Comment by zemvpferreira
1 year ago
I have found that the #1 cause for lost sleep is anxiety. Every piece of sleep hygiene, from blue light to meals to exercise to whatever else you want to consider can't hold a candle to going to bed with a quiet head. Your advice is good but I wanted to put this out there: First fix your worrying and running thoughts, then fix your sleep environment if you still need to, then look into medication.
If your anxiety comes from not being productive enough and the not being productive enough goes existential ... and you won't get productive without sleep, then it is hard breaking that cycle with just stop worrying. Exercising can help putting your body physical at rest and you will sleep, if you are physically exhausted enough. And then you can go on do everything else.
Daily exercise knocks on both doors, so to speak. It will help you sleep and it will also help you manage anxiety. Same for maintaining gut health. We are non-orthogonal systems.
Fair enough, I don't mean to say that I'm not a proponent of exercise, or having a cold bedroom, or any of the other standard pieces of advice. I follow them all by habit at this point.
What I mean to say is that first things first. There are lots of well-meaning advice we can give to people suffering from insomnia, delayed sleep onset etc etc. Most of it will only work if it helps fix anxiety. Awareness of this can be very helpful by itself.
If I go a week or so without some real exercise my anxiety starts to creep up. It does this no matter how good or bad my sleep has been over that time.
Edit typo while on my trainer. Lol
The problem arises when the obligation to exercise impinges on sleep time, whether that be having to get up early for a run or having to stay up late after chores to get a session done.
Sleep gives immediate benefits, exercise gives longer term benefits. It's a conundrum.