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Simply taking more steps during the day — perhaps adding a 20-minute stroll to a lunch break at work or walking the dog for an extra block or two at night — may be enough to help us sleep more soundly.
Plenty of research suggests that engaging in regular physical activity during the day can help improve sleep at night. Most studies, however, have involved college students or adults with either specific health problems or clinical sleep problems, such as insomnia. Few studies have examined how physical activity influences the quality of sleep of healthy adults.
A study published recently in the journal Sleep Health, is helping to fill that research gap. In the study, researchers at Brandeis University found that when healthy adults — individuals without any symptoms of a clinical sleep problem — increase the time they spend walking each day, they sleep better at night.
The study’s results are encouraging, say its authors, for they suggest that we don’t have to engage in a structured, high-intensity exercise program to improve our sleep. Simply taking more steps during the day — perhaps adding a 20-minute stroll to a lunch break at work or walking the dog for an extra block or two at night — may be enough to help us sleep more soundly.
As background information in the study points out, getting good-quality sleep — or, rather, not getting it — is a huge public health problem in the United States. Lack of sleep has been linked to an increased risk of several chronic diseases, including type 2 diabetes, heart disease and depression. It’s also a major contributor to traffic accidents, industrial accidents and medical errors.
Within any 24-hour period, a third of American adults report not having slept for the recommended minimum of seven hours, and between 50 and 70 million Americans have a sleep disorder severe enough to affect their ability to function during the day.
Nine million Americans over the age of 30 take some kind of prescription or over-the-counter sleep aid to help them fall asleep each night, despite the risk of those products leading to dependence and other negative health effects. Middle-aged and older adults are the most common users of such aids, most likely because of the changes in sleep patterns — most notably, difficulty falling and staying asleep — that often occur with aging.
Researchers have been trying to identify non-drug alternatives for improving sleep. Physical activity has been found to be one of the most promising.
The study found that walking was positively associated with improved sleep. The participants who averaged the most steps during the month-long study — and who spent the most minutes being active — reported significantly better sleep, on average, than those who walked the least.
That finding was especially true for women.
The improvement was in quality of sleep, not in sleep duration, although that was probably because the study’s participants were already getting the minimum seven hours of recommended sleep.
The effect on sleep appeared to be immediate. Participants — even those who were the least active — reported sleeping better on the nights that followed a day of walking more than was typical for them.
“The fact that both between- and within-person analyses were significant suggests that average patterns of and daily fluctuations in [physical activity] affect sleep,” the study’s conclude.
