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Comment by verytrivial | Hacker News Reader

If you can, and haven't already, take up running/jogging/walking. I'd be a mental wreck without it and the quality of my sleep is inversly proportional to how regularly I'm running. No running means lying in bed for 60-90 minutes before sleep. Running means out-like-a-light in about 45 seconds. I might even be stressed about something but my brain in just like 'LOL no bye-bye.' This plus at least 10 mins of meditation at some point during the day, just sitting somewhere pleasant and stepping off the thought merry-go-round and internally looking the other way for a while.

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Regular, daily exercise in general is the key. I wouldn't recommend running as most people only have hard pavement to run on and it's too high impact. Brisk walking, cycling, swimming and weight training are all low impact and better. But I do think getting outside is a rather important part of this too. Even if I'm doing exercise, living a life between buildings is not good for my health.

I run 3x a week. I would like to every day, but my shins won’t allow me to.

Shin splints can be fixed. A good physiotherapist can tell you what's wrong.

Bad running form (over striding, low cadence), weak core and hips, weak glutes, pelvic tilt, bad desk setup, one body part overcompensating for another, and so on all lead to typical running injuries.

Do you mean just before bed, or in general during the day?

It's not recommended to do high intensity exercise right before bed. This can cause difficulty sleeping. Get the high intensity stuff done at least a couple of hours before bed.

"According to this study[1], morning exercise might be more helpful; there is no sign that evening exercise disrupts sleep, but it might not help as much either."

From https://lorienpsych.com/2021/01/02/insomnia/ which also has other advice

[1] https://sci-hub.st/https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/art...

Exercise very close to bed affects many (myself included) as it can take a little while for your increased circulation/elevated core temperature to return to normal. Otherwise a few hours before bed shouldn't be a problem.

One positive effect of morning exercise may sinply lie in the associated tendency towards increased exposure to natural (i.e. more intense) light in the morning hours [I don't have a quote at hand, but Prof. Andrew Huberman speaks about the effects of calibrating one's circadian rhythm by morning light exposure in his YouTube podcast.]

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