Can Exercise Help Reduce Insomnia?

Summary: Yes, exercise can help reduce insomnia. While standard therapies for insomnia include medication and therapy, a new study examines the impact of various types of exercise on sleep quality and insomnia.

Key Points:

• Insomnia and related sleep deprivation can cause serious impairment in various essential life functions.
• Chronic insomnia and long-term sleep deprivation increase the negative consequences of sleep loss, which can escalate in severity over time.
• Exercise is a common way to help reduce insomnia, but few studies identify which types of exercise help reduce insomnia most effectively.

Sleep, Insomnia, and Health

In 2025, a group of scientists based in the United Kingdom (U.K.) designed a study called “Effects Of Various Exercise Interventions in Insomnia Patients: A Systematic Review and Network Meta-Analysis” with the following objective:

“To compare the effectiveness of different exercise interventions in improving sleep quality and alleviating insomnia severity among patients with insomnia.”

This research effort is part of a movement over the past ten years to explore the causes and effects of recent increases in mental health problems worldwide. According to well-respected sources like the World Health Organization (WHO), the National Institutes of Health (NIH), and the Centers for Disease Control (CDC), rates of mental health disorders such as anxiety and depression are on the rise worldwide.

Research on mental health disorders such as insomnia – associated with a wide variety of mental health issues – can help us provide patients with the support they need to reduce or remove the contribution of sleep problems such as insomnia to general mental health problems. From a big-picture perspective, improving sleep is a core component in restoring positive mental health and achieving practical treatment goals and objectives.

Like eating a healthy diet, learning stress management techniques, and getting enough exercise and activity every day, getting enough quality sleep is part of the solid foundation we all need for optimal health and wellness. That’s why insomnia is a problem: it disrupts a key component of both physical and mental health.

What is Insomnia?

Experts on sleep and mental health define insomnia as follows:

“Insomnia is characterized by primary symptoms of difficulty falling, difficulty staying asleep, early awakening with inability to fall back asleep, and/or a sensation that sleep is neither restorative nor refreshing.”

To receive a clinical diagnosis of insomnia, a person must meet the above criteria, and must report the following features:

1. Sleep problems/insomnia symptoms occur at least three (3) nights a week for three (3) consecutive months.
2. Patient must have adequate opportunity to sleep.
3. Sleep problems/insomnia symptoms cannot be explained by another disorder, medication, or substance use.
4. Sleep problems must cause significant distress or impairment in one or more important areas of life functioning:
   • Social activity
   • Work performance/ability
   • Educational/academic performance/achievement
   • Family responsibility

That’s what insomnia is, according to the experts. It’s more than one bad night of sleep, or a week with one or two nights of tossing and turning: it’s the accumulation of poor or disrupted sleep over time, which causes problems during waking hours.

The Negative Consequences of Insomnia

The negative consequences of insomnia are primarily the result of sleep deprivation. According to the Journal of Clinical Sleep Medicine (JCSM), long-term insomnia and chronic sleep deprivation are associated with the following physical outcomes:

• Heart disease
• Kidney disease
• High blood pressure
• Diabetes
• Stroke
• Obesity

In addition, studies show that chronic insomnia and long-term sleep deprivation are associated with the presence of the following mental health disorders:

• Depression (MDD)
• Anxiety (GAD)
• Attention-deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD)
• Schizophrenia
• Psychosis

The consequences of insufficient sleep – whether associated with insomnia or sleep deprivation from another cause – include increased risk of a wide range of accidental injury in children, teens, and adults. The National Institutes of Health (NIH), warn that sleep deficiency frequently plays a role in fatal traffic accidents and significant tragic events such as nuclear reactor meltdowns, incidents with large ships, and plane crashes.

The Prevalence of Insomnia

A recent meta-analysis and review conducted to reevaluate the prevalence of clinical insomnia among adults worldwide called “The Prevalence of Insomnia Disorder in the General Population: A Meta‐Analysis” shows the following:

• Worldwide: 12.4%
• Europe 9.9%
• North America 16.2%
• Oceania 19.2%

Various studies estimate the prevalence of insomnia among adults in the U.S. at around 14 percent. However, the Centers for Disease Control (CDC) indicates that roughly 37 percent of adults don’t get the 7-8 hours of sleep every night necessary for optimal physical and mental health. While not getting enough sleep occasionally is not the same thing as insomnia or sleep deprivation, it can lead to both, and short-term lack of sleep is associated anger, irritability, and low mood, as well as with short-term deficits in cognitive function, memory, school/work performance, and decision-making.

That’s why it’s important for everyone – including people with no history of serious mental health issues – to understand what kind of exercise can help reduce insomnia. To that end, let’s take a look at the study we introduce above and answer the question we pose in the title of this article: Can Exercise Help Reduce Insomnia?

The Study: Various Types of Exercise Compared to Treatment as Usual

To learn whether exercise can reduce insomnia, researchers collected data from results from more than 20 peer-reviewed studies with information on over 1,000 participants diagnosed with insomnia. The overall study included over a dozen various types of exercise to help reduce insomnia.

Among the dozen types of exercise analyzed, the researchers focused on the following exercise modalities:

• Weight training
• Basic aerobic exercises/workouts
• Aerobic workouts combined with psychotherapy
• Aerobic workouts combined with weight training
• Walking
• Jogging
• Yoga
• Tai chi

With well-established sleep metrics such as the Pittsburgh Sleep Quality Index (PSQI), Insomnia Severity Index (ISI), sleep journals, polysomnography and actigraphy, researchers measured the following sleep variables:

• Total sleep time (TST): accumulated sleep per night
• Sleep efficiency (SE): ratio of sleeping time/total time in bed
• Wake after sleep onset (WASO): waking up and not being able to fall back asleep right away
• Sleep onset latency (SOL): time it takes to fall asleep

The researchers compared the impact of exercise on these metrics against the following modalities, which included a mix of treatment-as-usual and alternative approaches:

• Standard sleep hygiene
• Cognitive behavioral therapy (CBT)
• Acupuncture
• Massage
• Ayurveda (traditional eastern healing method)
• No treatment

Here’s what they found.

Impact of Exercise on Insomnia: Outcomes

• Total sleep time (TST):
  • Yoga showed greatest increases in TST – over an hour and a half, on average
  • Tai chi showed the second greatest increases in TST – almost an hour, on average
• Sleep efficiency (SE)
  • Yoga had the greatest effect on sleep efficiency
  • Tai chi had the second greatest effect on sleep quality
• Wake after sleep onset (WASO)
  • Yoga showed greatest reductions in waking after sleeping, with close to 60 minutes improvement, on average
  • Tai chi showed the second greatest reduction in waking after sleeping, with close to 40 minutes improvement, on average
• Sleep onset latency (SOL)
  • Yoga showed the greatest reductions in time to sleep, reducing sleep latency by half an hour
  • Tai chi showed the second greatest reductions in time to sleep, reducing sleep latency by half an hour

Additional findings. Compared to standard sleep hygiene, cognitive behavioral therapy (CBT), acupuncture, massage, and Ayurveda:

• Tai chi showed the most significant improvements across all sleep metrics, improvements which persisted for two years after the beginning of the study.
• After yoga and tai chi, walking/jogging showed significant overall reductions for insomnia severity

We’ll discuss these results below.

Activities That Lead to Real Rest: Exercise That Can Help Reduce Insomnia Doesn’t Need to Be Intense

The most notable takeaway from this study, from our perspective, is that the exercise modalities that promoted mindfulness, stress reduction, and relaxation outperformed the more vigorous forms of exercise, such as weight training and aerobic workouts.

Here’s what that means to us:

The way exercise can help reduce insomnia is not by getting you so exhausted you pass out, but rather, it’s about reducing stress and increasing relaxation enough to allow you to fall asleep.

The fact that exercise – specifically very lo-cost exercise like yoga and tai chi – outperformed standard treatments may mean it’s time to elevate these methods from complementary supports to first-line treatments for insomnia. While there is some initial cost, once a person learns yoga and/or tai chi, and establishes a regular, consistent practice, the skills are theirs for the rest of their lives: all they have to do is practice them.