How your body AND your mind cause insomnia

“Not being able to sleep is terrible. You have the misery of having partied all night without any of the satisfaction.”

I love this quote because it's so true, right? If you struggle to sleep, you know how much it sucks to wake up tired and slightly hungover and you didn't have any fun the night before. I know what this is like too, and that's why I'm so excited to share with you everything that I have learned. 

I'm not going to be talking about the basics that you already know about such as avoiding screens and not drinking too much caffeine and all of the basic sleep hygiene things. These things are the foundation. But there is more going on if you’ve tried those things and you still can't sleep!

I actually got into learning about sleep because of my son.

He was a horrible sleeper as an infant, and I ended up hiring a sleep consultant to help. It made such a big difference in my life that I became a sleep consultant to help other families with their children’s sleep.

The ironic thing was that even though I was a sleep consultant, I wasn't sleeping. 

My Insomnia started in late pregnancy, but it didn't go away even after my son was sleeping through the night at six months old, and it lasted for another year and a half before I finally figured out what was causing it. 

I would try to go to bed early because I was so exhausted, but it would take me forever to fall asleep. Then I would wake up at 3 in the morning and be wide awake and not able to go back to sleep until it was 6am and my son was waking up for the day.

By this time I was still working my full time job. I had started my business as a sleep consultant and I wasn't sleeping. I was pretty exhausted and miserable. And I also felt like a fraud because I’m helping people sleep but I'm not sleeping!

I decided to take an adult sleep certification program even though I was pretty skeptical going into it because I already knew a lot about sleep. But the things that I learned there totally helped. I needed to make some changes to my schedule, to some of my habits, to what I was eating and when. And within a month I was sleeping so much better.

My solution to my own insomnia

About a year later, I had a really stressful period in my life and my sleep deteriorated again. 

And all the things that I had learned before and that worked before did not help.

This is when I learned about functional lab testing and I became trained in using lab tests to find the root cause of why you can't sleep. 

From my own testing, I found out I had hormone imbalance, I had a parasite, and I had food sensitivities. I had plenty of things going on in my body that were causing my insomnia.

And once I knew those things and was able to correct them, I started sleeping great again. 

This is what I’ve learned: not being able to sleep is a health issue because if you are perfectly healthy, your body sleeps, right? That's what it is meant to do because we need sleep.

Sleep is actually one of our five basic needs, along with air, food, water, and shelter. A healthy body knows how to sleep. It’s a sign that you aren't totally healthy if you can't sleep normally. 

But the good news is there is a reason why and we can find out what it is and fix it so that you can sleep like you're meant to. 

Two things keeping you from sleeping

Now in general, there are two things keeping you from sleeping: your body AND your mind. 

I talk about so many factors that affect sleep in my blog but here are the basics:

How your mind impacts sleep

We all know mental stress is going to affect our sleep, right? So being super busy and overwhelmed all the time, worrying about money,getting in a fight with your spouse, being in a job you don't like, etc. All of those things create mental stress that affects your body and keeps you from sleeping well.

Now there are even deeper things that you might not even realize that are affecting your sleep, and that's what I help my clients find as well. Are they unhappy in their marriage? Do they have unresolved trauma from the past? Are they living their life purpose? If they’re open to it, we start addressing these things as well.

How your body impacts your sleep

What most of you probably don't know about is all the things that can happen in the body that affect your sleep as well.

I touched on a few of the ways my body was keeping me from sleeping earlier: hormone issues, food sensitivities and, this is a big one: gut health. For me it was from a parasite, but there are many ways our gut can impact our health.

The main physical issues I see with clients are food sensitivities, nutrient deficiencies, mineral imbalance, and liver health. These are all things we don't hear about affecting sleep, but they can totally affect our sleep and either cause our body to release cortisol at night, at bedtime, or in the middle of the night, which is going to wake us up.

The solution for insomnia

How do we find out exactly what issues are causing your insomnia? 

To help my clients, I use the science of lab testing. Functional lab tests show what's going on in your body. The tests I do look at everything that could be causing your sleep issues: gut health, liver function, neurotransmitters, toxins such as heavy metals, mineral balance, and more.

Then I use alternative therapies and supplements to help my clients restore their health again. Because again, not sleeping is a health issue. You need to rebuild your health to sleep normally.

To address what's going on in the mind. I use cognitive behavioral therapy techniques, life coaching skills, and help with general stress management techniques that have worked for me and many of my clients.

To really address everything that could be keeping you from sleeping, looking at both the body and the mind is key. 

It’s really the only way to start sleeping normally again. Because if we don't look at everything and we're missing something, then you might not get any better.

I want you to know that your insomnia is a fixable problem. If you can't sleep, there's a reason. We can find it, we can correct it, and you can sleep normally, just like you were meant to do.