Sleeping Better - Research Says you just Need to Time your TV and your Exercise Better
Exercise is good for you; and that is hardly news. But people tend to take that idea and let it run away with them. Some of the fitness fiends in our lives will offer exercise as a cure for everything from insomnia, from depression, to weight control - especially for school-aged children. Of course that kind of advice never hits home with anyone, because it seems rather a truism. If you eat better and if you exercise more, you're bound to see a few improvements to your health - how do you argue with that? But apart from the general understanding that exercise can't hurt you, is there something specific that regular physical activity can do to contribute to sounder sleep? Anything other than, knowing that if you are really tired out by bedtime, you can't help but get to sleeping better?
Insomnia is such a grave problem in America, especially among school-aged children. The study published, rounded up hundreds of school-aged children, and got them to wear actigraphs for days, devices that can measure physical activity. They just wanted to check to see if getting children to move about and gain a little exercise through the day helps them sleep better at night, in any reliable way: to see if more exercise during the day results in better sleep. The graphs they got were an eye-opener about helping children get some shut-eye.
They found that usually, a child put to bed, will take anywhere from ten minutes to a half hour, to fall asleep. They call this, sleep onset latency. And the more quickly children fall asleep, the longer and more soundly their sleep runs. Every time a child crashes in front of the TV to watch for an hour, he takes an extra three minutes to fall asleep. This should be really useful information for adults who suffer from chronic insomnia. Sleeping better, just got easier.
But in adults, there are certain caveats to be mindful of. The time you choose to get your exercises can often have a helpful, or an adverse contribution to make. If you ever went to a sleep clinic, you'd know that doctors give you a blood test to start you out with. They are trying to measure stress hormone levels in the blood: people who are insomnia, are usually extremely sensitive to stress. The thing is, exercise is known to increase stress hormone levels in the blood for some time. And it can take a few hours for the hormones to go down. You could actually do for yourself what the sleep clinic people do to help you get to sleeping better. You could exercise close to bedtime a couple of days, and rate how you sleep in a journal. You can progressively move your exercise time farther and farther away from your bedtime, and make a note of how it affects your sleep.
If you find that you are sleeping better and better the farther you move your exercise time away from your bedtime, you'll know how to schedule it. Some people really benefit from exercising through the day, but keeping it well enough away from their bedtime, that there was a study done in Brazil on this. It showed that moderate levels of weight training in many people, made them drop off 40% faster, and helped them sleep 20% longer than they were used to. That sounds simple enough, if you ask me.
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