Have you tried Huberman’s sleep stack and advice and they don't work for you? 


In this episode, I’ll explain why they don’t work for chronic insomnia and what will work instead so you can get the sleep you need to perform at your best. 


And I’ll tell you about one of my clients who struggled to sleep for years even with Huberman’s recommendations and is now sleeping 7-8 hours a night again.


Schedule a consultation to get started with the Complete Sleep Solution program so you can consistently sleep 7+ hours uninterrupted, naturally and permanently. https://p.bttr.to/3VJwvDs


Episode Transcript


[00:00:00] Have you tried human's sleep stack and advice, and they don't work for you? In this video, in this episode, I'll explain why they don't work for chronic insomnia and what will work instead, so you can get the sleep you need to perform at your best. And I'll tell you about one of my clients who struggled to sleep for years, even with Huber Man's recommendations, and is now sleeping seven to eight hours a night.


This is the Sleep Detective Podcast where you will learn why you can't sleep and how to fix it naturally. I'm Martha Lewis. I've been a functional health coach for the past six years, and I've helped over 300 clients. Find and fix the root causes of their sleep issues so they can consistently sleep seven to nine hours a night without drugs, even if they've tried what seems like everything.


Now, first I wanna tell you about my client, Wes. 'cause he is a great example of someone who is trying so many things, including [00:01:00] Huber Man's recommendations to sleep better. And it's funny because. I talked to him a year before he signed up for the program and he said he wanted to try some more things first, and then when he came back a year later, he was like, I've already spent over $3,000 and, another year and I'm sleeping a little bit better, but I'm still not where I want to be.


So he, you know. What he was dealing with was he was waking up at 3:00 AM every night, and a lot of times he wasn't able to fall back asleep and so he was just awake for the day, so he was only getting five to six hours of sleep. Now it had gotten a little better 'cause he used to get maybe four to five.


And so he had been able to, with the changes he made and the things he did to get a little more. But he knew that he needed at least seven or eight hours to really feel best and perform at his best. He is very fit. He [00:02:00] exercises, he eats well. He drinks a G one. He lives a very healthy lifestyle like many of my clients.


And so he tried huberman supplements, he tried his recommendations, which are, the general sleep recommendations of get sunlight in the morning, dim the lights before bed, take the time to wind down before bed. Have a dark, cool room. Don't drink caffeine too late in the day. All the things, right?


If you've been struggling to sleep for any period of time, I'm sure you know about all these recommendations, and they are important recommendations for optimizing our sleep, but they don't. Solve chronic insomnia. So other things he did was, he did blood work with a functional medicine doctor. Nothing there really showed anything or helped.


He did a home gut health test and took probiotics recommended from that test. That didn't help. Again, he improved a little, but he still wasn't getting [00:03:00] the sleep that he needed. So. I think that one of the main issues with Huberman sleep recommendations, and by the way, I'm not saying anything bad about Dr.


Andrew Huberman. I listen to his podcast. I think he's very knowledgeable and very helpful. I think the problem is, again, he's helping people optimize sleep, so people who are probably already sleeping pretty well, but they want to improve their sleep because they care about their health. These things aren't enough for chronic.


Insomnia for chronic ongoing sleep issues. So let's talk about what his recommendations are and why these things didn't work for Wes and why they won't necessarily by themselves work for you. So Magnesium 3 0 8, or by glycinate is the first one, and. It is true that many people, it's estimated up to 90% of Americans are deficient in [00:04:00] magnesium, and magnesium does help our muscles relax.


It helps us be able to sleep, and this is a common supplement recommended in general for sleep, but magnesium by itself is only going to help if you're deficient in magnesium, and that's the only reason why you weren't sleeping. Same with melatonin, for example, like melatonin can help some people sleep if they're deficient in melatonin.


That's what their body needs, and if that's the only reason why they aren't sleeping. So it turned out Wes did have magnesium deficiency, but all of his minerals for super low, including calcium, sodium, potassium, and ideally these primary minerals, calcium, magnesium, sodium, and potassium should all be I balance with each other.


And they become depleted over time when we're under chronic stress because we burn through these minerals so much faster when we're stressed. Our adrenal glands [00:05:00] need, especially sodium and potassium to function properly and. When our gut isn't healthy and we aren't digesting food and getting the nutrients from food that we're supposed to and absorbing those nutrients, then we can become deficient.


And also our soils are so deficient in magnesium that the foods we're eating are also deficient in minerals in general. So yes, Wes had a mineral deficiency, so it's, so he did need some magnesium, but he also needed calcium, sodium, potassium, and all. The minerals to trace minerals in small amounts. So that's why magnesium by itself wasn't enough to help him sleep better.


Now, Huberin also recommends L-theanine and apigenin, and these both can help with our GABA receptors. So GABA is like our anti-anxiety neurotransmitter, and a lot of my clients are [00:06:00] deficient in gaba, and Wes was one of those. But he also had other neurotransmitter deficiencies, so he was also deficient in serotonin and dopamine, both of which are super important for sleep as well.


So this is why L-theanine and apigenin by themselves weren't enough to help him sleep better, and I also learned about apigenin. That it can help with neuroinflammation or brain inflammation in the book. Why isn't my brain working, which is. I highly recommend this book. It talks a lot about how different imbalances in the body affect brain health, including sleep, so it totally applies to sleep.


So there, it could be helping in that way as well. Huberman also recommends glycine and GABA and acetol, right? And so glycine can help. Again, if you're deficient in glycine, and [00:07:00] that's the only reason why you aren't sleeping. It can help. Same with gaba. So L the mean is actually the precursor to gaba, but you can take certain GABA supplements that help.


With GABA directly, a lot of GABA supplements aren't able to cross a blood brain barrier. So you want pharma gaba, or a liposomal GABA that can actually get into the brain and help. And then Acetol can help with gaba, can help with serotonin. It can also help with blood sugar, which is a common reason for waking up in the night when blood sugar drops too low at night.


The body releases cortisol to raise blood sugar, but it's also gonna wake us up. So again, all of these nutrients can be helpful if you're deficient in these nutrients, and this is the reason why you weren't sleeping. But these are just general supplements recommended for. Everyone, right? Not everyone is deficient in these things.


Some people might be deficient in other things, [00:08:00] and so that's why these things weren't enough to help Wes, even though he was also, you know, trying multiple things to help. And there's another reason why Huber's recommendations might not be working for you. And I wanna use this analogy. So taking. These random supplements, I call them random because they're not based on necessarily what your individual body needs.


They're just general recommendations to help the general population improve their sleep. So that's what I mean by random. Another good word could be generic, right? They're. Customized for you. They're just recommended for everyone. So taking these kind of supplements in this way for sleep is like patching a leaky roof with duct tape.


So the duct tape might stop the drip for a night or two, but it's not actually fixing the hole. You actually have to fix the hole in the roof to permanently stop the dripping. [00:09:00] And so that is the key with this, is that all these supplements, they aren't addressing the root cause of sleep issues. Now, yes, they might be correcting some deficiencies, which is part of it, but Wes had these other imbalances in his body that he didn't even know were there, that were the main reasons why he wasn't sleeping.


It wasn't just minerals, it wasn't just neurotransmitters. He also had super high cortisol at night. Well, no wonder he wasn't sleeping. Now, L-theanine and GABA can help lower cortisol, but they aren't addressing, okay, why is cortisol high at night? And it's usually because of stress and inflammation in the body.


So where does that stress and inflammation come from? Well, liver detox issues is a common one, which Wes definitely had. So the liver's most active at night, that's when it's supposed to be getting rid of toxins and when there are more than it can [00:10:00] handle, those toxins circulate around causing inflammation.


The body releases cortisol to deal with that inflammation 'cause it's an anti-inflammatory hormone. But that's gonna wake you up. Wes also had an unhealthy gut, so he had a bacteria called h pylori, and he had other bacterial overgrowth in his gut that were causing lots of inflammation, especially in the middle of the night when they're most active.


And he wasn't digesting protein well. His enzyme elastase that helps break down protein was pretty depleted, which can happen with h pylori infections because h pylori also affects protein digestion. And where do most of our minerals come from? They come from protein sources. A lot of them. And so if we aren't digesting protein well and breaking it down and getting the amino acids and minerals and nutrients we need from protein, then we're gonna become deficient in [00:11:00] those.


So this was also a piece of the puzzle for him and I like to compare it to a puzzle because by the time anyone has. Chronic sleep issues, there's more than one imbalance going on, so it's never just magnesium deficiency or just melatonin deficiency or even just a gut infection. Everything in the body's connected, and so all those systems have affected each other, so there's always multiple pieces to the puzzle of not being able to sleep.


So again, he had some mineral deficiencies, neurotransmitter deficiencies, high cortisol at night, trouble detoxing, and unhealthy gut. It also turned out he had blood sugar imbalances, so even though he ate really well. And he did not want to test his blood sugar, but by month five in the program working with me [00:12:00] again, his sleep had gotten better and he was able to fall back asleep a lot more easily in the middle of the night when he was waking up, but it wasn't consistent and he still wasn't just sleeping through and getting that seven to eight hours.


So he didn't wanna test his blood sugar with a glucometer or a continuous glucose monitor, but he agreed to experiment with changing his breakfast. So he was eating a smoothie for breakfast every morning, and it had protein powder and it had fat and it didn't have a ton of sugar. But when he changed his breakfast to a savory breakfast, not a smoothie, to having like breakfast sausage and vegetables.


Guess what? He started sleeping through the night, and so even though he was so healthy and eating really well, that smoothie wasn't working for him, for his sleep, and he wrote five months into it after changing his breakfast. Another good news update [00:13:00] 10 nights in a row, getting back to sleep in bed.


After waking between 1230 and 2:30 AM I'm a hundred percent certain. I haven't had 10 nights of decent rest in a couple years. So this was a big and kind of surprising piece of the puzzle for him. Now, we also did some work on his habits. Even though he had mostly great habits, especially around sleep, he was getting up super early to work out, and if he woke up at three, he would just get up at three 30 and go to work out.


So we moved that to later in the day. So that helped take the pressure off of knowing that he had to wake up at four 30 in the morning, because a lot of times, if. Say he was awake at two 30 or three, he might go back to sleep around four 30, but he knew that he had to get up, so this really helped him just be able to get more sleep while we were working on everything.


He also had some, you know, some worry about sleep. And so we worked on his [00:14:00] mindset about that, and he had plenty of work stress. So like many of my clients, he's a hard worker, he's a high achiever, he's an accountant. And and he's very ambitious and he noticed that he would sleep better on the weekends and not sleep as well during the week.


So work stress was part of it. And so I really helped him with. Really setting boundaries about when he was thinking about work and not thinking about work. And that way you're not just thinking about work 24 7 and realizing that it's actually valuable to rest and take time off instead of just being go, go, go all the time.


And so work was, again, another piece of the puzzle, but there were also these imbalances in his body that he didn't know were there. It was both of these things, it's stress, like mental stress from work and then stress in the body from all these different imbalances. And so I helped him patch all of the holes in the roof instead of just trying to duct tape it or bandaid [00:15:00] it with random supplements.


I helped him actually fix these imbalances and that's how he's now able to sleep seven or eight hours a night and. I contacted him recently and he's still sleeping well. It's been over a year since we worked together and he's still doing great and you can actually hear him tell his story in the next video.


If you wanna click on that, he'll tell you all about his experience in the program, what he did, and what finally helped. And if you are interested in finding the root cause of your sleep issues, if generic supplements like Huberman. Stack isn't working for you, it's just because they aren't addressing the actual root cause of why you aren't sleeping.


And so even if you're healthy and you exercise and eat well and care about your health, there's something going on in your body if you aren't able to sleep normally. And so in my Complete Sleep Solution program, I use functional lab tests plus [00:16:00] assessments to find everything that's affecting your sleep, to look for all the pieces of the puzzle.


And if that's something you're interested in, you can schedule a free consultation to talk about what's going on with your sleep and health, what your goals are, and how the program works, and you can schedule that at the link in the show notes. All right. I hope that you watch Wes' story in the next video.

Listen and follow: Apple Podcasts · Spotify