Rescue Your Workout from Sleep Deprivation via Meditation

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As a software engineer, I used to get paged for my service at night.

If I'm lucky, it's a low impact outage that I can mitigate immediately.

But sometimes I have to escalate, work with others for hours, and eventually hand off the incident at the end of my shift at midnight.

Then when I wake up, I would have to make a tough choice.

Do I still want to go to the gym when I am sleep deprived?

At the time I pushed through my feeling of grogginess, went to the gym and usually ended up feeling better.

Now I learned that scientific studies show that exercising actually helps offset the negative effects of sleep deprivation on brain performance and health.

That means improved reaction times, better sustained attention, faster visual scanning speed and reduced anxiety.

However, the exercise should not be too intense because that could drive the immune system down and make the body more vulnerable to infections.

And I would not attempt heavy lifting that also requires coordinated movement.

In fact it's easier to get injured while sleep deprived. Studies show that the correlation between sleep deprivation and acute injury is a strong one.

Also, just because moderate exercise helps offset the negative effects of poor sleep, it would not be wise to use exercise as a way to compensate for frequent sleep loss.

To sum it up, if you had one night of poor sleep, you will highly likely to benefit from some moderate exercise.

Don't go for a squatting PR.

Work on your perfecting lifting techniques with slightly lower weights.

And if you are chronically losing sleep because your service pages you every night, you should think about switching teams!

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