Slow Moves for a Sweet Sleep

Mindful exercise like yoga or tai chi can ease insomnia and improve sleep, research shows

Christine Richmond

Updated February 24, 2026

Nitat Termmee/Getty Images

If you struggle to get good-quality sleep, there’s one potential remedy you may have overlooked. And it probably won’t leave you feeling drowsy the next morning like sleeping pills can. It’s exercise — especially slow, intentional movement like yoga or tai chi.

In a study published in BMJ Evidence-Based Medicine in 2025, researchers compared the effectiveness of 13 treatments for insomnia, or consistent trouble falling or staying asleep. They included seven types of exercise (yoga, tai chi, walking or jogging, and strength training among them) and six non-exercise options, such as cognitive behavioral therapy for insomnia and acupuncture.

The review involved 22 trials with a total of 1,348 people with insomnia, average age 51. One of the questions the researchers sought to answer was whether exercise could be used in place of of CBT-I, the current gold standard treatment, to manage insomnia.

Their reasoning: Although CBT-I works well, it can be expensive, and finding a trained practitioner can be challenging. Meanwhile, there’s already some evidence of exercise’s potential to treat insomnia, including that it “strengthens functional connectivity within key brain regions involved in sleep-wake regulation,” the researchers noted.

The results showed that all seven types of exercise improved sleep in some way. Walking or jogging, for example, eased daytime symptoms of insomnia, such as fatigue and brain fog.

Two exercises stood out to the researchers because they worked almost as well as CBT-I: Yoga and tai chi.

Less stress, longer sleep time

People who practiced yoga for at least one month slept nearly two additional hours per night on average and cut the time they spent awake in the middle of the night by almost an hour. Similarly, those who practiced tai chi for at least 12 weeks enjoyed about 50 extra minutes of sleep each night and spent about 30 fewer minutes tossing and turning in bed.

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It may be yoga and tai chi’s emphasis on mindfulness that made them perform so well in this study, says Christiane Wrann, an associate professor at Harvard Medical School who was not involved in the research.

“Mindfulness can reduce stress levels, and that can contribute to better sleep,” explains Wrann, who studies exercise’s effects on the brain. The study authors also point out that yoga can help reduce anxiety and tai chi may help regulate circadian rhythms.

Another study, published in BMJ in 2025, randomly assigned 200 people with insomnia age 50 and older to either three months of tai chi training or the same amount of CBT-I sessions. After 15 months, tai chi’s effectiveness for treating sleep problems was found to be similar to CBT-I.

Choose your moves

Wrann says it’s important to remember that there’s not one perfect exercise. The best workout, she says, is one you enjoy and can do regularly. If you’re curious about tai chi and want to check out classes at a local fitness center, go for it. Or maybe you’d prefer to do yoga videos in your living room.

If you’d rather just lace up a pair of sneakers and go for a walk, that’s great too, Wrann says. She and her colleagues have found that “once people take up exercise, improvement in sleep is one of the first things they report. And that helps motivate them to keep going.”