Ready to find out why you can’t sleep and get a clear plan to fix it? Apply for the Complete Sleep Solution program: https://l.bttr.to/Y70np


 If your sleep feels light and restless and you wake up tired, no matter how many hours you were in bed, the issue isn't just how long you're sleeping, it's the quality of those hours, specifically how much deep sleep your body is getting.


Even though I've worked with hundreds of people with this exact pattern, I can tell you that light, restless sleep isn't normal. 


In this episode, I'm going to walk you through three ways to increase deep sleep naturally by addressing what's keeping your system from fully powering down at night.


00:00 Why Deep Sleep Matters

00:59 Samantha’s Sleep Spiral

01:47 Recovery and What Changed

02:33 Program Break and Invite

03:16 Cause #1 

04:20 Cause #2

05:07 Cause #3

06:44 Testing to Find the Root

07:02 Cortisol Testing Explained

08:12 Finding Inflammation Sources

10:15 Neurotransmitter Testing and Hope


Episode Transcript


[00:00:00] If your sleep feels light and restless and you wake up tired, no matter how many hours you were in bed, the issue isn't just how long you're sleeping, it's the quality of those hours, specifically how much deep sleep your body is getting.


So this is where you fall asleep, but you know it's light sleep, or you toss and turn. You don't dream, and by morning you don't feel restored. You feel like your body never really shut off.


Deep sleep is where your body repairs restores and resets. Without enough of it, you feel older, slower, and more drained than you should.


Even though I've worked with hundreds of people with this exact pattern, I can tell you that light, restless sleep isn't normal. There are specific physiological reasons your body won't drop into deep repair.


In this episode, I'm going to walk you through three ways to increase deep sleep naturally by addressing what's keeping your system from fully powering down at night.


My client, Samantha, didn't [00:01:00] describe herself as someone with insomnia. She would say, I'm sleeping, but I'm not really sleeping. And for years this was manageable for her. She would have a couple bad nights around her cycle. She'd take supplements, it would improve, then it would slide backwards again, and then over time, her sleep kept getting worse.


So even all night, she did sleep. It was light. It felt really fragile. She said she felt half aware all night long. She'd wake up, exhausted, anxious and tired, like her body never fully shut down. Eventually it escalated to consecutive nights with almost no sleep.


She had to take medical leave from her hospital job because she was so exhausted, she was afraid she was going to make a mistake with a patient.


So the good news is she didn't have some dramatic infection or some mysterious disease. What she had was that her body had slowly become depleted and dysregulated over time, and so it wouldn't allow [00:02:00] her to drop into deep sleep anymore.


Once we found and address why her sleep was so light with a few targeted changes, it gradually deepened again. She started getting four hours, then five hours, then six, eventually seven to eight hours of sleep almost every single night. She went from only a couple of decent nights of sleep a month to only a couple of off nights a month.


And so today I want to explain why sleep keeps getting lighter and lighter and how to fix it.


We will get back to the episode in just a second. But real quick, if your sleep also feels light and restless and you wake up exhausted, no matter how many hours you were in bed, that's usually a sign something in your body is keeping you from dropping into deep restorative sleep, and as you know, more sleep hygiene or another supplement isn't going to fix it.


Inside my Complete Sleep Solution program, we figure out what's actually suppressing your deep sleep and create a [00:03:00] clear step-by-step plan to address it. If you're ready to stop guessing and understand exactly what your body needs to sleep deeply, again, you can apply using the link in the description.


Okay, back to the episode.


If your sleep feels light and restless, one of three things is usually happening.


And the first, you've probably know that this hormone can keep you awake at night, but it can also cause light and restless sleep, and that is cortisol.


So the body should not be releasing a lot of cortisol at night. It releases it in the morning to wake us up and then helps keep us alert throughout the day. And of course, cortisol is there for when a stressful situation happens. So we don't want our body releasing cortisol at night.


When the body does start releasing cortisol at night for multiple reasons, at first, it can cause more of that light and restless [00:04:00] sleep, and then eventually it will start waking you up completely and make it really hard to go back to sleep.


Or you know, maybe you do go back to sleep around three, four or 5:00 AM but it feels really light and restless and that's because there's more cortisol than should be in your system right then.


So the second reason why sleep can be light and restless has to do with actually what causes high cortisol at night.


And usually that is inflammation. So any kind of chronic low grade inflammation is going to tell the body to release cortisol because that's stress, right? And cortisol comes to the rescue when there's stress and inflammation. So we want to figure out, okay, well where is that inflammation coming from?


And a lot of times we can't even tell that we have inflammation. Sometimes people know it. If you have a lot of aches and pains and soreness and things like that, or feel [00:05:00] puffy and inflamed, then there's definitely inflammation. But sometimes we have no idea that it's there.


And then the third reason that I see has to do with our brain chemistry, especially with our neurotransmitters. So neurotransmitters can become depleted over time and cause this very light and restless sleep. They become depleted when the body's constantly stressed, then the body burns through those neurotransmitters faster than usual. There can be genetic predispositions to having low serotonin or low GABA or low dopamine.


So those are the main neurotransmitters I'm talking about in regards to sleep that almost all of my clients are deficient in at least one of those, if not all three. Another reason they get depleted has to do with gut health as well, because it's actually the good bacteria in the gut that make up to 90% of our neurotransmitters.


[00:06:00] And then if we don't have the nutrients we need to make those neurotransmitters. So we need fat, we need protein or the amino acids from protein. We need certain B vitamins, other vitamins and minerals as well. And so if we aren't getting those from food or if the gut isn't healthy and we aren't absorbing those nutrients from food, we become depleted in those nutrients and our body can't make the neurotransmitters it needs.


So those are all things I'm looking for in the testing that I do is are neurotransmitters depleted.


And what is causing those neurotransmitters to be depleted.


So. How do you figure out what's causing your light sleep and not being able to get into deep sleep?


If you've already tried sleep hygiene and supplements and blood work and diet changes and exercising and you know, living a healthy lifestyle, then it's time to [00:07:00] test and figure it out.


I use a test called the Hormone Zoomer to find out exactly what's going on with cortisol. It's a urine test so we can see what's happening with your cortisol throughout a 24 hour period.


This test is very similar to the Dutch, which I used to use. And I do think this is a better way to test than saliva because Saliva's just going to tell us that point in time, and most saliva tests are not asking for this middle of the night sample. Whereas when we're testing urine, when we test it in the middle of the night and in the morning, we actually see what's happening throughout the night. And so a lot of times I can see on the test that yes, cortisol is super high in the middle of the night. No wonder you aren't able to sleep.


And then I use other tests to find out, okay, why is cortisol high? Because I can recommend something to lower cortisol at night, but it's there for a reason. It's there to help with stress and [00:08:00] inflammation.


So we don't actually just want to take that away without addressing, okay, why is the body stressed? Where is this inflammation coming from? 'cause the cortisol is actually there to protect you.


The second thing that you wanna do then is of course, lower inflammation, right ?Now we can do that by eating an anti-inflammatory diet and exercising and you know, there are anti-inflammatory supplements as well.


But we also need to make sure that inflammation isn't coming from other sources that you don't even realize are there. For example, different toxins. So heavy metals and environmental chemicals are a big one that we're exposed to all the time. And a healthy body should be able to break it down. But when there are too many toxins, our detox pathways get overloaded, and that can't happen as well as it should. So those toxins build up and cause inflammation.


There can also be toxins from pathogens in the [00:09:00] gut. So parasites and h pylori and bacterial overgrowth are actually releasing toxins and so. Even if you aren't getting exposed to toxins or you're doing what you can to minimize exposure to toxins that you're getting from the environment, toxins, could be being produced inside your body and you don't even realize it. So looking at gut health is a super important piece of the puzzle.


Looking at the hormones at your hormones as well. And the hormone zoomer has a marker for what's called oxidative stress, which can suggest inflammation. And a lot of times inflammatory markers on blood work are fine and they're still inflammation, and that's because there are many different ways to test for inflammation and some things might show up fine and others are, are what's going to actually be affected.


And then the gut test I do, called the gut zoomer, shows [00:10:00] how much inflammation there is in the gut so we can see if that is contributing. And then I look at total toxins to see kind of your overall toxic burden and what could be causing inflammation there.


And then the third thing is you wanna test neurotransmitters to find out exactly what's going on with those. So that's why I use a neurotransmitter test that's looking at 30 different neurotransmitters so we can see what's happening there. And, you know, I've heard people say that, oh, neurotransmitter testing isn't that accurate? It's true in a way. There's no way to actually test exactly what's going on in the brain and at the receptor level in the brain, but what's being excreted in the urine can still give us a lot of clues, and I have seen so many clients get better from supporting neurotransmitter imbalances that we see on that test.


So I just want you to know that if you've been [00:11:00] getting light restless sleep for months or years or however long, and you aren't waking up feeling rested, that there's a reason why, and it's true, it's not normal, and we can find out what's causing it and fix it.


And if you want to hear Samantha's story, then you can watch the next video here.

Listen and follow: Apple Podcasts · Spotify