Dr. John A. King explains how exercise improves sleep by inducing physical fatigue, regulating body temperature, and supporting your circadian rhythm. He describes his own history of severe insomnia from childhood trauma, then recommends eliminating sugar, eating high-fat low-carb, staying hydrated, and doing varied exercise like running or weight training.
Hey, continuing our series on exercise and mental health and the impact of it, the positive impact of it. You know, don't break stuff, well, that kind of hurts and messes up your mojo. Look, there's a bunch of stuff on why exercise is good. I think one of the big things is that I found it's really helped my ability to sleep. You know, I train myself to only sleep 90 minutes a night. I set an alarm and I wake myself up because I'd have this incredible these horrible recalls of what happened to me as a kid, and I'd get trapped in these nightmares of, you know, rape and all sorts of stuff. And, um, so I would set myself these, these timers, and I trained myself to sleep very little. Um, and like, that sucks, especially if you get further down in your recovery and you think, bloody hell, I could do with a good night's sleep, you know, a bit of a kip. Um, and so sleep Really does impact you. You know, you probably all know this sort of stuff, though. Increases your hunger, get food cravings, which just make you fat and you don't like yourself anyway. Increases cortisol stress hormones. You know, again, you get fat, diabetes, heart attack, high blood pressure, blah blah blah. Your brain doesn't flush the toxins out of your brain, can't think clearly. You're just a pain in the ass to be around, really, because you're irritable. So lack of sleep's no good. And what exercise does is it just makes you buggered and you get tired and you, you want to— then, then the food that you are eating is actually good for you. Make sure that's the case so you're not just having empty calories or just calories are too much because they're not burning. It regulates your body temperature, which allows you to sleep better. It supports the natural rhythm, circadian rhythm in your body. You wake at the appropriate times because you're tired or exhausted. Bang, you're out. You're up again. Your body goes through this natural thing. And it really can help your, I believe, just overall quality of your sleep. So physical exercise helps a lot of things, both mentally and also biologically, which are an important part of a regime for mental health. Now, I say regime because a regime is something that you're in charge in. A regime is something that you establish. It's a habit that you put in place for the benefit of, or to gain the benefit from it, which you, which you've decreed. Now, that's vital because it's a tool in your toolbox to top box, a tool in your toolbox to manage your mental illness. Mental illnesses just don't go away. You don't take a magic pill to get rid of depression or PTSD or Because that's just pharma bullshit. Because all they're trying to do is like numb you out and, and that just makes you a worse person, more prone to suicide and unable to, you know, sincerely interact with the rest of the world around you. You know, if you've got to take a med, if you've got a chemical imbalance, that's one thing. But if you're just being doped up by big pharma and your AMA doctor because they couldn't give a shit about trying to find alternative ways around this. You know, just fuck that lot off and get about investigating new things for yourself. Physical exercise is absolutely paramount. A good diet. Don't have any bloody sugar. Get rid of orange and red food coloring because that shit will kill you. Get that shit out of your life. Drink some water. Go for a run. Get the weights. Do bloody Pilates if you want to. Whatever it is, just do it because then you're going to start to naturally exercise yourself. Eat a high-fat, low-carb diet. Naturally feed your body and your brain the food it Get some sleep because that's going to naturally— and do these things, these regimes, establish them for you, not because some bastard can just write a bloody prescription and get a kickback on some bloody yacht somewhere. And, um, and I think taking control of the regime or the patterns that you need for mental health is fundamentally important. And, um, yeah, right. That'll do. Hey, listen, comment, uh, drop us an email, give us a phone call, uh, we'll do what we can to help you. If you haven't read Deal With It, you should. It's bloody good. Um, yeah, that'll do. Cheerio.
