Grow Flowers, Sleep Better, Study Suggests
Gardening is known to be good for your mental and physical health. And researchers have now found that the pastime is good for your sleep too!
A study published in the Journal of Affective Disorders compared how often different groups of people, including gardeners, experienced various sleep problems. These included things like insomnia, feeling tired during the day, and sleep apnea, which causes people's breathing to stop and restart many times while they sleep.
The study used self-reported sleep data from over 62,000 US adults, who completed a telephone survey for the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) in 2017.
Of the participants, about 4,000 were gardeners. Around 41,000 exercised in other ways, and nearly 17,000 did not exercise.
The data showed that, compared to people who did not exercise, people who took part in gardening were 42% less likely to report experiencing two or more sleep problems. Those who took part in other exercise were 33% less likely to experience two or more sleep problems.
And compared with both other exercisers and non-exercisers, gardeners slept for longer, getting an average of over 7 hours of sleep a night.
One of the study's authors, Xiang Gao, said that, based on the study results, it could be recommended that adults spend time gardening as a way of reducing sleep problems without the need for medication.
The CDC recommends that adults get at least seven hours of sleep a day to be healthy. But CDC data shows that more than one-third of US adults aren't getting enough sleep.
