If you can't sleep normally, there are multiple imbalances in your body-it's never just one thing. But we can find what they are and fix them so you can sleep well!


Find out more and sign up for the Insomnia Insight program.


Episode Transcript:


Have you tried everything from natural to pharmaceutical just to get a good night's rest? Join me, Martha Lewis, certified sleep expert and functional health coach as I unpack what's really keeping you up at night and how to change it. This is the Sleep Detective podcast and I'm going to show you how to sleep well so you can enjoy your life.


Hello everyone. Happy Monday. I hope you all had a lovely weekend. It was beautiful in Jackson Hole, and the snow is coming, I thought today, but it looks like it's not coming till tomorrow. So one more nice day, which I'm excited about. So you probably notice that I have been going live every weekday, and it's because I just have all this information that I want to share with you. And I think that this information isn't really out there because if you tell people you have sleep issues or if you Google it, you hear the same thing over and over again, right?


Like try magnesium, try melatonin, make sure you have a bedtime routine. And if you go to your doctor, he or she's going to tell you the same thing or prescribe a sleeping pill and your blood work comes back normal, then it's all in your head. And so go to a therapist or go to a psychiatrist and get a sleeping pill. So I'm just really passionate about sharing this information that there are imbalances in your body that are affecting your sleep. And so this is what I want you to know. So every day I am talking about different things to explain what's actually going on, and then you also know that you can fix it. So it's not like you just have to live with this, or you just have to take a sleeping pill forever. So that's really what I want you to know is that there's a reason why you aren't sleeping.


We can find out what it is and we can fix it. So that's the good news. So today I want to talk about there's more than one cause of your insomnia. And the reason I think this is important to explain is because this is why what you've tried so far hasn't worked. This is why magnesium and melatonin and CBD and all the sleep formulas haven't worked for you. Your body might actually need those things, but there's more than just melatonin deficiency going on, or almost all my clients need magnesium, but they also need other minerals. And then there's things going on with their hormones and their gut health. And so it's always more than just magnesium. If magnesium works for you, that's great. If that's the answer, then that was the issue for you and now you have the answer. But most of you who are going to be listening to this and who have found me, you've tried all those things and it's not working.


And I remember when I couldn't sleep, I was so frustrated because I didn't know why I cared about my health. I was a nutritionist. I was working in the supplement industry. I've been focused on health for a very long time, and I'm actually going to tell you my whole story On Thursday for Halloween, I'm going to dress up as the sleep detective and tell you my story. But today I'm just going to give you a shorter version because when I did the functional lab test that I do now for my clients, I found that I had a parasite, which was a big contributor to why I wasn't sleeping, but it also wasn't the only reason. So I had imbalance of hormones probably from having a baby at age 39. I had heavy metal buildup from uranium and drinking water and copper from taking birth control for 10 years.


I was reacting to different foods and it had neurotransmitter deficiencies. And so these were the pieces of what I call my insomnia puzzle. So I see everyone as you have your unique puzzle and your pieces in your puzzle as to what's causing your sleep issues are different than the person next to you. And so those were my pieces. I had five major pieces, gut health with the parasite hormones, heavy metals, food sensitivities, neurotransmitter deficiencies. So it wasn't just one of those that was causing my sleep issues. There were multiple things. And so that's why if you just take, I work with a lot of peri and postmenopausal women who are taking HRT, but they still aren't sleeping. So they still need those hormones, but it's not enough if there's also gut health issues, neurotransmitter deficiencies and more. So hormones aren't enough or else than they would be sleeping well, right?


So there's always more than one reason why you weren't sleeping because the reason you weren't sleeping is because your body is out of whack. And I talked about this last week, like the bottom line truth about why you can't sleep and explained how it stress and how stress breaks a body down over time. And so by the time you have a symptom such as not being able to sleep normally, it means multiple systems in your body are broken down and aren't functioning correctly. So we need to find all of those things and support all of those different systems for you to be able to sleep better. So this is why sleep hacks don't work. For those of us who struggled for weeks, months, or even years to sleep, the sleep hygiene isn't enough to work. So as a sleep detective, I use lab tests and assessments to find the clues that explain why my clients aren't sleeping.


So we're looking for everything that could be sabotaging your sleep. So cortisol and adrenal function, again, high cortisol at night is a very common reason for not sleeping. Now, we need to find the reason why you have high cortisol at night, but that's something we're looking at. We're looking at gut health, and I say we, I do have a team who works with my private one-on-one clients. I actually run my Insomnia Insight Group program. So you'll be working with me directly in that program. So I look at cortisol and adrenals, gut health, liver detox, hormones, mineral balance, heavy metals, mold, toxicity, brain health, neurotransmitters, habits, mindset, genetics, diet, blood sugar. So as you can see, there are lots of different possible pieces to the puzzle. And so your pieces are going to be unique, a unique combination of some of those things that I just mentioned.


And so I don't want you to be overwhelmed by all of this because that's my job is to find those and then tell you how to fix them. So that's what I have spent years and countless hours of training to learn how to do. So my job is to find the different pieces of your puzzle. So I want to give you an example of my client, Emily, and if you have questions, feel free to comment them, and I will be checking the comments as well. But for now, I'll tell you about my client, Emily. So she came to me, she was going five to seven days without Emmy sleep, which I can't imagine my sleep was never that bad. But I do work with people on all parts of the spectrum as far as some people aren't sleeping at all. Some people like me are getting seven hours maybe, but that's not enough.


Some people are getting five to six, three to four, there's lots of possibilities. But Emily was going five to seven days without any sleep. Sometimes she was losing weight. She had poor memory and serious brain fog, very low energy and motivation, and she was a new mom. She had a one or 2-year-old at the time. So her pieces of the puzzle were habits. So first of all, she was trying to sleep in every room in the house, going to bed too early and watching screens when she couldn't fall asleep. So those were minor things, but when we addressed those immediately, she started sleeping better. She had blood sugar issues, which was waking her up after she did fall asleep. She of course had a very negative mindset. She had become very anxious about sleep, which is totally normal when you're going days without sleeping or when you've been dealing with sleep issues for weeks and months, but it is something that we want to address.


She had liver detox issues. She had what's called estrogen dominance where estrogen was higher than progesterone, and that's because her liver wasn't breaking down her hormones properly. She had a parasite just like I did, which was causing extremely high cortisol at night. And she had developed food sensitivities because that parasite had damaged her gut over time. And then we start reacting to different foods. So those were her pieces of the puzzle. So there's a lot of different things going on there, but we addressed all of them and now she falls asleep easily and stays asleep all night. I mean, within the first couple weeks of working together, she started sleeping so much better even before we got the test results because we addressed her habits, we looked at blood sugar, just those two things made a huge difference. And so now she has energy and patience to play with her young daughter.


She's back to work as an artist. She's an amazing artist. She creates these beautiful paintings. She's actually lives in Jackson Hole where I do too. So I see her, we're friends, and I see her everything on Facebook. She's an amazing artist. And so she wrote as a testimonial: "Right from the start, your program helped me to sleep. When I contacted you, I had been going five to seven days without sleeping, and my entire body was failing because of it. There seemed to be no hope, no prescription, no cure. I'm constantly referring to others to the immediate success I had working with you and how the lab tests legitimately found the imbalances in my body, which were causing my sleep issues. So I was able to keep improving. I'm just so grateful to have started your program and will be able to use what I learned as a stepping stone to continue to keep up my health."


And I love how she says this because about her health, because this program is really a health restoring program. Now, yes, I'm specializing in sleep, but the reason you aren't sleeping is because your body isn't healthy, even if you try to be healthy and want to be healthy and care about your health like I do, and Emily did as well. So it's more than even just sleep. It's getting everything that's out of balance in your body, back in balance, and then you can sleep normally, and then you'll also have energy and wake up feeling rested and be motivated and really be able to live your best life when your body is in balance and healthy. So the reason you haven't been able to cure your insomnia, even though you've tried so many things, is because there are multiple puzzle pieces that need to be found and then addressed, and so we can figure out what it is and fix them.


So in the Insomnia Insight program, I go into detective mode and find all your unique puzzle pieces so that we know exactly what's getting in the way of good sleep for you. So I'm using four different lab tests. I'm also assessing for things like blood sugar imbalance, mold toxicity, how your genes are acting, lots of different things to give me this big picture so I can find all the pieces of your puzzle. And then once, well, so for the next few days, there is the jumpstart, the sleep Better Jumpstart bonus. So if you sign up by October 31st, within a few days of you signing up and filling out the intake forms, I will review everything and I will give you a jumpstart plan. And so this is looking at your habits at blood sugar, at your diet screening for other things that I mentioned. And I will give you a plan right away to get started because it does take about a month to get the test results back and over half of my clients start getting an hour more of sleep in the first month just from that jumpstart plan alone.


But no matter what, with that plan, once we have your test results back in a month, you'll be ready to just jump into the next phase and get started on what I'm going to recommend next based on your results. And so once your results come in, then you'll get a summary of those. There are videos to watch to explain each of the tests in layman terms so it all makes sense. And then I also give you a protocol to address each piece of the puzzle as simply as possible. I'm really all about keeping things simple. And so the most changes I'm going to recommend right off the bat are three, one to three changes that you can start making right away. I might recommend a couple more after your test results come back and then I'll give you a protocol of supplements to follow, and you get a spreadsheet telling you which time of day to take everything so it really spells it out for you. I do recommend gradually adding each supplement and increasing the dose to make sure that your body tolerates everything, because I don't want you to start taking eight supplements at once and then you don't feel well, and we don't know why. But I will give you a spreadsheet explaining very simply how to add each thing that you can follow.


So then once you have your protocol, then you start following that. Oh, I see your comment here too, and I will answer you as well. And then you also get six months of support. So their weekly live group coaching calls that you can join and daily chat messaging. So you can ask your question anytime, and I'll get back to you Monday through Friday within 24 hours at the most, so that you have help implementing your protocol so you stay on track and we can refine it if needed or if you're having trouble making some of the changes I'm suggesting. So when you sign up today, you'll get your jumpstart plan in just a few days, and then in 30 days we'll have your lab results back so you'll know exactly why you weren't sleeping and have a plan to fix it.


And the plan is customized for you because each person's puzzle pieces are different. So I just want you to know that you can overcome insomnia when you find and fix all the root causes. And so that is what I can help you with. Now, someone asks, how much does a morning walk affect your sleep? So I don't know if you mean positively or negatively, but morning is a great time to exercise. I definitely recommend exercising most days of the week, but not strenuous exercise, especially if you aren't sleeping much because strenuous exercise just stresses your body out even more. Your body's already stressed from not sleeping and for all the reasons why you weren't sleeping. So I think a morning walk is amazing and movement is necessary. We as humans are meant to move. It's not until the past couple hundred years and especially more recently, that we have sat down for most of the day.


So I think a morning walk is really important. And part of what I talk about in the program too is what you do during the day affects your sleep at night. So it's not just about what you do the hour before bed and not watching screens and having a bedtime routine and all of those things that are always recommended. Everything you're doing is affecting your sleep and your health. So you do want to start first thing in the morning, like setting yourself up for good sleep. And that doesn't mean it has to be complicated and you have to do 20 things all day long. But yes, I think that a morning walk is great. So I hope that that helps answer that question. All right, you are always welcome to message me with questions. You can add comments to this live stream even after the fact, and I will get back to you. Let me know if you have any questions about your sleep, about my programs and how I can help. I just want you to know that you can sleep well. It's what our bodies are meant to do, and when your body is in balance, it will be able to sleep normally. So have a great day and I will be back tomorrow. So I will talk to you then.

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