9: How sleep and inflammation work together to help you sleep or sabotage your sleep

Episode Transcript

Welcome to the Why You Can't Sleep podcast. If you struggle to sleep and you've tried what seems like everything, you are in the right place. There are imbalances in your body that are keeping you awake, and you're going to learn what they are in this show. Now let's kick off this episode with an inspiring success story from one of my clients who has significantly improved their sleep by correcting the underlying health issues that were causing their insomnia.

Another client, Emily, had a really hard time falling asleep because her mind was racing. And she wrote, "Things are going great. Getting to bed and falling asleep within 30 minutes now. Love it!!!"

Thank you, Emily.

Hi, everyone. Welcome to another episode. Today I'm excited to talk about inflammation. So how inflammation sabotages your sleep and the three main causes of inflammation. So you'll know how you can lower inflammation so that you can sleep better when you're inflamed. When your body has inflammation, it is going to constantly release cortisol to reduce that inflammation, because cortisol is an anti inflammatory hormone. Cortisol is also one of our stress hormones that helps us focus, increases heart rate and blood pressure, and it actually moves energy away from our digestion and into your hands and feet to those extremities so that you're ready to run from or fight something. So this is our fight or flight response, and it's meant to be for survival in the moment, right? If we're getting attacked by a bear, our body releases cortisol.

That changes all these things happening in our body so that we can think quickly and run from or fight the bear. So that's great if you're being chased by a bear, which rarely happens, right, in modern life, but obviously it's not great when you're trying to sleep. So when your body releases cortisol at night from inflammation, it's going to wake you up and make it really hard to fall back asleep, or it's going to make it really hard to fall asleep in the first place. Now, there are three main reasons why you have inflammation. The first is from the food you're eating. So our diet can create a lot of inflammation. Gluten and dairy especially tend to be inflammatory, and many people are sensitive to them and they don't know it. Refined sugar, processed oils and fats are also contributing to inflammation.

It might be surprising, but a low carb or a low fat diet can actually cause inflammation too. If that's not the right balance of macronutrients for you, and if you're eating food you're sensitive to, so even healthy foods like eggs are a common one, or even broccoli, then your gut wall is going to be inflamed anytime you eat that food. So to make sure what you're eating doesn't cause inflammation, it's obviously you want to focus on eating whole organic foods, not processed food. So eliminating those refined sugars and oils, but also you want to find out what foods are sensitive to and avoid them as well. Or if you don't want to do some kind of food sensitivity test, you can start eliminating gluten, dairy, refined sugar, and alcohol right now and possibly see a big improvement in your sleep because you would be lowering so much inflammation that way. Now, the second main cause of inflammation is a pathogen in your gut. So having a parasite like giardia, or I had something called blastocystis hominis, or a bacteria like H. Pylori, which I actually see in 90% of my clients, or yeast like Candida.

So all of these things cause inflammation. And these creatures are most active at night, so that's when they are eating and excreting and releasing a lot of toxins and causing a lot of inflammation. So, this is a common reason why my clients are waking up, especially around three and 04:00 a.m. and not being able to go back to sleep. To find out if pathogens are causing inflammation for you, you want to do a pathogen screening and address anything that you might find there. Now, I use the gi map or a gastrointestinal map that shows what's living in your gut, shows the good bacteria, the bad bacteria, any kind of pathogens that might be there. And so this is a lab test I do for all of my clients because it can make a huge difference in their sleep. Gut health is so critical for good sleep, and I will tell you that none of my clients have a healthy gut.

Now, the third cause of inflammation is from environmental toxins. So these are things like our personal care products, like your shampoo, your deodorant, your face cream. All of these can have estrogen like compounds in them that can be toxic. Same with cleaning supplies you use. Tap water has a lot of toxins, and so do many of the pots and pans that we cook with. Dental fillings have heavy metals. Mold. And I just did an episode about mold toxicity.

This can cause a lot of inflammation, too, and pesticides and produce and hormones and conventionally raised meat are also adding to our toxic burden. Now, a healthy liver should ideally deal with all of these toxins. But if you're constantly exposed to these things and your liver can't keep up, it's going to cause a lot of inflammation because those toxins are going to keep circulating in your body. So what you can do, you can minimize the amount of toxins your liver has to handle by using more natural personal care products and cleaning supplies. By drinking filtered water from a high quality filter. The one a Brita filter or your refrigerator filter, does not count, unfortunately. And even limiting emfs or those electromagnetic frequencies in your home, especially at night, all of these things can really help lower your toxic burden, which is going to lower inflammation. And inflammation is one of the main reasons why you might have high cortisol at night, which is sabotaging your sleep.

There are also other reasons that can cause this high cortisol, such as a pathogen in your gut, like we talked about, or even low blood sugar. And what's causing your body to release cortisol at night is going to be different for everyone. And that's why I do lab testing so that we aren't guessing. And these tests give me clues about what's going wrong in your body that's causing you to have that stress response at night that's keeping you from sleeping normally. So if you're tired of not sleeping and you're ready to get to the root cause and fix it, I can help you. This is what I help my clients with every day. Feel free to book a call with me to talk about what it's like to work together. The simple steps you can take to really restore your health so that you can sleep like a normal person.

All right, I wish you a good night's sleep, and I will talk to you next time.

Are you ready to take the first step toward figuring out your sleep issues?

You want to start with the essentials, so I created the Sleep Essentials program to help you get started improving your sleep. It's based on what I start with for my one on one clients, so it's things that everyone needs to address.

This program has four modules so you can learn about what really causes sleep issues and how to optimize your diet and blood sugar for better sleep.

It also has five bonuses, such as how to calm your nerves, nervous system, how to exercise for your best sleep, and how to get off sleeping pills. It comes with videos, handouts, and checklists, so you can start implementing right away. The cost is normally $37, but for being a listener of this podcast, you can use code SLEEP20 to get $20 off, making it a steal for $17.

Sign up today at thesleepdetective.com/sleepessentials

Listen and follow: Apple Podcasts · Spotify