Going on holiday has countless advantages. You’re less stressed, you get to see new cultures, you get to spend some much needed quality time with your loved ones and you step out of your comfort zone. But no matter all those upsides, there’s also one big downside of leaving your home and going on a vacation. Because if we’re totally honest, more often than not, we actually sleep way worse when we’re away than when we’re at home. A bad mattress, noises which you don’t recognise and a lack of blackout curtains are often to blame.
That’s a shame really, because a bad night (or a couple of them) can quickly take over your whole day. It makes you less enthused about what you’ll be doing, it gives you less energy and it’s not great overall. Yet there might be something you can do about that. Of course we all know it helps to be tired in order to sleep well at night but a new study has now revealed how you can make sure to be sleepy enough.
Melatonin production
The study was carried out by a team of researchers from the Psychology Department at Brandeis University in the United States and published in Sleep Health. According to the scientists, upping your daily number of steps by about 2.000 could be the key to sleeping better at night. Whether you take these steps outside or inside doesn’t really matter, as a part of the volunteers implicated in the study even got to their stepping count by doing household chores.
All in all, the more steps the volunteers took on a day, the better they self-rated their sleep. And the same goes for the time they spent moving: the more, the better. On average, the people involved in the study took 7.000 steps a day during the month they were analysed. Not that much and even those walking less reported to sleep better, as long as they walked more than they would usually have.
As to why the participants slept better, the researchers haven’t found the answer just yet. However, as an early morning walk can help regulate your circadian rhythm by stopping your melatonin production after waking, it shouldn’t come as a surprise that this also helps to sleep better at night.
