Struggling to sleep? Why walking every day could reduce risks to your health

Walking briskly for two and a half hours a week – or only 21 minutes a day – could reduce the risk of death in people who struggle to get enough sleep, a study has found.

A lack of sleep is known to cause a wide range of health problems including increased risk of stroke, heart disease and cancer. But according to a team of Australian researchers, exercise can eliminate the health concerns caused by a poor sleep pattern.

The study analysed data from 380,055 Britons with an average age of 56. Participants gave themselves a score for their level of exercise and self-reported their sleep level.

The amount of exercise people did was categorised as high, medium or low, while sleep was split into healthy, intermediate and poor levels. A low level of exercise is equivalent to 150 minutes of brisk walking a week and meets the guidelines set out by the World Health Organisation.

Over an 11-year follow-up, 15,503 people died, with 4,095 deaths from cardiovascular disease and 9,064 from cancer.

Of these, 1,932 people died from coronary heart disease, 359 from a brain bleed (haemorrhagic) stroke, 450 from a blood clot (ischaemic) stroke and 1,595 from lung cancer.

After the follow-up, experts found that, compared with people in the high exercise group who also had healthy sleep, those in the low exercise and poor sleep group had a 57 per cent higher risk of early death from any cause.

When sleep was taken out of the equation, participants who did no exercise were 25 per cent more likely to have an early death than the most active cohort – but just 2.5 hours of walking a week reduced this to an eight per cent increase in risk.

The researchers said most of the links between poor sleep and early death were eliminated if people met the 150 minutes a week target.

The researchers, including academics from the University of Sydney and University College London, said: "Our results support the value of interventions to concurrently target (physical activity) and sleep to improve health."