Hello! This is Everything Is Amazing, a newsletter about science, curiosity, mind-blown wonder, and the timeless power of using stock photos of cats to lazily manipulate people’s emotions.

This particular newsletter - a continuation of this series - is going to be unusually ridiculous (and not just because I’m narrating it: see audio, above). Not at all what I originally intended.

I mean - you know how it usually works by now, right? Some well-meaning plonker - that would be me - sets himself the task of investigating the latest science into a thing in the hope of discovering something quietly astonishingly, the kind of thing that has you mumbling “wow!” when you read it in a news headline on the way to work. All delivered with a level of amiable knowing amateurism, but backed up with links to people in science doing the actual work here.

That’s been my hope, in looking into the reasons why I can’t get a good night’s sleep these days, and what I can do about it. I’d stumble over some weird new thing that actually seems to work according to a number of credibly sceptical studies, and then I try it upon myself, and it works, and I get to write about it in my own excitable way.

This time I’d even hoped for a bit more, actually. Maybe I could even invent something - you know, that thing I never get to do, because I’m not a scientist and don’t have my own lab or team, and, well, I don’t know anything.

But what if I could do it this time? Not something unsafe of course, just something tap-dancing on that fine line between clever and stupid.

Say: take a 300 microgram pill of melatonin, shove it inside a Reese’s Peanut Butter Cup (those things always make me sleepy), add a sprinkle of creatine and a couple of drops of Head & Shoulders anti-dandruff shampoo, and then knock the whole thing back with a mug of malted Horlicks.

Result: you get the best night’s sleep of your life, and then you tell everyone about Sowden’s Miracle Insomnia Cure™, and then I can finally occupy that apparently extremely profitable place between popular broadcasting and selling poorly studied health supplements, like a modern day John R. Brinkley, who famously made a fortune by claiming to cure men of a number of ailments by implanting them with goat testicles. I wish I was making this up, but I’m not. Anyway, my point is: a man can dream.

But alas - no. You will notice that this particular post in the series is not paywalled.

That’s because what I have ‘discovered’ - I’ll explain those inverted commas in a second - cannot in any way be patented, intellectual-copyrighted or presented to you with the merest shred of ownership stamped over it.

This miracle cure I’ve alluded to in the title of this newsletter is not sleeping in the great outdoors. At least, not yet. I’m going to keep experimenting with that one because I haven’t yet had a comfortable enough night out, thanks to various camping equipment insufficiencies/disasters which have now all been fixed. Hopefully the next night out is the charm here.

I should also add that it’s the middle of the Scottish winter and we’ve just had the first proper winter storm blow through - Storm Bram - and if I can get an unusually good night’s sleep when it’s blowing a proper hoolie outside my tent, there must be something in it. And I love this kind of wild camping - completely unnecessary, only an idiot would try it at this time of year, where do I sign up, and so on.

I’ve also had some fascinating suggestions from friends and readers by email. I’m spoiling none of them yet, but I will say, thank you to David, John, Clarissa and Jane, and for the gentleman that confidently asserted that I should try ingesting baked beans and gunpowder, I’ll be assuming you’re not a professional chemist and I’ll giving that one a miss purely based on what my imagination tells me would happen next, no offence to you, sir.

So I’m still hoping for something weird and clever, something you wouldn’t normally try, except for a bet.

Instead, I suspect I’ve already found what will work best for ridding me of chronic insomnia, and it’s been staring me in the face for years.

A few months ago, I started going to the gym. Gyms are fascinatingly weird places filled with people very earnestly doing very odd-looking things. Here’s an example:

Mike Sowden 18d At the gym today, a guy enters - crew-cut, oiled beard, dramatically colourful skin-tight clothes - & strides up to the next running machine along from me. He lifts his phone to start filming himself, dials the machine up to maybe 100mph, & sprints like the hounds of Hell are after him - all while filming himself & using his free hand to throw the devil's horns at the camera. Then he stops filming, stops the machine… 50 3

And week later, this happened:

Mike Sowden 10d At the gym. He came in again, full workout gear. All the running machines were being used. He walked a full lap of the gym, and left again. Sixty seconds. WHAT IS IN THIS MAN'S BRAIN. https://substack.com/@everythingisamazing/note/c-180489725 13

But since standing around gawping at people in lycra is a sure-fire way to get yourself ejected from a gym, I’ve been using the machines as well.

This hasn’t been easy. What I’ve always been is a walker. I will happily walk all day, not necessarily very fast, but in a relentless or perhaps you could say wholly unimaginative way that usually eats through about 15 or 20 miles a week on average.

Walking is great - but it’s also a low-intensity form of exercise, unless you decide to push yourself, which I don’t because, why spoil a good semi-lazy meander? And pushing yourself too hard can be a distraction from your own thoughts or from the audiobook or podcast you’re listening to, which is another reason I love walking.

At the gym, I wobble my way through all sorts of gently tortuous movements while balancing large pieces of metal on the ends of various limbs. And it’s working! I feel stronger, I can walk further, my so-called brain seems much sharper.

Also? I’m sleeping better. Much better, some nights. And all of those nights correlate with going to the gym.

Dammit.

So - my insomnia is mostly because I’ve been lazy?

Ah, look how quickly this stuff turns to self-judgement. The same would apply if I tried to present it to you as wellness advice, which is absolutely not what I’m doing here. I am not going to yell “YOU SLEEPLESS PEOPLE ARE JUST BONE-IDLE” and try to sell you a gym membership, just use the code “THEIDIOTSENTME” to get 25% off your first month.

No. The most I could say is that if you’re struggling with insomnia, if it’s possible you could try a bit more physical exercise of whatever kind is most practical to you, with no guarantee that will help in your case.

But of course everyone knows this. Deeper sleep is one of the best-known benefits of getting more active, so maybe I’m a fool for assuming I needed something else, and it was probably my reluctance to try going to the gym - ugh, all that effort - that got in the way of me trying it out.

But this is a science newsletter, not a vibes, regret and self-disgust newsletter, so what does the science say?

As luck would have it, the BMJ (the British Medical Journal) recently published a systematic review of the findings from 22 studies involving over 1,300 adults with sleep disorders, looking at the role of 13 different interventions, 7 of which were exercise-based. Their conclusion:

“Exercise is an effective treatment for improving sleep in patients with insomnia.”

Hooray! But what is surprising is that gentler exercises seem to work better, with yoga the best of all - it increased people’s sleep time by almost two hours on average, compared to the control group. Nearly as effective were Tai Chi and walking or sedate jogging.

Here’s what Grace Wade at New Scientist has to say about this:

“What is it about gentler workouts that makes them so good for catching z’s? It may have to do with the emphasis on controlled breathing and body awareness. Research shows that mindfulness-based workouts, such as yoga and tai chi, decrease activity in the sympathetic nervous system, which governs our body’s fight-or-flight response. As a result, blood pressure and heart rate drop and levels of the stress hormone cortisol decline. This, in turn, alleviates the depressive and anxiety symptoms that so often hinder sleep.”

This might be unwelcome news to the kind of gym-goer that, say, enjoys publicly showing off their muscles in pointless displays of strength, as was the fairly ludicrous sight this week at Washington D.C.’s Reagan International Airport. Perhaps US Secretary Of Health Robert F. Kennedy Jnr. would be better swapping out his manly pull ups for a few Sun Salutations and a Downward-Facing Dog, but I can’t really see him trying that for the cameras.

But look - what the study suggests is that any exercise is usually good for improving your sleep!

Upping your physical activity is usually a good bet - except maybe at airports, which for most folk are some of the strangest-feeling and most grindingly stressful spaces in modern social life and what you really want is for everything to work perfectly first time so your already jittery nervous system doesn’t explode & you can leave said airport as quickly as possible. That’s probably what needs investing in, rather than ellipticals and battle ropes. Be kind, guys.

Anyway. In my case, I’m now getting more exercise than ever before. My former gym was a ten minute walk away, and it just closed for refurbishment that will take at least a year, so I’ve had to switch to its sister gym which is all the way across town, a 45 minute walk each way.

This is a further improvement to my gym routine - I’m getting that all-important low-intensity part of my workout, I’ve got an extra 90 minutes a day I can spend listening to stuff on top of that time at the gym, and I’m sure the result is I’ll be sleeping better than ever before.

But there’s some part of me that wishes this wasn’t so obvious. Maybe this is a problem with the way we think about this life-improvement stuff: it only grabs our attention if it’s outlandish-looking enough - for example, goat testicles - while what actually works seems so ‘boring’ that we hardly ever begin with it. (This seems to me like a huge problem, and I’m glad so many smart people are starting to write about it right now.)

Why are we like this? What can be done?

No idea - but I know the perfect place to think about it.

Images: Samuel Girven; William Navarro; Kate Stone Matheson.