If you are having trouble sleeping, then a good workout can help, but you shouldn’t expect a few minutes of exercise before bedtime to help you sleep better. It can actually have the opposite effect. Working out before you try to sleep can actually stimulate your brain and increase blood flow, making all those thoughts that keep you up at night to be even more pronounced.
Exercise can help you fight insomnia, but only if you commit to it. This is a solution for sleep deprivation that works over the long term, because like most things in life, there isn’t a quick fix. Exercising to help you sleep better is a lot healthier for you than taking medication. It may not work as fast, but there are all sorts of long-term benefits to going this route rather than using prescription drugs or some over-the-counter medication.
How Long Does It take to Start Working?
As you can imagine, most people suffering from insomnia are looking for a solution to the problem. They want to know how long it will take to start seeing some results. According to one study, which was published in the Journal of Clinical Sleep Medicine, you should start seeing real benefits in a few months. It may take longer for some people, and others may see results a bit faster. This may seem like a long time to have to wait, but the payoff is that insomniacs should be able to get an extra 45 minutes of sleep. That can have a huge impact on how rested they feel the next morning and how much energy they have for the day.
Imagine the difference an extra 45 minutes will have on productivity, a sense of wellbeing and happiness each day. It could be life-changing, and that’s what any insomniac is hoping for- a life changing fix for their struggle with sleep. That’s exactly what a proper exercise routine will provide.
How Much Effort Has to Be Put in?
The next question an insomniac would have then would naturally be to wonder how much exercise and what kind of exercise they would have to do in order to get these results. According to the same study, just doing 30 minutes of aerobic exercise three times a week was all it took to make a difference. This could be something as simple as jogging or doing some calisthenics. It doesn’t all have to be high intensity exercise- just enough to get your blood pumping and your heart rate up for a little while.
There are lots of ways people can do a workout like this- running up and down their own stairs, using a treadmill, running in place, taking their dog for a jog, using an aerobics video to work out with an instructor or countless other ways. Aerobic exercise is definitely the best kind for improving sleep, and jogging is probably the easiest and most surefire way to get in your workout and get the kind of results you are hoping for. If you just go for a run every now and then, you won’t see significant change. Staying committed to jogging on a regular basis is what will make the difference.
It’s vital that you use the right kind of equipment if you are going to do jogging or any kind of workout, really. Sites such as Jogging Addiction offer great resources to clue you in on what kind of equipment to buy to ensure you don’t get blisters or chafe when you go do your run. The sooner you have the right equipment, the sooner you can start seeing great results from your efforts.
How Powerful Are the Results?
We have touched briefly already on what kind of difference it can make to do some exercise and how it will affect a person’s sleep patterns. We want to go into a bit more detail to show you just how effective jogging is for dealing with chronic insomnia.
One way we can do that is to compare jogging as an insomnia treatment to medication. There are lots of medications you can take to treat insomnia, but few to none of them can affect the root problem. They simply treat the symptoms, because that is as far as modern medicine has come when we consider pharmaceutical treatment. You can take medication for years and not have your insomnia cured. Once you stop taking the medication, you will still be fighting to go to sleep each night.
Medication can also have side effects, and the longer you take it, the more likely it is to have a long-term, damaging effect on your body. It could even affect your mental health, in some cases. You are better off with trying to jog to treat insomnia, and this study we mentioned is proof of that.
Jogging will treat the root problem, in many cases, offering real change throughout your body that will benefit you over the long-term. Like the medication, you will probably have to keep running to keep the insomnia at bay, but jogging offers all sorts of secondary benefits too. It will help you maintain health, keep your heart strong and decrease heart attack risk, improve lung capacity so you don’t get tired as easily and tone your body to create a fitter, more appealing look.
Even while you wait for the sleep benefits to kick in, you will be benefiting from jogging in tons of other ways, so why not get started today?
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