high intervals of training before sleep, mess with their natural cycle, you need to switch up your exercise schedule stat!

Exercise at the Same Time

If you are finding it hard to pick and keep the habit, it has been proven if you commit to that exercise at a certain time each and every day, you will see a higher chance of sticking to it, due to you prioritising exercise as with other life important commitments such as work etc. The sooner you revolve your way and attitude when it comes to exercising, everything should just fall in place.

Scientists say that the best optimum duration of sleeping should be from 30 minutes of exercise, 5 days within the week. It has also been proven to split it up into chunks of 15 minutes, which can help with early sets of exhaustion that can occur from exercises that are high intensity. It can happen when you first begin exercise, wearing yourself out completely is a very probable thing to occur.

If you want better sleep, make sure to focus on your diet too

Sometimes the exercise may not be doing enough for you to doze off, and that may be because you have neglected to check into what you are consuming regularly. Sometimes certain foods will need more effort and energy from your body to break down, especially if you have underlying issues within your digestive system, IBS being one of them. So by minimising the hard work for your body, by eating right, you should find it much easier to sleep as your body will be less strenuous at work, breaking down the food in your intestines.

There are other things that you can get more involved with minimising. Things such as reducing caffeine intake by a certain time of day, so it does not affect your sleep. Caffeine in certain coffee brands such as Starbucks and Tim Hortons for example have huge caffeine doses, beyond the average and the studies suggest it can take up to 6 hours for the caffeine effects to leave your body. Meaning, depending on this factor, you should orbit your last cup of coffee a certain number of hours before you would usually sleep.

Lastly, try and avoid the consumption of alcohol because that again is another way of making your body do the work, in terms of detoxification from the liver etc. You will not be making it any easier for yourself in the long run at all. If all else fails and you really cannot heighten your sleeping quality from all of these tips, it would be best to seek professional assistance from a doctor to expand on more solutions outside of lifestyle changes.