How Exercise Can Help You Sleep Better

Most of us know exercise can improve muscle strength, heart health, and energy levels, but regular physical activity can also reduce insomnia and increase deep sleep. Research shows that just 30 minutes of moderate aerobic exercise, such as walking, swimming, or jogging, can help you fall asleep faster and experience more deep sleep.
What’s more, better sleep can be found after just one day of exercise and will continue to improve with long-term training. Below, we outline precisely how physical activity impacts that body and why it is conducive to a good night’s sleep.
How Can Regular Exercise Affect Your Sleep?
Including exercise into your daily routine can improve your mental and physical health, but it also offers the following sleep-related benefits.
Fall Asleep Faster
One link between sleep and exercise involves body temperature. Your body temperature fluctuates slightly throughout the day—it tends to be higher in the afternoon when you’re alert and lower in the evening when you prepare for sleep.
When you exercise, your core body temperature and alertness increases. As your temperature gradually lowers back down throughout the day, you naturally become tired and fall asleep quickly once it is time for bed.
Whether you workout first thing in the morning or the afternoon, you will still experience this benefit. However, exercise right before bed can increase alertness and inhibit sleep, so it is best to work out at least 2 hours before bed.
Increase Deep Sleep
Exercise increases slow brain waves, total sleep time, and REM sleep, which leads to deeper, more restorative rest. When you spend more time in deep sleep (stage 3 and REM), you experience more healing—slow delta waves clean the brain, important information is stored in long term memory, and HGH works to repair and rebuild muscles. Shortened sleep periods deprive your body of these essential benefits.
The increased adenosine production during physical activity seems to be one of the reasons exercise can improve deep sleep. Adenosine is a vital component of a natural sleep-wake cycle. When adenosine builds up in the body, it gradually causes slower cell activity that leads to drowsiness—helping us drop into deep sleep faster.
Improve Sleep Duration
Exercise requires energy—when you workout, you expend more energy and will naturally require more sleep to feel rejuvenated. After practicing moderate aerobic activity for 16 weeks, evidence shows that sleep duration increases by up to 2 hours.
To experience longer, better quality sleep, a regular exercise routine is vital; however, your workout does not need to be intense to experience these benefits.
Studies show that patients enjoyed a longer sleep time regardless of the type of activity or intensity. But the consistency of activity did make a difference, and most sleepers find a gradual improvement between 4...