Key Takeaways

Blood sugar instability doesn't stop when you go to bed — overnight crashes trigger a cortisol release that wakes you up and makes it nearly impossible to fall back asleep
Most chronic insomnia clients are dealing with some combination of blood sugar swings, inflammation, overtaxed adrenals, impaired liver detox, and a stuck nervous system — none of which show up on standard bloodwork
Addressing these five areas — starting with diet, adrenal support, and liver function — can resolve sleep issues that sleep specialists, CPAP machines, and prescription sleep aids haven't been able to touch

You've done the sleep hygiene thing. Maybe you've even tried prescription sleep aids. And you're still waking up at 2am, or you can't fall asleep, or you hit the pillow exhausted and your brain just won't shut down.

Here's what's almost certainly going on: the things disrupting your sleep aren't the things anyone's told you to look at. Not your doctor, not sleep articles, not the wellness influencers on social media.

I'm a functional sleep practitioner and I've worked with hundreds of people who had already tried everything before coming to me. One of them was Peter, a 78-year-old scientist from Jackson, Wyoming. He'd been on Ambien for a decade, had seen multiple sleep specialists, and had been on a CPAP for over ten years. He was also taking two stimulants every morning just to counteract how groggy the sleeping pills made him. Nothing was working.

When I ran functional lab tests, I found things his doctors had completely missed. By the time we finished working together, Peter was off both medications entirely, sleeping mostly through the night, had lost 33 pounds without trying, and was back to hiking two to eight miles a day. At 78, he said he was feeling better than he had in years.

Here's what changed everything for him — and what I see as the root causes of chronic insomnia over and over again.

Blood Sugar Instability Is Disrupting Your Sleep

When blood sugar spikes and crashes throughout the day — starting the morning with coffee and a pastry, for example — that roller coaster doesn't just stop when you go to bed. It continues overnight. And when blood sugar drops too low during the night, your body releases cortisol to bring it back up. Cortisol at 2am is exactly what wakes you up and makes getting back to sleep nearly impossible.

I've seen this even with clients who think they're eating well. A smoothie for breakfast can spike blood sugar more than people expect. Snacks that are only carbohydrates — chips, pretzels, even fruit on its own — cause the same problem.

Peter had developed a habit of drinking margaritas during COVID. When he started wearing a continuous glucose monitor (CGM), he could see exactly what that was doing to his blood sugar at night. We also found he had insulin resistance — he'd get sleepy after every meal — which was later confirmed with fasting glucose, A1C, and insulin testing together. Fasting glucose alone can look totally normal while insulin and A1C are quietly creeping up.

For blood sugar balance, start breakfast with plenty of protein and fat. Keep all meals balanced. When sleep deprivation has already disrupted your body's glucose regulation, diet alone sometimes isn't enough — in those cases I'll recommend a blood sugar support formula or inositol to break the cycle while we work on sleep.

For a CGM, I now recommend Lingo — you can get two Free Libre 3 sensors for $89, use code found here to get 15% off.

Chronic Inflammation Is Keeping You Wired

Most sleep issues are caused by stress and inflammation — and inflammation can come from food, pathogens in the gut, and toxins your body can't fully clear. We're exposed to food multiple times a day, which makes it one of the most immediate levers to pull.

Refined sugar, flour, processed foods, and refined oils are major drivers of inflammation. Beyond that, gluten, dairy, soy, eggs, and corn tend to be inflammatory for many people — though I prefer to test first rather than have everyone eliminate everything.

Peter tested positive for gluten sensitivity and also found out he carried the genes for celiac disease. Once he stopped eating gluten, he noticed a dramatic difference. That's not universal — but the point is, his inflammatory response to gluten was real and measurable, and no one had looked for it before.

Your Adrenals Are Doing Double Duty at Night

Your adrenal glands produce cortisol and other stress hormones. When the body has been under sustained stress — whether that's mental stress, gut pathogens, toxins, or blood sugar swings — the adrenals have to keep producing cortisol to manage it all. At night, when there's still inflammation to address, the body releases more cortisol. And that cortisol wakes you up.

Peter had very high cortisol at night, which was a direct explanation for why he couldn't stay asleep.

There are two kinds of stress I see in clients: the mental kind — being busy, juggling work and family — and the physiological kind that you often don't even know is there. You can have a parasite in your gut and have no symptoms at all. I had one myself with no symptoms. But your adrenals are still responding to it.

One supplement I recommend for almost all my clients is Nighttime HPA by Gaia Herbs. It has adaptogenic herbs that help the body deal with stress — including ashwagandha — alongside relaxing herbs that promote calm at night. It's meant to be taken in the evening.

Your Liver Is Working Overtime Between 1 and 3am

Almost all of my clients have trouble detoxing — and that's true even for people who don't drink alcohol. We're exposed to an enormous number of toxins in our environment, in our food and water, from products we put on our skin, and from pathogens in the gut that produce their own toxic byproducts. Since the Industrial Revolution, the toxic load the body has to manage has increased significantly.

The liver is most active between 1 and 3am — that's when it does its primary job of clearing toxins. When there are more toxins than it can handle, they circulate through the body causing inflammation, and the body releases cortisol in response. That cortisol wakes you up.

When I run testing, I can see the specific pathways where people are struggling — methylation, sulfation, glucuronidation. Peter showed impairment in liver detox, like most of my clients.

Supporting the liver can look like a methyl B complex (folate and methyl B12 for methylation, plus milk thistle for liver function), or products like CellCore's KL Support, which stands for kidney-liver support. Beyond supplements, practical things matter too: Epsom salt baths, drinking warm water with fresh lemon first thing in the morning to stimulate bile production, regular sweating (sauna is great for this), staying well hydrated, and making sure you're having at least one bowel movement a day. Those are the main routes toxins leave the body — urine, stool, and sweat.

Your Nervous System Is Stuck in Fight-or-Flight

This one is where everything else converges. When you've been running on stress for a long time — and especially when there's blood sugar instability, gut pathogens, liver stress, and inflammation all happening underneath the surface — your nervous system gets stuck in a chronically activated state. You feel wired even when you're exhausted. Your brain won't shut down at night even though your body desperately wants sleep.

Even five minutes of breathwork in the mid-afternoon can help shift the body out of stress mode and into rest-and-digest — and that shift can meaningfully affect how well you sleep that night.

For clients with a history of trauma, I also recommend programs specifically designed to help regulate the nervous system. Two I refer clients to are Primal Trust and The Workout Witch, uses passive stretches and exercises to help release stored trauma from the body. You can learn more about them here.

FAQ

Q: Why do I wake up at 2 or 3am every night?

A: The most common reason is a blood sugar crash or a cortisol spike — both of which are related. When blood sugar drops too low overnight, or when the body is dealing with inflammation from gut pathogens, toxins, or a struggling liver, it releases cortisol to compensate. Cortisol at 2am is exactly what pulls you out of sleep. The liver is also most active between 1 and 3am, so if it's overloaded with toxins, that window is when things tend to go wrong.

Q: Can blood sugar issues cause insomnia even if I don't have diabetes?

A: Yes. Fasting glucose can look completely normal on standard bloodwork while insulin and A1C are already creeping up. And even mild blood sugar fluctuations — from a high-carb meal, a smoothie, or alcohol — create overnight crashes that trigger cortisol. A continuous glucose monitor is one of the most useful tools for seeing exactly how your food choices are affecting your sleep.

Q: Why isn't my sleep medication working anymore?

A: Sleep medications address the symptom — difficulty sleeping — but don't address what's causing the wakefulness in the first place. If the underlying driver is high nighttime cortisol from blood sugar instability, liver detox issues, adrenal stress, or gut inflammation, no amount of medication will resolve it. My client Peter had been on Ambien for a decade with multiple sleep specialists involved and was still waking every 90 minutes. When we addressed the actual root causes, he was able to come off the medication entirely.

Q: Do I need functional lab testing to start doing any of this?

A: No — some of these steps you can start on your own. Stabilizing blood sugar through diet, reducing inflammatory foods, taking adrenal and liver support supplements, and building a nervous system practice are all things you can begin without testing. Testing becomes essential when dietary and lifestyle changes aren't enough, because at that point you need to know what's actually broken in your body — whether that's a gut pathogen, a specific detox pathway that's impaired, or a hormonal pattern — before you can target it effectively.

Ready to Find Out What's Actually Keeping You Awake?

If any of these root causes sound familiar — the 2am wake-ups, the wired-but-tired feeling, the sense that nothing you've tried has worked — this is exactly what the Complete Sleep Solution program investigates. The program includes functional lab testing across four panels: gut health, hormones, neurotransmitters, and toxins, so we know exactly what's driving your insomnia rather than guessing.

→ Learn how the Complete Sleep Solution program works

About Martha Lewis

Martha Lewis is a certified Functional Diagnostic Nutrition practitioner and founder of The Sleep Detective™. Since 2019, she has helped 300+ clients identify the root causes of their insomnia using functional lab testing — including gut analysis, hormone panels, neurotransmitter testing, and toxin screening. She discovered her own root causes (hormone imbalances, heavy metals, and a parasite) after years of trying conventional sleep solutions, and now uses the same investigative approach with her clients.

Learn more about Martha →