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If you’ve tried everything to fix your sleep — supplements, routines, all the “right” habits — and you’re still lying awake at night, this episode is for you.


In this episode, I share my personal story of struggling with insomnia for years… and what finally helped me get back to sleeping normally again.


If you’ve started to wonder whether something is just wrong with you, I want you to know — there is a reason your body isn’t sleeping. It just hasn’t been found yet.


You’ll learn:

  • Why doing “all the right things” still doesn’t fix insomnia
  • What finally gave me real answers after years of guessing
  • The shift that took me from broken sleep… to sleeping normally again


If you feel stuck and don’t know what you’re missing, this will help you start looking in the right place.


Episode Transcript


[00:00:00] If you've tried everything and you still can't sleep, I want to tell you my story, because I was that person. I tried every supplement, followed every rule, did everything right, and for two years, none of it worked. What finally fixed it wasn't anything I'd tried before, and once I found it, everything changed.


I'm Martha Lewis, AKA, the sleep detective. I help people find the real reason they can't sleep. Fix it for good. Today, I am going to tell you how exactly I fixed mine and got back to sleeping eight and a half hours a night just like I did last night.


Now, I used to be the best sleeper that I knew, and I always cared about sleep. So I was the person who left her own dinner party at 9 45 to go to bed because I knew that I had to be up in the morning to work on the farm where I was working. So sleep wasn't something I ever thought [00:01:00] about though. I never questioned it. I just did it every night with out even thinking twice about it.


And that all changed when I got pregnant at age 39. In the last few months of pregnancy, I started lying awake for hours and I couldn't fall asleep. I couldn't stay asleep. My midwife gave me herbs to try. Nothing worked. But I told myself it was just pregnancy, and once my son was born, things would go back to normal.


But they didn't.


My son turned out to be a terrible sleeper, and so I was nursing him every 45 minutes through the night, even when he was three months old. By that time, I was so exhausted that I hired a pediatric sleep consultant. Four nights later, he was sleeping, waking up once a night. It was so life changing that I trained as a pediatric sleep consultant myself.


But here's the thing, once he was sleeping through the night, I still wasn't. I'd [00:02:00] lie awake from 3:00 AM until he woke up at six. I was getting maybe five hours on a good night when I need eight and a half.


So I did what I knew how to do. I worked in the supplement department of a health food store at that time. I tried everything that came through those doors. Magnesium Melatonin, CB, D, every sleep formula on the market. I followed every rule I could find. Bedtime routine, no screens, I stopped eating chocolate after dinner, all of it. And nothing worked. I even remember crying in the middle of the night one night because I was just so desperate for sleep and I. Couldn't figure out why I couldn't sleep.


So I got a second certification, this one in adult sleep, and that actually helped a little. I stopped obsessing, stopped complaining about my sleep to everyone around me. Stopped researching in the middle of the night. And my sleep got somewhat better. I could definitely fall asleep more easily, but I was still waking up [00:03:00] at 3:00 AM most nights for an hour or two. So I wasn't getting eight and a half hours, especially straight through the night. And I had no idea why. I was a sleep consultant who couldn't sleep, and I had run out of ideas.


Quick pause before we continue. If you're listening to this and thinking, this is me, i've tried everything and nothing is working, I know how discouraging that feels. That point where you start to wonder if something is just wrong with you or if this is how your sleep is going to be for now on. I've been there and what I've learned both from my own experience and working with clients is that there's always a reason why your body isn't sleeping. It just hasn't been found yet. That's what I help people do in the Complete Sleep Solution Program. I identify what's going on in their bodies and create a plan to fix it. If you want help figuring that out for yourself, you can book a consultation with me using the link in the description. Alright, let's get back to my story.


So around this time, [00:04:00] I was researching about how to turn my sleep consulting into a business. 'cause this definitely became my passion. And in that research I stumbled across a woman who was doing something I had never seen before. Using functional lab testing to find the root causes of why people couldn't sleep.


And I had this immediate gut reaction like, this makes so much sense. If I've done everything right and I'm still not sleeping, something must be going on inside my body, even though I was already very healthy. And the only way to know is to test for it.


So I ran the test on myself. Now, the first thing that jumped out was my cortisol. Cortisol is our stress hormone. It's supposed to be lowest at night in the, in the middle of the night so we can sleep. Mine was through the roof in the middle of the night, which meant my body was in a stress response at exactly the wrong time every single night.


Something was causing it. And that something turned out to be mostly a [00:05:00] parasite.


Now, 13 years earlier, I'd traveled in Nepal and India and had gotten really sick, and I thought I dealt with it at the time, but according to the test, I was still carrying a parasite called blastocystis homini, or a blasto for short. And it had been quietly damaging my gut, driving up my cortisol and disrupting my sleep as the years went on.


Now I know the idea of a parasite really grosses people out, but when I saw that result, I was actually relieved because finally I had an answer that made sense.


But that wasn't it.


The test also showed hormone imbalance. Not surprising after having a baby at 39. Also high uranium and copper from heavy metal exposure. Mineral imbalances. And when I later tested my neurotransmitters, I found I was deficient in both serotonin and gaba, the two that matter the most for feeling [00:06:00] calm and being able to sleep.


So it wasn't just one thing, it was all of it together, compounding each other. And not one of those things had showed up on regular blood work that I had done over the years. Every year my doctor told me that I was in perfect health, but I wasn't, and I knew I wasn't because I couldn't sleep normally. I just didn't have the right test.


So once I started correcting everything, the test had found, my sleep changed finally. Now, not overnight. That wasn't how my story went. Some of my clients get better really quickly. It definitely took me time for my body to get back in balance. But steadily and consistently, my sleep got better. And when I added support for my neurotransmitters, that was the final piece. I went from those five to six to seven broken hours a night to sleeping, eight and a half hours. I stopped thinking about sleep. I stopped dreading bedtime. It just became something my body did [00:07:00] again, the way it always had before.


Although I never take it for granted. I am thankful every night when I get a good night's sleep.


And I've now helped over 300 clients do the same thing. And what I see in my practice every single day is what I experience myself, people who've tried everything. They're already healthy. They're doing everything right and still can't sleep. And not because they're doing anything wrong, but because there's something going on in their bodies that no one has tested for yet.


So a parasite, hormone imbalance, heavy metals, mineral deficiencies, neurotransmitter depletion. These things don't show up on standard blood work, but they show up on the tests I run. And once you know what you're dealing with, then you can fix it. That's why I became the sleep detective, and that's exactly what I do for my clients.


I want you to know that you don't have to give up and live with insomnia forever. And if you want to know exactly how I help my clients get there, watch this video [00:08:00] Next, the Three Step Sleep Fix for Adults Over 40.

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