My own insomnia story began with a clear trigger: pregnancy.


My insomnia started during late pregnancy and didn't go away after my son was born. Pregnancy brings many hormonal shifts with it that can trigger all sorts of latent health issues to surface. I know what triggered my sleep issues, and some of my clients also know what triggered theirs. 


However, not everyone has a known trigger because sleep issues can also happen gradually and get worse over time, or they can ebb and flow when people go through phases of good sleep and bad sleep.


So what does trigger insomnia and how do sleep issues happen even if you don't know what actually triggers them?


Like I mentioned, for myself, it was pregnancy. I've worked with quite a few people and talked to many women where pregnancy or childbirth is what triggered their sleep issues, (which I will say is miserable because you're already not sleeping due to being pregnant and uncomfortable or having a newborn). It's definitely a double whammy of sleep deprivation!


I’ve also heard of countless other triggering events from my clients. 


I've had people take antibiotics for H. pylori, and then suddenly they can't sleep. 


Definitely, surgery can also trigger it, which makes sense because that's really stressful for your body. You're also given a lot of different drugs during surgery, especially antibiotics, which affect your gut health. So it totally makes sense that surgery would affect sleep.


I've had people swear vaccinations have triggered their insomnia. Also Covid and other illnesses have triggered sleep issues.


Especially stressful events can lead to serious sleep issues, such as the stress from divorce or even work stress. 


One of my clients right now, Richard, used to work 70 to 80 hours a week, and his sleep deteriorated to where he was only sleeping one or two hours a night. Now, luckily, his sleep has more than doubled since he started the program. He’s now getting four to five hours a night and said that this has made such a difference to his emotional state. He's been re-engaging with life in the last week, which is so awesome!


But for a lot of people, they have no idea what caused their insomnia. And this is what I want to point out is true whether you know what triggered your insomnia or not.


The fact is: your body wasn't healthy before your insomnia happened.


Insomnia is a symptom of larger health issues.


For me, pregnancy triggered my insomnia. But my body was already in the process of breaking down. 


I believe that it was a parasite that I had gotten 13 years before while traveling in Nepal and India. I got really sick, and I didn't take antibiotics at first. I think that it lingered with me for many years and slowly started damaging my gut, which led to food sensitivities. I'm sensitive to gluten and dairy and many other foods when I tested a couple of years ago.


That parasite damaged my gut, which over time led to hormone imbalance. When I did these tests two years after I had my son, I had a major hormone imbalance. But that didn't just happen out of the blue, right? 


It happened from this parasite damaging my gut, and from my body having to make a lot of cortisol because that parasite caused so much inflammation.


Whenever the body focuses on making a lot of cortisol to deal with stress and inflammation, it takes those resources away from sex hormones. So, hormones become depleted. 


And then that parasite also affected my liver function. (So did drinking too much alcohol in my 20s and 30s). But having the parasite did not help because pathogens create all these toxins in the gut. They build up, and the liver can't handle that, especially if you're also drinking alcohol and exposed to a lot of other toxins.


I also see people with heavy metals. I had high uranium and copper toxicity, likely from being on birth control, even though that was 10 years before I ever developed insomnia. Heavy metals didn’t trigger my insomnia, but they contributed to my body’s dysfunction over time.


That one parasite started to affect so many different things in my body. It eventually led to hormone imbalance, and getting pregnant at age 38 just was the final straw. 


So, that is what is true even if you know that antibiotics or surgery or a divorce triggered your insomnia. Those things were just the final straw. 


Your body, at that point, wasn't able to adapt anymore because our bodies want to stay in balance. They will do whatever they can to stay in balance, but eventually, it gets to the point where they can't. And to some of us who are more predisposed to sleep issues, it's going to lead to insomnia.


So, the trigger can be different for everyone, or there can be no known trigger. But no matter what, the body's slowly breaking down over time because of all the stress it's under. And that stress is also going to be different for everyone. 


So, there are lots of different things that can lead to insomnia over time, and eventually, sometimes it leads to the straw that broke the camel's back. 


Back to my client Richard who has had major improvement in just a couple of months, he felt like starting the mold protocol is what helped. The assessment that I used determined that he likely had mold toxicity. BUT it was also the mold toxicity on top of the work stress on top of the other imbalances in his body that led to his sleep continuously deteriorating over the past couple of years.


Again, there's not one thing; there are many things. It's really the result of the body being in what I call metabolic chaos, which I talked about in Episode 100. What really causes insomnia is your body breaking down; it's not in a healthy state anymore. 


I know it's hard for a lot of people to believe that this is a health issue when they're doing everything they can to be healthy. Many of my clients are very healthy. They eat really well, they eat organic foods, they work on minimizing toxins, they exercise, they might even take supplements, and they do what they can to manage stress. They're following the sleep hygiene that's recommended.


And I know just how frustrating that is too because I have cared about my health for a long time.


I started studying nutrition when I was in my early 20s and just became fascinated with it. I started eating really well 20 years ago and caring about organic. I worked on a local organic, biodynamic farm. I exercised, (looking back it turns out I over-exercised) but I exercised often. I love to backcountry snowboard, mountain bike, hike, and trail run which we are told are very healthy.


And even before I got insomnia, I was studying supplements. I managed the supplement department of a couple of health food stores. So again, I've been passionate about health for a long time. And yet I still developed insomnia.


I hope this reassures you that if you are trying to do everything you can to be healthy and you still can't sleep, it's not your fault. You're doing a lot of the right things; there's just something more going on in your body that we need to find out. 


Here’s where functional lab testing is so helpful. That's how I found out what was causing my insomnia, and that's how I find what's causing my clients' insomnia. 


Because it's more than just one thing. 


By the time you are experiencing any kind of symptoms, such as sleep issues, your body isn't healthy, and multiple systems of your body have started breaking down. Your body can't get back into balance, even though it wants to, and so it's affecting your sleep.


The way to get back in balance is to figure out what's out of balance and start supporting those things. That means looking at gut health, liver function, food sensitivities, toxins and heavy metals, and more to find out where inflammation is coming from. It's even looking at neurotransmitters, which I now test for, which are super important for sleep. 


It's really looking at the big picture of what's going on in your body, what's going on in your life that could be causing the stress, and addressing those things. 


And then you can sleep normally!


We do 4 lab tests and in-depth assessments in the Complete Sleep Solution program to get to the bottom of your sleep issues for good.. And then we give you a plan to get back in balance so that you can sleep normally by restoring your health.