After a stressful day at work, you can’t wait to get home to your bed, but when you do, sleeping becomes a major task.

You’ve become dependent on pills like melatonin, so even when you try to get any sleep without them, if at all you will, you end up turning in bed for hours, and sometimes, this is only for a short period.

Research has shown that the average human needs at least 8 hours of good sleep as poor sleeping habits can affect your all-around performance.

You could stick to taking melatonin, but hopefully, you’ve come to realize that continuous intake of drugs isn’t great for your liver, especially since when your body grows more dependent, your dosage increases.

So what do you do?

While there are several natural remedies for poor sleep, in this article we’ll focus on how walking can help improve sleep.

This sounds strange, doesn’t it?

Because if stress from work could be one of the factors that contribute to your poor sleeping habit, isn’t walking only stressing out your body more?

That would be a fair argument if you were to think it, but here’s the thing; walking is more than a physical exercise, it’s mental, hence, yes, it can help improve sleep.

Your major question, how does walking improve sleep?

For years, researchers have tried to understand the relationship between being physically active and getting good sleep. Based on their research, only a few, yet conflicting results were obtained.

While some studies suggested that when people are physically active they tend to sleep poorly, others suggested that poor physical activity results in poor sleep and vice versa.

However, based on a current study in Boston that was aimed at increasing the daily and monthly steps of participants, results showed that participants who took daily walks reported sleeping better than those who walked monthly and those who walked monthly reported sleeping better on days they walked.

Causes of Poor Sleep

• Aging
• Excess use of stimulants such as caffeine, especially before bedtime
• Lack of exposure to sunlight
• Jet lag
• Late night dinners
• Sleeping a lot during daytime
• Stress
• Depression
• Noisy environment
• Medical conditions

How Does Walking Improve Sleep?

While there are several reasons why you’re not getting good sleep, we’ll focus on how walking can improve sleep quality by considering the following reasons:

– Depression

– Stress

– Late-night dinners

– Lack of exposure to sunlight

Walking as an antidepressant

Once you incorporate walking for at least 30 minutes into your daily routines, you’ll notice a significant change in your sleeping habit.

This is because when you walk, endorphins -a chemical that promotes a state of relaxation and pleasure are released. As endorphins are released, you begin to have increased feelings of well-being, self-esteem, and sometimes euphoria.

Therefore, whenever you’re in a bad mood or you’re depressed and find it difficult to sleep, taking a walk will help improve your mood so you can sleep well.

Walking as an anti stress

Whenever you feel stressed at work, take a timeout, take a 15-minute walk outdoors, and see how better you’ll feel afterward.

Taking a walk outside increases your oxygen level, making your blood more oxygenated, and resulting in a feeling of calmness. It also helps to listen to some type of soothing music when taking a walk to relieve stress.

Walking after late-night dinners

Sometimes eating late could lead to poor quality of sleep, because at that time, your body is supposed to be in rest mode, but instead, it’s busy metabolizing your food.

However, when you take a walk after your meal, it helps to speed up the rate of metabolism, as your body uses the calories you’ve consumed as energy to keep you going.

Walking promotes exposure to sunlight

Many underestimate the power of receiving sunlight daily, however, when you receive sunlight during the day, your body produces serotonin -the “feel good hormone”, which gets converted at night to melatonin – a hormone that controls the sleep cycle.

Therefore by taking walks during the day, you encourage your body to produce enough melatonin at night so you don’t have any need for pills.

Takeaway

Many factors affect your sleep quality, but when it comes to factors such as stress and depression, you may not need pills to help you sleep better, as by only taking a walk, you can improve your sleep quality.

Hey, check out this new sleep device that helps you enjoy a “snoreless” quality sleep VitalSleep.

VitalSleep is FDA-approved, free from latex, and recommended by doctors for snoring relief.

Sources

Walk to a Better Night of Sleep: Testing the Relationship Between Physical Activity and Sleep www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov

Want to Sleep Better? Walk For This Many Minutes Every Day, Say Expert. www.eatthis.com

You Might Also Like:

Can You Lose Belly Fat By Walking? https://wellbeingwithcatherine.health.blog/2023/02/02/can-you-lose-belly-fat-by-walking/

Role of Water in Weight Losshttps://wellbeingwithcatherine.health.blog/2023/01/31/role-of-water-in-weight-loss/

Does Intermittent Fasting Work?https://wellbeingwithcatherine.health.blog/2023/01/30/does-intermittent-fasting-work/

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