Exercise is an important part of getting past insomnia. There are a few reasons for this. The first is that it actually tires you out, making your body want to crave sleep more. The second reason has to do with the hormones it actually affects.
Exercise works best at stress-induced insomnia. This stress causes your body to produce more of the stress hormone cortisol, which stresses you out, making it harder to sleep. Like a self-fulfilling prophecy, the lack of sleep you continue to get only makes you get stressed out more.
When you exercise, you will have an original increase in the stress hormones in your body. The good news is that within a few hours, these hormones will go back down and typically continue down below previous levels before exercise. This conclused that doing regular exercise a few hours before bedtime can help break the cycle of insomnia.
Another important thing to note is that your mind might not want to "shut up". It just keeps going & going and because of this, you just can't get any sleep. When you start to exercise, you'll end up putting this built up stress to work in the way of physical work. By the time you finish off your exercises, you don't have that energy to let your mind ramble on like it does.
The timing of this whole process is critical because we want to break the cycle of insomnia that seems to entrap most people. You'll have an increase in stresses due to exercise for the initial few hours. That's something that you can't avoid. You exercise, you get energy and feel awake. The idea is to time it when you expect those stress lows to occur, so you can increase your chances of success. I think the best time to aim for is 4hrs. Try exercises 4hrs before you plan to go to bed.
You also get the added benefit of the health, so it's something you should already be doing regardless of your insomnia. What we need to do now is find exercises that you like to do.
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