20-minute workout keeps the brain healthy despite poor night sleep!

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London. A research has revealed that if you have not slept well at night, then just 20 minutes of exercise can keep your brain healthy.

The study, led by researchers at the University of Portsmouth, has revealed how sleep, oxygen levels and exercise affect our ability to perform mental tasks.

The team found that moderate-intensity exercise improved thinking ability, regardless of a person’s sleep status or oxygen levels.

Joe Costello, from the university’s School of Sport Health and Exercise Science (SHES), said: “We know from existing research that exercise improves our thinking ability even when oxygen levels are low, but this is the first study to suggest that It also improves mental development after complete and partial sleep deprivation and with hypoxia.

“These findings add significantly to what we know about the relationship between exercise and these stressors and help reinforce the message that exercise is medicine for the body and brain,” he said.

The study, published in Physiology & Behavior, involved two experiments, each with 12 participants (24 total).

The first looked at the effects of partial sleep deprivation on a person’s cognitive performance, and the second examined the effects of total sleep deprivation and hypoxia.

All participants in both experienced improvements in mental development performance after 20 minutes of cycling.

Costello said, “Because we were looking at exercise as a positive intervention, we decided to use the recommended moderate intensity exercise. If the exercise were longer or harder, its negative consequences could be magnified and that in itself “Could have caused stress.”

In the first experiment, subjects were allowed to sleep only five hours a night over three days.

Each morning they were given seven tasks to complete while resting and then cycling. They were also asked to rate their sleep and mood before completing the task.

The results showed that the effect of three nights of partial sleep on functions was inconsistent.

An explanation for this may be that some people are more resilient to mild or moderate sleep loss, the paper said.

However, moderate-intensity exercise improved performance across all tasks, regardless of sleep status.

In the second experiment, participants spent an entire night without sleep and were then placed in a hypoxic (low level of oxygen) environment in the University’s Extreme Environment Laboratories.

Despite low oxygen levels, exercise continued to improve mental development.

–IANS

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