I thought exercise was supposed to help me sleep

March 23, 2023 5:52 AM

I never have trouble falling asleep, but staying asleep can be difficult for me. Especially after I exercise, I’m very likely to wake up between 2 and 4am and not be able to get back to sleep. How can exercise make sleep worse instead of better? How do you exercise if it ruins your sleep?

It doesn’t seem to matter if I exercise in the morning or afternoon. And it doesn’t seem to matter if I work out hard enough to sweat and feel a little sore the next day or if I just get an hour of light cardio in puttering around my garden - anything beyond about a half hour walk feels fine but leaves me sleepless.

This isn’t recent - it’s been going on for years. It feels like exercise is doing me more harm than good at this point because it’s ruining my sleep 2-3 days/week.

Exercise isn’t solely to blame for my sleep issues - I also have trouble staying asleep the week before my period and have chronic migraine where I get woken up sometimes by attacks - but it is very clearly worsening my sleep problems.

posted by congen to Health & Fitness (12 answers total)

There are a lot of factors that oculd be at play here, but I'll mention a couple things that are relevant to my little niche in the research world. It's helpful to consider wakefulness/sleep debt as a sort of bucket that you fill. If exercise is pushing you over the edge of the bucket so your wakefulness is spilling out onto your usual sleep cycle, consider what else might be filling up the bucket. If you have any stimulants or steroid/hormone axis meds in your daily routine, that's useful knowledge (pharmaceutical and otherwise, including caffeine and theobromine). There's almost always at least one culprit other than exercise in the mix. To go deeper into the pharma weeds, there's a significant discussion about sleep impacts of all manner of drugs that are commonly prescribed, and even those available OTC. Outside of these sort of extraneous inputs, there's also the sum total of what your headspace is like as a background. Are you overworked, stressed, anxious, rushed, etc.? THese are all worth considering holistically, because a direct causal relationship that begins with exercise and ends with insomnia or sleep dispruption is not the most common thing (with a big exeption for sleplessness caused by pain, soreness, and the physiological excitement that follows big expenditures of mental and physical energy).

ANother question to consider in conjunction with your doctor: do sleep aids change the situation? Whether your answer is yes or no that data is instructive to anyone making a diagnostic evaluation of your system. If you haven't tried a sleep aid, this might be a useful next step when you next speak with your doc. I had a bout of insomnia (for the first time in my life!) back in 2018-2019 and it was a surreal, horrible experience. The net result was that I came off caffeine (for almost two years!*), shifted my sleep/wake schedule (becoming an early to be, early to rise person for the first time ever), and exercising early while fasted. It's funny how idiosyncratically a lot of these features can be, but I'm confident you can figure out some likely contributing factors that might be good to discuss with someone who knows your medical history. Good luck!

*I very cautiously started having caffeine again after those two years and am happy to report that it was no longer the culprit it had been when other things were filling up my wakefulness bucket.
posted by late afternoon dreaming hotel at 6:56 AM on March 23, 2023 [2 favorites]

Best answer: If you have a uterus, this may be a sign of perimenopause, which can start as early as your 30s. You can get your hormone levels checked and get on low dose HRT to resolve this if that's the case.

You could also start taking ashwaganda in the evenings, along with magnesium, and a B complex.

The 3 am waking is generally triggered by a cortisol spike, which is also a way our bodies regulate blood sugar. You may need to eat a small protein rich snack before bed to keep your blood sugar high enough through the night.
posted by ananci at 7:00 AM on March 23, 2023 [5 favorites]

Response by poster: Lots of good advice here, but I probably should have mentioned that I cut out caffeine many years ago with the exception of a very occasional one square of dark chocolate whose consumption is uncorrelated with my sleep issues.
posted by congen at 7:03 AM on March 23, 2023

Do you only exercise outdoors? Do you have trouble sleeping after spending time outdoors that is not related to exercise? I ask, because once upon a time I was having trouble sleeping and my doctor asked if I have allergies (to outdoors things like pollen, etc.). I do, and so he prescribed a steroid nasal spray. When I began using it, I began to sleep well. That doctor was a genius.
posted by SageTrail at 7:21 AM on March 23, 2023 [1 favorite]

You didn’t mention this specifically as a problem, but I get low level muscle soreness from exercise that interferes with my sleep. Not enough that it bothers me at all awake, but it seems to make ordinary tossing and turning enough to wake me up. For me, taking an ibuprofen before bed helps a lot.
posted by LizardBreath at 7:24 AM on March 23, 2023 [1 favorite]

Best answer: Like you, rather than calming me down exercise (at any time of day) instead revs me up and can interfere with sleep. Hard workouts are particularly notorious for this, but, like you nearly any workout will do it. Bonus, I have chronic insomnia and migraines, and I can't take daytime naps. Upshot for me is that, post-exercise, my heart rate tends to stay elevated for at least 18 hours; the harder the workout, the more elevated.

Since I love working out and I'm not going to stop, to mitigate these effects, I do the following: 1) always use a roller during cool down and shower with magnesium gel after the workout, 2) take magnesium after the workout and again before bedtime (around 11pm-11:30pm), 3) make certain to do slow, steady cardio several times during the week (high intensity workouts seem to exacerbate the problem; 1+ hour of low intensity workouts mitigate it), 4) practice 4-7-8 breathing, and 5) avoid hard workouts on the days that I absolutely have to sleep (e.g., because of next-day appointments).

It's not perfect, but it alleviates the worst of the problem.

I'm curious what other folks have tried.
posted by skye.dancer at 7:25 AM on March 23, 2023 [1 favorite]

Unless you are a pro athelete, working out hard hours a day, regular exercise will not help you sleep.

A normal sleep schedule, you have to keep it even on the weekends, and 30 minutes of mindless relaxing time (no screens) before bed will help more.
posted by The_Vegetables at 7:25 AM on March 23, 2023

Hard workouts have done this to me, too. I’m a sweaty dude and exercising in cold, warm or hot weather produces buckets of sweat. Over the years, I’ve come to learn it’s not just salt you lose but magnesium and other minerals. You can start with looking at the most common things we sweat, and here’s an article that discusses some common electrolyte stores we lose.

Personally, I think starting with dietary items to build those stores is a better place to start. Supplements have a lot of potential side effects if they get out of whack. They should be an option if diet doesn’t work but not the first go around. So track your foods and increase some things that would help keep those stores full.

Breathing exercises can help. I use Square Breathing but 4-7-8 is more for sleep, I believe.

Journaling as you work to improve this might not be a bad idea, too, so you can track what is working while giving it time to see results.
posted by glaucon at 7:44 AM on March 23, 2023 [1 favorite]

Any chance your blood sugar is dropping over night? Maybe you need to eat more on the workout days? I find if I eat too few calories in a day I wake up between 2-4 am wide awake. I was tracking my food intake for allergy/food sensitivity issues and found a correlation between my low calorie days and my early morning (2-4am) wakefulness. I started making sure I hit my minimum calories and the early morning wakeups have stopped. Apparently if your blood sugar drops low through the night your body will release some hormones to bring your blood sugar back up but that rush of hormones can wake you up.
posted by CleverClover at 8:09 AM on March 23, 2023 [3 favorites]

Hydration and nutrition. You probably need to eat more, better, and drink more and/or replenish electrolites after your workout. Bonus overheating if you’re muscles are hot.

Unless you are a pro athelete, working out hard hours a day, regular exercise will not help you sleep.


Respectfully disagree. Or rather, a lack of exercise will cause trouble sleeping, and a decent workout as part of a regular routine will have you sleeping like a baby. But once you are adapted to it. When you are first starting out, yeah it’s gonna rev you up a bit.
posted by [insert clever name here] at 8:37 AM on March 23, 2023 [1 favorite]

I have interrupted sleep even when I fall asleep promptly. It helps if I get up and just go pee even if it's not at all urgent. Then I make sure I'm warm/ cool enough, and sometimes that's enough. Then reading helps, esp. non-fiction or non-thrilling fiction. Generally speaking, exercise helps by improving my overall well-being and increasing oxygen. Learn to do the relaxation exercise where you consciously relax each part of your body, starting at your toes. Inhale calm, release tension as you exhale. If you're too mentally stimulated, there are meditative podcasts, and calm music.

If I'm stressed and my mind is too busy replaying problems, a tiny dose of edible weed helps. Assess your body to see if you have aches from exercise; edibles can help with that, as well. I typically crush a candy and take a fragment, though not after 3 am if I want to be alert by 8 or 9.
posted by theora55 at 11:10 AM on March 23, 2023

Do you mostly exercise outside? Could this perhaps be linked to sunlight exposure instead of just exertion?

If I am indoors for most of the day, not getting sunlight and/or merely getting artificial light (especially a problem in winter) and then go out for a walk and only get my sunlight right at the end of the day, this is a confusing wakefulness signal to my body and I will wake up sometime between 2 AM and 4 AM. The key isn't to avoid sunlight in the evening -- more sunlight is better! -- but to increase sunlight exposure during the day, preferably as early in the morning as possible. Maybe through lunchtime exercise or a SAD lamp upon waking. Or even just by using brighter indoor lighting in the morning.
posted by fire, water, earth, air at 5:57 AM on March 24, 2023 [1 favorite]