Your partner tells you that you overreact. 


You’re irritable and short-tempered. 


You know that spilling milk shouldn’t be a big deal but you can’t help but get upset every time.


I want to tell you that you’re not crazy and this isn’t your fault.


If this is happening to you, it means that your stress response is on high alert. Your brain and body are so used to being stressed that you have developed negative plasticity to stress. This means that it takes less stress to cause the same stress response than it did before.


This happened to me when my mom died 19 years ago. I remember that everything felt so stressful and that I couldn’t handle the smallest things.


This is normal after a traumatic event. But it’s not normal for this to be your status quo. It’s not normal for this to continue for years.


Rachel’s story

When I first started working with my client Rachel, she told me that her life shouldn’t be stressful-she had a loving husband, a healthy baby, a worry-free job she loves, etc. But she felt stressed all the time. 


When I saw her cortisol levels on the hormone test I ran, it all made sense. Her cortisol was extremely depleted. Her body didn’t have the resources it needed to make cortisol and handle stress. 


One definition of stress is “a condition in which we perceive that the demands in our life exceed our personal resources.” This was true for Rachel. Her body literally didn’t have the resources it needed to deal with stress. 


Her other tests she had a few bacterial pathogens and lots of other bacterial overgrowth. Her minerals were out of balance and she had quite a few food sensitivities.


I recommended avoiding the foods she’s sensitive to which included gluten and dairy. 


She chose to stop taking birth control because she saw how depleted her estrogen and progesterone were. 


I recommended supplements to support her stress response, rebalance her minerals, and deal with the pathogens. 


We worked on her thoughts about sleep and her life in general.


To sum it up, I looked at everything that was causing stress and helped her minimize it so her body could heal.


Now she’s “been sleeping really great!”


“After discovering Martha and enlisting her services, she did a full analysis of my body and helped me to understand the imbalance and why I wasn't able to fall asleep/stay asleep. She gave me natural solutions on how to get my body flow back in balance and after a year of following her advice, I can fall asleep and stay asleep on my own. I won't ever go back to prescription pills-thanks to Martha. Whatever advice she is giving you, take it. She has your best interests in mind as she did mine. Because of this, I no longer have a negative relationship with sleep. I rarely think about the upcoming sleep which is the opposite of how it used to be. I used to dread going to sleep and would think about it all day long-- now I can appreciate it more. I'm finally getting the consistent enough results I've been looking for my whole life. You are a lifesaver! So appreciative of everything you've done for me."


Signs of unhealthy stress response

  • always something to do
  • never time for yourself
  • not getting enough sleep or rest
  • not enough time or motivation for regular exercise
  • Feeling like you’re in survival mode, which means you aren’t accomplishing your life’s purpose


What causes too much stress

If you’ve gotten to this point, it means that you’ve been too stressed for a long time. This can be from emotional stress. 


But it can also be from physiological stress that you don’t even know is there-a pathogen in your gut, eating a poor diet, hormone imbalance, nutrient deficiencies, etc.


All of this stress causes your body to constantly release cortisol. Over time, cortisol gets dysregulated. Your sympathetic nervous system takes over, which is your fight or flight response. When you’re in fight or flight, it blocks your parasympathetic nervous system, the part of your nervous system that makes you feel calm and relaxed.


Being in fight or flight all the time also causes inflammation throughout your body and brain. Then you’re more susceptible to pathogens, hormone imbalances, and digestive issues.


The effects of high cortisol

Constant high cortisol damages your brain, especially the hippocampus. Your hippocampus is where learning and memory occur. And it’s what regulates your circadian rhythm. This is how stress directly leads to poor memory and sleep issues.


The hippocampus is also the first part of your brain that gets affected by Alzhemier’s! To prevent this scary disease and to sleep normally, you’ve got to find out everything that’s stressing you out in your body and your mind and change it.


Over time the body doesn’t have the resources it needs to make cortisol and cortisol becomes depleted.


How low cortisol sabotages sleep

We tend to think of high cortisol as causing insomnia. But low cortisol can, too!


If you feel like the littlest things stress you out, your cortisol levels may be low all the time, day and night, like RC’s.


So what’s making you wake up? Here are some possibilities:

  • Low blood sugar:

Your body needs cortisol to release glycogen and raise blood sugar levels when they

get too low. If cortisol is too low, then your body resorts to epinephrine (adrenaline)

and norepinephrine instead. Those fight or flight hormones make you wake up with

your heart beating fast and your mind racing.


  • Serotonin is supposed to convert to melatonin. Low cortisol can stop that conversion

   and then low melatonin can cause sleep difficulties. 


  • Other health imbalances such as heavy metal toxicity, mineral imbalances and low

   progesterone can also make you wake up at night.


The key is to find where the stressors are in your body. Is it from your gut, your liver, your hormones, nutrient deficiencies, toxins, etc? 


And work on lowering mental stress as well.


Then your body will start to get back in balance and it can make an appropriate amount of cortisol to deal with a normal amount of stress.


Then you’ll be able to sleep normally and wake up feeling rested with energy!


This is exactly what I do to help my clients improve their health so they can sleep normally. 



The Complete Sleep Solution program uses functional lab testing to find out what's going on in their body that is out of whack and stressful. 


And we also use life coaching and cognitive behavioral therapy techniques to help with mental stress. 


Other sleep programs or doctors only look at the body OR the mind-no one else looks at both. This is why the Complete Sleep Solution program is so effective.