[powerpress]
Sleep Help: Fix It Fast
Tell me… how do you sleep at night? And not like from guilt - even though I can see how that phrase might of come off, but as in - Do you fall asleep easy? Do you wake feeling rested? Do you sleep all night long?
If you can’t guess what I am going to say next - I’m just going to lay it out there for you. Sleep is critical for your mental, physical, and emotional wellbeing. Vital even. And yet for so many - sleep is elusive.
Think of how many times you hear someone say - I’m tired. I’m exhausted. I didn’t sleep. Now one end of that for SURE is the over glorification of busy BUT there is another side entirely in the time and quality of heads on the pillow. And that leads to inflammation, the build-up of toxins, the inability to process deep emotions, and disrupted energy flow.
There are more sleep aids on the market today than ever before and yet we are still sleepless.
Dive in with me today, so I can get you on the way to a full and restful night’s sleep.
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Transcript: https://audreychristie.com/116
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Sleep Help: Fix it Fast
Transcript (this is fairly raw transcript - there will be errors)
Sleep Help: Fix It Fast
Tell me… how do you sleep at night? And not like from guilt - even though I can see how that phrase might of come off, but as in - Do you fall asleep easy? Do you wake feeling rested? Do you sleep all night long?
If you can’t guess what I am going to say next - I’m just going to lay it out there for you. Sleep is critical for your mental, physical, and emotional wellbeing. Vital even. And yet for so many - sleep is elusive.
Think of how many times you hear someone say - I’m tired. I’m exhausted. I didn’t sleep. Now one end of that for SURE is the over glorification of busy BUT there is another side entirely in the time and quality of heads on the pillow. And that leads to inflammation, the build-up of toxins, in the ability to process deep emotions, and disrupted energy flow.
There are more sleep aids on the market today than ever before and yet we are still sleepless.
Dive in with me today, so I can get you on the way to a full and restful night’s sleep.
Sleep is Critical
Sleep doesn’t feel very important to us - we all go through stages in life yes? Where sleep is for old folks - or maybe we’ve proclaimed “I’ll sleep when I’m dead.”
I may have even proclaimed that before... and I get it from the outside the body appears to be still and inactive. But there is actually so much more going on in there!
During the night, while you snooze your body is working to restock your hormones, process serious toxins, repair tissue damage, re-arm the immune system with vital white blood cells, eliminate the effects of stress, and process those big heavy emotions.
The current state of sleep disorders – isn’t just causing the coffee stock to soar - it is disrupting our immune system, inflaming autoimmune conditions, and causing hormone disruptions...coffee ain’t fixin’ that.
Luckily, sleep is one of the first priorities I address in their journey back to wellness. Routinely getting a sound sleep improves motivation and the ability to make the changes necessary to heal the body. And I’m going to share simple steps you can do to change that TODAY. But first I want to talk to you about HOW you fall asleep
The Magic of Falling Asleep
The magic of falling asleep starts with the pineal gland. The pineal gland is a teeny-tiny gland, about the size of an ant, located in the center of our skull - think right behind the middle of the eyebrows (the third eye).
The pineal gland secretes a neurotransmitter called melatonin following our circadian rhythm. Have you heard of melatonin? I always cringe when I hear people “taking melatonin” for sleep or worse giving it to their kids routinely.
Melatonin is a pretty cool little neurotransmitter it, once it kicks in, it's kind of in charge. It suppresses the activity of a whole bunch of other neurotransmitters, resulting in the calming of the brain and body. Part of the reason for this brain calming is because it counters things like cortisol, the stress hormone secreted by our adrenal gland.
As you become more drowsy, your brain slowly begins to turn down the volume on our voluntary skeletal muscle functions, eventually turning them off. This is super cool because it is your body’s way of keeping you from moving around so much and doing things like acting out your dreams.
Turning off voluntary skeletal muscle is the body’s built-in way to prevent that internal revitalization work I mentioned - the restocking of your hormones, processing of the serious toxins, repairing tissue damage, re-arming the immune system with white blood cells, eliminating the effects of stress, and processing those big heavy emotions - from being disrupted.
For example, you may have seen in real life, think of a dog you have seen dreaming or even a child...this function in the body is the reason why its hard to move your limbs or shout in response to a nightmare or vivid dream.
For you to have that ideal restful and nourishing sleep, melatonin should be steadily rising and cortisol should be super low at bedtime.
Sounds simple right? But there’s a catch: the pineal gland has to be triggered to start the melatonin process and thanks to the way our ancestors lived - if someone trips the alarm your body can reverse things.
Do you know what triggers melatonin? Darkness and low noise situations. Do you know what will grind it to a screeching halt? The opposite of that. Don’t worry - we are going to take a closer look.
I want to take a quick break for a shout out - you know I adore getting feedback from you - ratings or reviews on your fav podcast provider, comments and messages on social, and feedback from clients in my 1:1s and group programs...it helps me to help more people I get the BEST questions too
Recently I received this message on Facebook-
"Audrey, I can’t sleep. I lay in bed for hours and just can’t fall asleep - and when I do fall asleep I wake frequently...is there something natural I can take?"
Where do you think I am going with this? When I dug in a little deeper, I found the issue - it wasn’t that she was missing some nutrient that her body needed to sleep - it was that she was missing darkness and low noise!
We made some adjustments and right away within just a couple of nights her body switched gears and remembered how to fall asleep and stay asleep.
Now it's not always that simple I assure you - sometimes it takes longer to reverse these things depending on a number of factors.
I have started to hear recently that “my phone is my only connection to my friends/family/world” and here's the thing - that is totally fine the other 10 hours in the day but it is an excuse (and not a very good one) for poor sleep that kicks off a waterfall of poor health.
Tough Love: Sleep Help Starts with YOU
The “my phone is my only connection” is an excuse, even amidst the current state of isolation for increasing addiction to TV, handheld devices, social media, and email in the evening, our choices easily get in the way of our body’s pro-sleep chemical shifts.
Most of these devices display what is called full-spectrum light. This serves to confuse the brain, is it night time or not? Combine that with the type of shows we watch (or even emails), these shows are often loud and stressful. The evening news is designed to create stress and fear, maybe you watch crime dramas or violent shows or horror movies designed to do the same. We don’t check work emails for joy late in the evening either - it's usually stress-related or adding to the already extensive to-do list.
But Audrey - what about my blue light blocking setting on my iPhone? Or my app for blocking blue light? Guess what - studies show it doesn’t work. Yep - all participants in the study for Apple’s “Night Shift” setting showed decreased melatonin production.
6 Steps to Sleep
As promised let’s dig into what to do - I want you to do this all week AND if next week you really stuck to it - in episode 117 I will go deeper into some other sleep assist options if that has been ruled out.
If at any point you are done with trying to DIY your sleep - you can book a quick virtual Sleep Consultation with me here.
Steps to stop sleeplessness:
1- Choose calming, quiet evening activities. Often all it takes is identifying more calming, quiet evening activities (e.g. reading a book, taking a warm bath, going for a light stroll outdoors, playing with a pet, folding laundry). If you are having trouble sleeping, I recommend no email, TV, next-day-planning, no budgeting, or stressful conversations in the full hour before bedtime. The key here is to choose activities that resonate with you - hate reading - not for you. Laundry stresses you out - choose something else.
If noise is an issue, whether it be environmental noise or the snores of a partner or pet, it's easy to grab some super soft foam earplugs or the white noise of a fan. There are lots of white noise machines that help with this too, both while sleeping and in the hour before bed.
2- Turn off all full-spectrum light for a full 1-2 hours before bedtime. This means no email, TV, or smartphone apps. On the rare occasion that you do need to use these devices - try blue light blocking glasses to assist in diffusing the effect on your sleep cycle - the phone and app settings are not effective. If you aren’t sleeping right now then make a hard rule to turn off phones/handheld devices 2 hours before bedtime. Make a hard rule - no phones or iPads in the bedroom.
3-Avoid all caffeine sources after 2 pm (e.g. tea (even green), coffee, soda, chocolate, etc. Yes, it can affect you that many hours later.
4- Mind the temperature. It is also important to the bedroom not be too hot, as this can disrupt sleep during the night. Rooms that are too hot or too cold tend to wake us up. In addition to waking us up to mess with the bedding, temperature extremes naturally increase our stress hormones which promote wakefulness.
5- Have a relaxing ritual at night. That might include some herbal tea, like lavender, chamomile, valerian, or passionflower. These herbal teas can help you relax and set the tone for sleep. If you aren’t much of a tea drinker - or even if you are - a hot bath with Epsom salts may work well if you are like me - and if a hot bath sounds like torture, maybe writing in your journal for 10 minutes or reading some inspirational or spiritual books will help. You can also meditate before bed, or meditate yourself to sleep. If you're struggling with stress or anxiety, CBD might help to calm you. Use this comparison chart to find out which type of CBD might be best for you, but often all that is needed is a little oil massaged into your legs or arms and you'll feel the effects soon enough.
6- Quiet the digestion. This one is particularly powerful, a full tummy often causes initial drowsiness but if you have restless or light sleep - avoiding eating the last 2-3 hours before bed is very beneficial.
Don’t worry you don’t have to remember all these steps - you can grab these steps in my free pdf download at audreychristie.com/autoimmune.
Its a free resource I have created just for you, its called 5 Steps to take TODAY to stop Autoimmune Disease - print off the sleep page and mark them off over the next 5 days. You can even request my specific bulletproof sleep protocol or grab a quick sleep consult with me.
To wrap this up -
Sleep is a non-negotiable. If you are routinely not sleeping then this is a priority to fix - right away in order for your body to be able to do the work of healing, in order for your emotions to process, your hormones to restock, your immune system to function properly, and your autoimmunity to diminish and heal.
Thank you so much for tuning in, if you have a second it would mean the world to me if you could leave a rating or review! That helps me help more people get clear of autoimmune disease. I’d be oh so grateful.
Be well.