Struggling to fall asleep at night? Suffering from insomnia? Perhaps your high adrenaline and cortisol levels are to blame if you practice late-day exercise and especially strenuous exercise. But, why is exercise keeping you awake when doctors actually recommend regular exercise to improve sleep. To clear up any misunderstandings, please continue reading this article and learn about the link between exercise and sleep.
How are Exercise Timing and Sleep Connected?
As already noted, implementing exercise into your daily routine can make your sleep better in general as it may reduce stress and anxiety levels. However, exercising late in the day, i.e., a couple of hours before bedtime, can interfere with sleep and make it harder to doze off.
Still, this doesn’t apply to everyone as every individual is different and late-day exercise isn’t a problem for everyone. That said, you may do some trial and error to see how working out affects your sleep. But, ensure you don’t make other changes that may affect sleep like increasing caffeine or alcohol intake, changing your diet, etc.
In other words, simply try working out at different times of the day and make notes on how fast you fell asleep and how well your sleep was. By doing so, you will determine the best time to work out without sacrificing your sleep.
How can Exercise Impede Sleep?
Now, if you’ve found out that exercise does actually stop you from having a good night’s sleep, you should understand why this happens. Indeed, exercise can activate an individual’s stress-responsive systems, especially strenuous exercise. This means that the body reacts as it is under stress and starts releasing two hormones – cortisol and adrenaline – which greatly affect sleep. Therefore, let’s have a closer look at how they can keep you awake at night.
- 1. Adrenaline
To start with adrenaline, every time you work out your body releases this hormone accompanied by another one called norepinephrine. Both these hormones elevate heart rate, blood circulation, muscle strength, sugar metabolism, and alertness, meaning that they help improve your physical performance while making it harder to relax and doze off. And, of course, the more you exercise the higher levels of these hormones you will have. Plus, although adrenaline levels go back to normal quite fast upon exercise, norepinephrine levels remain high for up to 2 days.
- 2. Cortisol
Moving on to cortisol, endurance exercise can also increase the levels of this hormone as it is in charge of helping boost blood glucose concentration so that your muscles have the energy needed to keep exercising and improve performance. But, cortisol is also considered one of the key hormones affecting the body’s natural sleep-wake cycle as it peaks about half an hour after you wake up and declines during the day. In other words, cortisol level is at the lowest before bedtime and exercising stimulates its release and thus impedes sleep.
Conclusion
To sum up, regular exercise is proven to be beneficial for both your physical and mental health. Working out can also improve your sleep. But unfortunately, you have to be careful with your exercise timing if you want to reap all the sleep benefits and avoid any reverse effects like not being able to fall asleep.
That said, try exercising earlier in the day to keep your adrenaline, norepinephrine, and cortisol levels in check. As a bonus tip, remember to drink plenty of water because staying well hydrated can help reduce the negative effects of these hormones on sleep.