Cure:Insomnia

We live in a day and age where physical activity is becoming less and less required in order to lead a perfectly functional life. Rather than spending hours outside chopping wood, we simply turn the knob and turn up the heat. At work, we send an email to our co-workers rather than getting up and talking to them in person. Tasks that were once done by hand are increasingly automated. We increasingly automate our homes. Our places of work increase efficiency by using robots, computers, and other labor saving equipment. In general, lifestyles with a pronounced tendency toward physical inactivity are becoming the dominant lifestyle.  

The consequences of a life of physical inactivity are severe. You’ve heard a million times that exercise is healthy and that the human body was designed to be physically active and not to be passive, doing practically nothing! We’ve all heard it, yet many people fail to incorporate regular exercise into their daily routines. We hear everywhere that exercise is healthy, but often we do near hear about the exact consequences of inactivity. I often think that’s a major reason that we lack the motivation to start living an active life. We know that exercise is good for our health, but we aren’t always equally aware of the very dramatic consequences of a life of inactivity.  

Let the following serve as a reminder of just how important exercise is for your health and well-being both mentally and physically. The most obvious benefit of regular exercise is reaching your ideal body weight. When you lose excess weight, your body image improves and you feel better about yourself. This is both a mental and physical benefit in one! However, there are so many more benefits of exercise, for example:  

• Exercise helps decrease anxiety, stress, anger, blood pressure, cholesterol, and depression.  

• Exercise eases muscular tension.  

• Exercise sharpens the brain by increasing the amount of oxygen available.  

• Exercise strengthens the heart and lungs and vitalizes the nervous system.  

• Exercise increases endorphin production. Endorphins increase well-being and pain resistance.  

• Exercise increase energy levels, mood, and self-esteem.

• Exercise reduces the risk of a wide variety of diseases including diabetes, osteoporosis, coronary heart disease, hypertension, obesity, back problems and colon cancer.  

An important thing to note: Exercise not only helps you attain better health, it is also an outlet for mental and emotional distress such as anxiety and anger. It is also an effective tool in warding off depression. Anxiety, anger, and depression all have a very negative influence on sleep! We’ll learn more about this later on.  

Did you know that exercise has a more tranquilizing effect than many medications against anxiety?  

I could go on about the general benefits of exercise, but that is not the focus of this book. I hope that this has been a wake up call for those of you who lead an inactive lifestyle. Let’s look at exactly how sleep and exercise relate to each other. There are several reasons why physical inactivity can lead to increased insomnia.  

Recall how your daily rise and fall in body temperature—your circadian rhythm—dictates your ability to fall asleep. The more physically inactive you are during the day, the more you are inhibiting your daily rise and fall of body temperature—and we have already learned how inhibiting your natural temperature fluctuations can cause sleep problems.  

Exercise produces a quick rise in your body temperature followed two hours later by a drop in body temperature, which will last from two to four hours. This drop in body temperature will make it easier to fall asleep and stay asleep.  

Exercise is also conducive to sleep because it puts strain on the body. When you physically engage your body, your brain will compensate for this by increasing the length of the deep sleep stage. This means that exercise will not only help you fall asleep and increase sleep efficiency, it will also help you raise the quality of your sleep. Furthermore, because you will be in a prolonged period of deep sleep, it decreases the likelihood of you waking up!