How yoga may help you sleep better at night

From wionews.com

By Ilma Athar Ali

Story highlights

A bedtime yoga routine improves sleep quality by reducing stress and anxiety. Techniques like deep breathing and restorative postures calm the nervous system. Studies show practising gentle yoga helps individuals sleep longer and wake up less during the night.

Many adults struggle with fragmented sleep or insomnia, often turning to medications for relief. However, health experts suggest a much more natural approach. Practising gentle yoga before bed calms the nervous system and prepares the body for rest. Scientific data shows that a consistent evening routine can significantly improve the duration and quality of your sleep.

Lowering stress and anxiety before bed

Modern medicine often focuses on treating insomnia symptoms rather than addressing the underlying causes, such as chronic stress. Yoga facilitates sleep by directly reducing stress, anxiety, and arousal, which are known causes of poor rest. A national survey reported that over 55 per cent of people who practice yoga found that it helped them get better sleep, while over 85 per cent said it helped reduce stress. The mindful breathing involved in the practice allows your brain to transition into a relaxed state, making it much easier to drift off.

                                                                              Photograph: (Wikimedia Commons)

Improving sleep duration and quality

Committing to an evening routine offers long-term benefits over taking sleep medications. A study monitoring a 30-minute evening breathing and meditation practice found that, after eight weeks, participants slept an average of 36 minutes longer each night. The researchers also noted that participants woke up less frequently during the night, improving their overall sleep quality by 11 per cent. According to recent findings by Johns Hopkins Medicine, practising yoga daily can reduce insomnia, helping individuals get into the right mindset to fall asleep and stay asleep.

3 simple postures for better rest

You do not need to be flexible or engage in complicated movements to see results. Hatha or restorative yoga styles are best for pre-sleep routines. Try these three basic movements before getting into bed:

Legs up the wall (Viparita Karani): Lie flat on your back and rest your extended legs straight up against a wall. This simple pose helps recirculate your blood flow. Hold the pose and breathe deeply for one or two minutes.

Child's pose (Balasana): Kneel on the floor, bring your big toes together, and sink your torso onto your thighs. This posture releases shoulder tension and provides a sense of calm and stability.

Corpse pose (Savasana): Lie completely flat on your back with your arms and legs straight. Focus entirely on taking slow, even breaths until you feel completely relaxed from head to toe.

Taking drugs to help you sleep is not a reliable long-term solution. By dedicating a few minutes to mindful breathing and restorative poses, you train your mind and body to relax naturally. This gentle evening habit ensures you wake up feeling genuinely rested and prepared for the day ahead.

https://www.wionews.com/health-and-wellness/how-yoga-may-help-you-sleep-better-at-night-1786902371854

8 facts about sleep you probably didn’t know and why shut-eye affects every aspect of life

From scmp.com

From the science behind sleep paralysis to lucid dreams and memory making, experts help us understand little-known but vital aspects of sleep 

Little was known about sleep until modern science revolutionised our understanding. It turns out that what happens while you are unconscious dictates almost every aspect of your waking health, mood and brainpower.

While knowing how to get better sleep and why you need it is vital, the nocturnal world holds some interesting secrets. Here we look at eight things you probably did not know about sleep.

1. Testy times

If young men don’t get enough sleep, they have a level of testosterone that is equivalent to that of someone 10 years older, says British neuroscientist and renowned sleep expert Matthew Walker. That is because a big chunk of testosterone release happens while sleeping. Low testosterone levels affect energy levels and mood – and sperm production.

In women, too little sleep changes the way reproductive hormones are regulated, although the science is more complicated than a simple “less sleep equals less oestrogen” formula. They may experience a breakdown in the delicate monthly timing system that keeps their reproductive health and moods stable. Those who get fewer than six hours of sleep can see up to a 20 per cent reduction in ovulation-inducing hormones.

Lack of sleep disrupts our metabolic systems quickly. Getting only five hours of sleep for four nights in a row can negatively affect blood sugar levels, reducing insulin sensitivity to the extent that one could be classified as pre-diabetic, Walker says.

The immune system is also affected: restricting a healthy person to just four hours of sleep for a single night results in an alarming 70 per cent drop in the activity of natural killer cells – cytotoxic white blood cells that act as the immune system’s first line of defence.

2. Justice for owls

Some sleep scientists feel that modern society discriminates against those whose circadian rhythms – or internal clocks – make them night owls rather than larks who are up at the crack of dawn and go to bed early in the evening.

Since the Industrial Revolution in the 18th and 19th centuries, work has started early, and those who find it difficult to be in top form in the morning are looked down upon. This is considered unfair, as it is not possible to change your circadian rhythm.

A change in perception could be positive for businesses, Dr Stefan Volk of the University of Sydney Business School told this writer in a 2018 interview. Volk’s paper, “Chronotype Diversity in Teams: Toward a Theory of Team Energetic Asynchrony”, published in the Academy of Management Review, argued it would be productive to introduce a shift system so larks start work early and night owls start later, enabling everyone to work at their peak capacity.

Sadly for night owls, that is not on the horizon.

3. Memory making

Sleep is essential for forming memories; in deep sleep, bursts of activity in the hippocampus, which stores short-term memories, send information to the cortex, which stores long-term memories. Photo: Dreamstime/TNS

An important function of sleep is to consolidate memory; it turns short-term memory into long-term memory and stabilises new memories so that they stick.

In deep sleep, bursts of activity in the hippocampus, which stores short-term memories, send information to the cortex, which stores long-term memories.

The brain also cross-indexes memories and links them together during sleep, and adds new information gained in the day to what we already know by replaying recent experiences.

After a good night’s sleep, your memories will seem clearer and more coherent.

Sleep also consolidates learning by connecting facts into knowledge, notes Dr Barbara Oakley, a professor of engineering at Oakland University in Rochester, in the US state of Michigan, in her course “Learning How To Learn” on the online learning platform Coursera.

That is why a good night’s sleep before an exam is better than staying up all night cramming. Simply reading over your notes before going to sleep can be beneficial.

4. Connecting with the past

Dreams play an important part in our mental well-being. Sigmund Freud, the founder of psychoanalysis, believed the cause of a patient’s neurosis – usually a repressed traumatic childhood experience – could be determined by analysing their dreams.

That idea has generally been discredited, but sleep researchers still think dreams play a big role in our state of mind, changing our emotional relationship with our memories in a way that makes us feel better about them when we wake up.

The late sleep researcher and psychologist Rosalind Cartwright – known as the “queen of dreams” – said dreams are an important part of grieving and can take away the pain associated with the memory of a loss.

Through dreaming, we can gradually come to think of a deceased loved one more objectively, without the pain that comes with grief.

The same is true when something shocks us. If we see someone injured, or worse, in an accident or as the victim of a violent crime, dreaming will help us eventually be able to replay the event in our minds without the accompanying horror we felt when it occurred.

5. Dreams as therapy

The brain knows it is good for you to wake up in a calm mood, and uses dreaming to achieve that goal – dreams act as a kind of internal therapy.

“When all goes well, we awake refreshed with a modified strategy for guiding our behaviour,” wrote Cartwright in her 2010 book, The Twenty-four Hour Mind: The Role of Sleep and Dreaming in Our Emotional Lives.

Dreams help the mind work through the emotional business of the day, away from the stress of waking life.

6. Fright night

During the transition between wakefulness and sleep, some people see ghosts and demons – or think they see them. While falling asleep, some become paralysed and sense an evil or macabre intruder in the room watching them.

Sometimes things get physical, and there are reports of women feeling like they are being sexually assaulted by a strange creature – an “incubus”, as they are called in mythology – while being physically unable to flee.

But as “anomalistic psychologist” Professor Chris French explains in his 2024 book The Science of Weird S***, there is nothing supernatural in play; it is a well-documented scientific phenomenon called sleep paralysis.

This occurs when the mind is awake but the body is sleeping. Dreams occur mainly in REM (rapid eye movement) sleep, when the body is paralysed to stop the sleeper physically acting out those dreams – a state that is called REM atonia.

Due to a biological glitch, the paralysis can occur while the mind is awake.

Psychologist Chris French explains the science of sleep paralysis in his book The Science of Weird S***. Photo: gold.ac.uk

Researchers suggest the demons appear because we have evolved to subconsciously monitor the outside world for threats at all times while we are awake. Our brain is still focused on this task during sleep paralysis, but it becomes confused by the situation and invents the demons.

French says that few doctors are aware of sleep paralysis, and many people suffer unnecessarily because they think they are going mad – or really seeing evil intruders.

7. Living the dream

It is possible to control your dreams and influence their direction. This is called “lucid dreaming”, a term coined by Dutch psychiatrist Frederik van Eeden in 1913 in the journal Proceedings of the Society for Psychical Research.

The ability comes naturally to some people, although others have to practise by keeping dream journals to train the brain. Essentially, sleepers become aware they are dreaming, and some then consciously take control of the dream.

As with sleep paralysis, it is believed to be made possible by the interplay between REM sleep and wakefulness, although scientists are still figuring out how that works.

Some enjoy lucid dreaming and find it useful in inspiring creativity. It may even have been a factor in The Beatles’ classic song “Yesterday”. Paul McCartney is reported to have composed the melody for it after hearing it in a dream. Upon waking, he immediately played the tune on a piano next to his bed to capture it before it faded.

8. Moving for better sleep

Research suggests that tai chi and yoga can help you sleep and stay asleep for longer.

Tai chi practitioners can extend their nightly sleep by more than 50 minutes and can fall asleep 25 minutes faster than non-practitioners, according to a study published in BMJ Evidence-Based Medicine.

Yoga can add up to two hours of sleep each night and reduce the number of times you wake up.

In a similar vein, a study from the University of Hong Kong found that tai chi may provide as much relief as talk therapy does for those suffering from insomnia. 

The next time you are tempted to stay up a little later when it is time to turn in, remember that sleep is much more than a passive break from reality. It is an active, dynamic state in which our minds heal, memories lock in and bodies reset.

https://www.scmp.com/lifestyle/health-wellness/article/3359982/8-facts-about-sleep-you-probably-didnt-know-and-why-shut-eye-affects-every-aspect-life

Insomnia: according to Harvard, this yoga ritual could replace sleeping pills

From futura-sciences.com

People with chronic insomnia lie awake cycling through the same nightly bind: another hour staring at the ceiling, or another pill. Harvard Medical School research points to a third option hiding in plain sight 

Two decades of clinical trials

At Harvard Medical School, Dr. Sat Bir Singh Khalsa has spent more than two decades running clinical trials, where he tests yoga as a treatment for sleep disorders. Through his role as Director of Yoga Research at the Kundalini Research Institute, he conducts this work within the Division of Sleep and Circadian Disorders at Brigham and Women’s Hospital — one of the most rigorous sleep research programs in the country.

His 2021 randomized controlled trial, published in the Journal of Clinical Sleep Medicine, tested an eight week Kundalini yoga program against an active sleep hygiene comparison in adults with chronic sleep onset insomnia. Yoga produced measurable improvements in sleep efficiency, total sleep time, and insomnia severity. Those gains held at a six month follow-up.

Building on that success, a 2004 study published in Applied Psychophysiology and Biofeedback tracked chronic insomnia patients through an eight-week daily yoga program that they learned in a single session and then practiced independently at home. Across every key measure, the results were consistent: sleep efficiency improved, total sleep time increased, and participants fell asleep faster.

Why yoga targets insomnia differently

Most sleep medications suppress the nervous system to induce unconsciousness. Yoga works through a different mechanism entirely. Chronic insomnia involves elevated cognitive and physiological arousal. Under chronic stress, cortisol and adrenaline keep the nervous system primed for action even as the body strains to stand down.

Yoga addresses that arousal directly. Controlled breathing activates the parasympathetic nervous system, lowering heart rate and reducing cortisol. Held postures build body awareness and interrupt the ruminative thought patterns that delay sleep onset. Where most sleep interventions mask symptoms, Khalsa’s approach targets the underlying causes and the trial results reflected that. Improvements persisted for six months after the intervention ended.

In separate school based research, Khalsa found that adolescents who practiced yoga regularly showed improvements in sleep onset and measurable reductions in stress related symptoms, evidence that the physiological effects extend across age groups, not just clinical insomnia populations.

The technique researchers highlight

© Freepik

Among the specific practices Khalsa’s protocols use, pranayama — controlled breathing — consistently appears as a core component. The technique involves deliberate regulation of breath rate and depth, and in doing so directly influences the autonomic nervous system. In clinical settings, participants learned it in a single session and then practiced independently at home.

Beyond breathwork, bridge pose — a gentle backbend performed lying down — features in several Kundalini yoga sleep protocols. The posture encourages diaphragmatic breathing and parasympathetic activation, the physiological state the body needs to transition into sleep.

Where the evidence stops

Khalsa’s trials compared yoga to sleep hygiene and relaxation practices, not to pharmaceutical sleep aids directly. As a result, the claim that yoga outperforms sleeping pills is not supported by his published work. What the research does establish, however, is that a self-administered, low cost yoga practice produces clinically meaningful improvements in chronic insomnia that persist over time, without the dependency risks or next day cognitive effects associated with sedative hypnotics.

Cognitive behavioural therapy for insomnia remains the clinical standard of care. Yet Khalsa pairs yoga with CBT in several protocols, where the two approaches reinforce each other, yoga reducing physiological arousal while CBT targets the thought patterns that sustain it.

Participants learned the practice in a single session, then followed it daily for eight weeks, and still showed improvements six months after the trial ended. A sedative addresses one night. A practice that rewires the nervous system’s response to sleep addresses every night that follows.

https://www.futura-sciences.com/en/insomnia-according-to-harvard-this-yoga-ritual-could-replace-sleeping-pills_28199/

Neither walking nor lifting weights—this exercise is the one that most improves sleep

From eladelantado.com

Remember when you were a child, playing all day long, and at the end of the day, you would take a bath, put on your pyjamas, and go to bed to sleep like a log? Those times were much simpler… At least when it came to falling asleep. But we reach adulthood, and our minds race with daily responsibilities.

Insomnia is one of the greatest plagues afflicting modern humans. We can spend hours tossing and turning in bed, staring at the ceiling, unable to fall asleep. Such is the urgent need to fall into the arms of Morpheus that taking melatonin just before bedtime has become normal. 

                                                        Neither walking nor lifting weights—this exercise is the one that most improves sleep 

If you don’t want to give up and start taking medication on a regular basis, there are still ways to channel all our energy into getting tired and reaching bedtime ready to rest as soon as we lay our heads on the pillow.

Best of all, there’s no need to start intense exercise or even sign up for an expensive gym membership.

Improving sleep

To perform this exercise, all we need to do is roll out a yoga mat. Then, we lie down and let ourselves be carried away by our breathing. Although it may seem silly, a meta-analysis of 30 randomized controlled trials revealed that regular high-intensity yoga is associated with improved sleep.

Yoga was found to be more effective than walking, resistance training, combined exercise, aerobic exercise, or even traditional Chinese exercises such as Tai Chi. These trials were conducted in more than a dozen countries and involved 2,500 participants of all ages who had suffered from sleep disorders.

The group of researchers from Harbin Sport University in China soon hit upon the key: it seems that high-intensity yoga, done twice a week in 30-minute sessions, was the best antidote to sleep deprivation. Close behind in effectiveness was walking. Going for a walk every day. Positive results in just eight to 10 weeks.

However, when attempts have been made to replicate the findings, they have been somewhat inconsistent; a 2025 meta-analysis found that aerobic exercise and moderate-intensity exercise three times a week was the most effective way to improve sleep quality in people with chronic insomnia.

However, yoga continued to have more significant effects on sleep outcomes. This is because yoga is difficult to classify as aerobic or anaerobic, as its intensity can vary widely depending on the technique used. What we can be sure of is that any type of daily exercise will make it easier to fall asleep.

Yoga benefits

Yoga can not only increase your heart rate and help strengthen your muscles, but it can also regulate your breathing. Actively controlling your breathing can activate the parasympathetic nervous system, which is actively involved in rest and digestion. Other studies even suggest that yoga regulates brain wave activity patterns, which could promote deeper sleep.

Something we don’t often consider is the quality of our sleep. External factors such as random as alcohol consumption or heavy dinners just before bedtime can seriously worsen the quality of our sleep. However, one of the biggest culprits of insomnia in the West is smartphones. It has been proven that looking at screens that emit blue light disrupts our circadian cycle, as they inhibit the organized secretion of melatonin.

If you feel like you can’t fall asleep at night, we recommend that you stop looking at your phone at least an hour before going to bed. By being alone with our own thoughts, we can process all the emotions we have been repressing during the day.

In addition, our brain will be able to rest from all the doomscrolling we are doing on apps that have been psychologically designed to capture your attention, even when you are exhausted and just want to sleep.

https://eladelantado.com/en/exercise-improves-sleep/