Question: Exercise Yourself to Sleep According to the UC Davis Health Journal (November-December 1997, p. 8), older adults constitute only 12% of the population but receive almost 40% of the sedatives prescribed. The purpose of this randomized experiment was to see if regular exercise could help reduce sleep difficulties in older adults. The 43 participants were sedentary volunteers between the ages of 50 and 76 with moderate sleep problems but no heart disease. They were randomly assigned either to participate in a moderate community-based exercise program four times a week for 16 weeks or continue to be sedentary. For ethical reasons, the control group was admitted to the program when the experiment was complete. The results were striking.
The exercise group fell asleep an average of 11 minutes faster and slept an average of 42 minutes longer than the control group. Note that this could not be a double-blind experiment because participants obviously knew whether they were exercising. Because sleep patterns were selfreported, there could have been a tendency to err in reporting, in the direction desired by the experimenters. However, this is an example of a well-designed experiment, given the practical constraints, and, as the authors conclude, it does allow the finding that "older adults with moderate sleep complaints can improve self-rated sleep quality by initiating a regular, moderate-intensity exercise program" (p. 32).