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If you've been to your doctor, run the tests, and been told everything is normal — but you still can't sleep — this episode will explain why.


Insomnia isn't a disease. It's a sign that something in your body is out of balance. And because doctors are trained to diagnose and treat disease, the real causes of chronic insomnia consistently get missed. In this episode, Martha walks through exactly why conventional medicine falls short when it comes to sleep — and what to do instead.


You'll hear from Martha's client Andrea, who spent two years going to doctors, keeping files on her symptoms, and being told everything was normal — while waking at 1, 2, 3am every night and dealing with anxiety, fatigue, and joint pain. What functional testing eventually revealed changed everything.


In this episode:

  • Why insomnia is a health problem, not a medical problem — and why that distinction matters
  • What doctors typically recommend for insomnia and why it doesn't get to the root cause
  • Why standard blood tests aren't built to find what's causing your sleep problem
  • What functional testing looks at instead
  • What Martha found in Andrea's results after two years of normal bloodwork


00:00 Normal Tests No Sleep

00:38 Andrea’s Insomnia Story

01:32 Why Doctors Miss It

02:31 Why Common Fixes Fail

04:50 Why Labs Look Normal

06:09 Functional Testing Deep Dive

08:19 Test Don’t Guess

09:13 Andrea’s Real Root Causes

10:03 Results and Next Steps


Episode Transcript


[00:00:00] you've been to your doctor, you've had the tests, and everything came back normal, but you still can't sleep and you have no idea why. I'm Martha Lewis, the Sleep Detective. As a functional health and sleep coach, I've spent seven years working with people in exactly that situation. They're told their labs are fine while their bodies are telling a completely different story.


Over 300 clients later, I can tell you that if you aren't sleeping, things aren't normal.


In this episode, you're going to understand exactly why your doctor can't help and what's going on in your body that's keeping you awake. Because once you know that, you can finally start looking in the right place and get your sleep back for good


First I want to tell you about my client named Andrea.


So she was a good sleeper her whole life until she had kids. That was actually my experience too. After having children, she started waking at one, two, three in the morning and lying there for two hours, unable to get back to sleep. And it wasn't just sleep issues, she also had anxiety, [00:01:00] joint pain, and fatigue, and she was only in her thirties.


She kept files on all of her symptoms. She was that determined to figure it out. And after two years of doctor's appointments and all these tests, everything kept coming back normal. So she was starting to believe that this was just part of aging, even though she was still super young, and that this was who she was now, and that she had to live with this.


So she still had no answers, and she was running out of places to look


So one of the reasons that your doctor hasn't been able to help you is that insomnia actually isn't a disease. It's a sign your body is out of balance. Doctors are trained to diagnose and treat disease. That's their job, and they're really good at it. But insomnia isn't a disease. And by insomnia, I mean not being able to sleep well: trouble falling asleep, trouble staying asleep, that tossing and turning all night, [00:02:00] and maybe even getting some sleep, but just waking up feeling so exhausted.


So none of these are an actual disease. It's a symptom that things in the body aren't working the way they should, that your body is out of balance. That's actually a health problem, not a medical problem, and that's why your doctor can't help. Unfortunately, they aren't trained in health, and so we have to go outside the medical system to learn how to get our bodies healthy and in balance


You probably know some of the things that doctors do to try and help with sleep issues, but I want to talk about them and why they don't actually work. So they're probably going to recommend sleep hygiene or what I call the sleep rules of having a bedtime routine and, you know, limiting alcohol before bed and not having caffeine too late in the day.


Now, these are useful for mild sleep issues or for kind of optimizing sleep, but that's not [00:03:00] enough when there are imbalances in the body that are causing the problem. And I always say the reason someone with chronic insomnia isn't sleeping isn't because they're watching TV at night before bed. I mean, millions of people watch TV every night and sleep just fine.


Yes, it might be affecting the quality of your sleep somewhat, but it's not causing chronic sleep problems.


Now, they might also recommend that you do the gold standard for insomnia, which is CBT-I or cognitive behavioral therapy for insomnia. This can definitely help with the mental part of not sleeping, so looking at your thoughts and your behaviors and how those affect sleep.


But it's not, again, getting to the biological root causes, the imbalances I'll tell you about in a minute that are actually causing your sleep issues. And I think that sleep restriction, which is what is usually part of CBT-I, where you're supposed to really restrict the amount of time you're sleeping in a [00:04:00] bed, sounds awful.


And again, it's not addressing the root cause. Now, they might also recommend that you do a sleep study. A sleep study is mainly meant to look for sleep apnea, and it might tell you that you aren't sleeping if you don't sleep well while you're there, but it's not going to tell you why.


And if all of those fail, then they're probably going to prescribe medication or a sleeping pill. Sleeping pills are a band-aid. They are covering up the symptom. They aren't addressing what's causing it. So the problem is still there underneath. And sleeping pills can be addictive, both psychologically and physically. They can have side effects, and they don't work for a lot of people, or they work for a little while, and then they don't continue working. So many of my clients have had that experience


Now let's talk about why Andrea's test results kept coming back normal. So again, standard blood work is designed to rule out [00:05:00] disease, not identify functional imbalances. And so part of the problem is the things that disrupt sleep, especially depleted minerals, neurotransmitters, pathogens in the gut, hormone imbalances, cortisol patterns throughout a day, toxins, those aren't on standard blood work.


Now, blood work can give some clues as to what's going on, but if you use the lab's reference ranges, that's just telling you what an average of the population says is normal. It's not saying what is actually optimal or ideal.


So I can look at someone's blood work, and when I use optimal ranges, there are some things out of balance, and they are suggesting that, oh, maybe the liver isn't optimized, or maybe there are some infections or low stomach acid or slight thyroid issues, all of which can be affecting sleep.


But when you just use the lab reference ranges and everything comes back normal, you have nothing [00:06:00] to go on. And I remember that that would happen to me too, and it was so frustrating because I'm like, "Obviously, something isn't normal. I'm not able to sleep anymore."


So what I look for instead is I use comprehensive functional lab testing to look at all the different systems in your body that are affecting your sleep.


In every case of my clients, it's never just one thing. It's several things that have been kind of accumulating and affecting each other over many years. I am looking at gut health, at sex hormones, especially the balance between the hormones. Again, on standard blood work, everything can come back in the green, and even on the tests I do.


But say estrogen is way higher than progesterone, but they're both normal. But that can directly cause sleep issues. So a lot of times it's a matter of how we're interpreting even the functional lab test.


Also looking at your cortisol pattern. Blood work is just looking at that [00:07:00] second in time that you're taking the test. We need to see what's happening throughout a twenty-four-hour period because it can be normal in the morning and higher than that in the middle of the night, and it totally explains why you weren't sleeping.


I'm also looking for different neurotransmitters. So serotonin, GABA, dopamine, all of those, we need enough of those neurotransmitters to be able to sleep well.


And then there can be stimulating neurotransmitters like glutamate and histamine and acetylcholine, for example, that when those are too high, it directly impacts sleep.


I also look at different toxins, so mycotoxins from mold, environmental chemicals, heavy metals, and PFAs , are those forever chemicals.


So all of those toxins can cause inflammation, really compromise liver detox, which also affects sleep. So once the body isn't able to sleep [00:08:00] normally, like I said, it's usually multiple systems that aren't working optimally anymore. And so if you just try to focus on hormones or take HRT for hormones or just focus on gut health, it's not going to be enough if the other things are still out of balance.


So I really believe in, first of all, testing instead of guessing, 'cause that's how we know exactly what's going on in your body and what your body needs.


And looking at everything at the same time. That way nothing's missed, and that recognizes that every system in the body affects every other system.


And so if we only do one thing in isolation, the other things still stay out of balance, and eventually that first thing you tried to address is gonna get out of balance again because they're all influencing each other Now, if you want to know which imbalances might be affecting your sleep, I have a free checklist that you can download at [00:09:00] thesleepdetective.com/checklist.


It walks you through the most common root causes I see that I've been talking about here, and so you can check off different symptoms for each one so you can start to get a picture of what might be going on for you.


Now back to my client Andrea. When we ran the functional testing, here's what showed up. She had hormone imbalance from years on birth control and probably from having children as well. She had neurotransmitter imbalances, liver detox issues, and gut issues, and none of this was showing up on her standard blood work.


Once we addressed those imbalances, the waking up in the middle of the night stopped. Her anxiety went away. Her joint pain totally disappeared. She went to the doctor for a routine checkup after we had finished working together and realized that she had zero health complaints for the first time in years.


She almost asked why she was even there, 'cause she had been going to her doctor for sleep issues and these other symptoms that never got [00:10:00] resolved and then all of a sudden they were resolved.


So that's what two years of normal test results actually meant. The problem was there the whole time. The tests just weren't there to find it.


If you've been told everything is normal and you still can't sleep, you can sign up or book a consultation for the Complete Sleep Solution program and the link is in the description. And if you want to hear Andrea's story, you can watch that in the next video

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