Exercise can reduce stress & improve sleep – particularly for women with breast cancer

(Len De Nys, Anna Catriona Whittaker/ The Conversation) –– When you’re suffering from stress, it can affect almost every aspect of your life – even down to how well you sleep at night. While it’s normal to experience stress over things every now and again, if it continues to affect your sleep in the long-term it can lead to poorer quality sleep and even insomnia.

This may, in turn, lead to other health problems, such as depression, cancer relapse and early death.

But our recent review suggests that physical activity may be key to improving both stress levels and sleep.

To conduct our review, we looked at all possible studies ever published on this topic. Around 60% of the studies we looked at happened to be done on women with breast cancer, while the other 40% were done on a more diverse range of participants, including men and women without breast cancer. (…)