Episode Summary
This episode focuses on how circadian rhythm is regulated and why it is essential for sleep quality, hormone balance, nervous system function, and overall health. The discussion explains how cortisol and melatonin follow a natural daily rhythm controlled by the brain’s “master clock” (the suprachiasmatic nucleus) and how modern lifestyle factors—like light exposure, stress, poor sleep habits, and blood sugar instability—can disrupt this cycle.
The conversation breaks down how disruptions in circadian rhythm are often tied to nervous system imbalance, poor metabolic regulation, and impaired hormone detoxification (especially through the liver). Practical lifestyle strategies are emphasized, including light management, nutrition timing, exercise timing, and stress reduction to restore natural rhythm.
Key Takeaways
Topics Covered in This Episode
Transcript
Hey everyone, welcome to the Freedom to Flourish podcast on Doctor Joel Miller here with Doctor Tim Augustyniak.
Today we are talking about regulating your circadian rhythm and we’re going to talk about exactly what the circadian rhythm is.
We’re going to talk about why it’s so important and we’re going to talk about the different factors that we have seen through our own research, through our own clinical experience working with patients as to the different factors that impact your circadian rhythm.
We’re going to talk about these different factors and how your circadian rhythm is related to things like cortisol balance and the whole sympathetic and parasympathetic balance.
We’ll talk about hormones.
We’ll talk about just overall function and really what are the important things that you need to be doing from an overall sleep and bedtime and morning routine, but also addressing other factors that can also impact your circadian rhythm that you might not think or know about.
Doctor Tim, I’m so glad that we’re here this morning and so glad to be talking about things.
Good morning.
Good morning, this is a fun episode.
I feel like we probably don’t do phenomenal at this just with how much we work and and what we have going on in life.
But it’s always, always a good thing to ground ourselves in and remind ourselves and remind our listeners what it takes to regulate things and, and All in all just fix our sleep wake cycle and calm our nervous system.
So it’s really going to be a great episode.
We’ve got a couple things on the list here that we really want to get to and it’s, you know, what, what is our circadian rhythm and, and what does that entail?
Things that are really important to keep in mind to regulate this.
And then also how do you actually put it into action and, and how do you fix these things?
We also, you know, we always like to orient things within the frame of thought and the techniques that we utilize in the office.
So we’re going to talk about some things that we see with the systems healthcare technique and how we can go through fixing those things.
But then from there, you know, how is it that, you know, those that work night shifts and really let this get off the rails?
How, how does this negatively impact your health?
What things are going to be negatives that come about because of this?
So plenty of things on the list.
So anyway, All in all, let’s get the ball rolling.
So right off the bat, the top thing that we have on the list here is, well, what?
What does circadian even mean?
So after a quick Google search, because quite honestly, I didn’t know this either.
So circadian is a word that comes from the Latin origins of the words about and day.
So it’s about your day.
So about in in in Latin is circa and then day is DS dies D i.e.
S However, you say that in a, you know, Latin pronunciation.
And so it just means how our body goes about our day normally.
In a nutshell, all this is our sleep wake cycle.
So, you know, ideally we should have a pretty, pretty standard hormone rhythm that happens throughout the day.
Most people are familiar with melatonin because you’ll take that to, you know, help us sleep.
Or in our opinion, I don’t, I don’t think you really should, but it’s a common thing that people will take.
It’s a hormone that helps us sleep.
So throughout the day, you start with very low melatonin in the morning and then as the day goes on, it climbs.
And so by the time bedtime comes, you should have really pretty high melatonin.
The inverse is also true with cortisol.
So when you first wake up in the morning, cortisol should be really high.
That’s very standard for being in a fasted state between meals, especially up to probably 12 hours after a meal first thing in the morning.
And then as the day goes, cortisol should fall down, and decrease to a point where there’s not a whole lot around at bedtime, therefore allowing you to sleep.
So that’s, that’s really what it should normally be.
And, issues arise when all these things get thrown out of whack.
So Doctor Joel, when it comes to dysregulation of this, what, what other things are you keeping in mind beyond just cortisol and melatonin and all those things?
Yeah, I would say it really revolves around that, that relationship between them.
And you explained it so well.
I would say when it comes to the circadian rhythms, it all comes back to just the importance of cortisol and melatonin.
And there’s the balance between each other.
Our body functions off of hormones.
Our nervous system tells our body what to do and when, when to feel, you know, rested and, and well, when to feel tired based on hormone regulation.
And those hormones are regulated based on different centers in the brain.
So there is what’s called a nucleus in our brain.
It’s called the suprachiasmatic nucleus.
If you’ve researched circadian rhythms, you probably come across this.
This is considered the part that neurologists have kind of studied back to what is the area of the brain or the area of our nervous system that regulates the overall time of the body and tells our body whether it’s time to be tired and sleepy or ready to be alert.
And so the suprachiasmatic nucleus in your brain is considered the master clock.
And so here’s what’s really interesting, the more you kind of research into this, one of the biggest things that kind of stimulates the Super chaosmatic nucleus is light exposure.
Now there’s other things that we’ll get into as well, but basically there’s different stimuli that when your brain, when you’re super chaosmatic nucleus has a stimuli, it’s going to either increase cortisol and tell your body it’s time to be alert.
Or when you don’t have this stimulus, it’s going to learn more towards producing melatonin and, and putting your body more in a restful kind of sleep like state.
And it’s so important that we have this proper cortisol and melatonin balance because again, all of your organs and your body functions off of this.
There is a time through the day where your body needs to have higher cortisol to be more alert, to be ready to go.
But then during the evening and night, your body needs to have lower cortisol so you can sleep and you can, can rest and you can repair and restore and, and all of these things.
And so the time, the clock of the body is driven and kind of controlled by these different areas in our brain, but what are the factors that impact those things is really where we’ll spend, I think most of our time today.
So, Doctor Tim, you mentioned just different factors and different things that help to kind of regulate and impact this.
I’ll kind of give a kind of just the generic list and then we can kind of dive into each of these together.
But we talked about how light exposure is super common.
We talked about how South exercise is extremely common.
That’s why sometimes exercising too close to bed can be a little bit stressful in your system. It has to do with cortisol regulation as well.
Food overall and how that impacts cortisol can be a huge thing as well.
Inflammation is a big piece as inflammation can also be Dr. Cortisol and whenever these hormones are driven by other stimuli or other inputs, that’s where it can then throw off your master clock because your body has to figure out what’s going on.
To give you an example, if you, you know, you get to 8-9 O clock at night and your body, your super chaosmatic nucleus is saying, hey, you know this cortisol is consistently coming down, your melatonin is increasing.
It’s going to be time to go to bed soon.
But you go on a five mile run and that sends cortisol really high.
Your body is going to have to decide, OK, what do we do with this?
And if you handle cortisol really, really well, maybe you are actually able to go to sleep fairly soon after.
If you’re not able to handle cortisol super well, and which again, most people at eight, 9:00 at night aren’t necessarily able to do this, If you go on a run or you work out, it’s going to send your body into the state that says, hey, it’s time to be awake.
And so obviously exercise can do that, but nutrition, light exposure, stress, things like that.
So Doctor Tim, anything you’d add to that kind of generic list outside of those key factors?
And then let’s kind of let’s kind of jump into each one of those a little bit more in depth.
Yeah, well, even beyond that.
So I know, I know you’re using the five mile run as an example.
I would, I would bet that’s not especially a super applicable example to people.
So probably not with the Super chaosmatic nucleus and it perceiving light and all that stuff.
I think it’s important to talk about different wavelengths of light, different frequencies of light.
And with that, that’s where the whole argument of more of our red light versus blue light comes in.
And So what the sun emits sunlight and a lot of our, our lights in our, in our homes, our LED lights, all that stuff emit is blue light, which blue light is what triggers the Super chaosomatic nucleus to say, hey, it’s time to wake up.
Let’s produce cortisol versus blue light filtering glasses.
Things like that are actually super beneficial at decreasing that blue light exposure.
Therefore, you can be in an environment that still has some light to it that won’t necessarily make you nice and awake, you know?
And so one of the biggest things that’s, I would argue this is one of the most common things nowadays when it comes to sleep issues is all these big marketing things of, Hey, buy our blue light filtering glasses.
Buy these glasses and a lot of them are orange.
And that’s the only difference is they are orange.
Therefore they filter all the other wavelengths of light.
They just let the red light, orange light, all that stuff through.
And quite honestly, they do work and, and, and help people regulate the rhythm.
But I would argue that putting the phone down and not necessarily going on a five mile run and all those things are probably just a bit more beneficial.
Maybe read a book and do something a bit more beneficial for your brain that isn’t necessarily reliant on technology before you go to bed.
So anyway, but yeah, let’s get into let’s get into these things a bit more specifically.
So all in all, with promoting a good circadian rhythm.
Another thing that I really like to talk about is proper vagus nerve function.
So with a disrupted circadian rhythm, you’re going to have irregular stress patterns throughout the day.
So one of the first things that can predict disruption of your sleep wake cycle is adrenal fatigue of some sorts.
So adrenal fatigue doesn’t necessarily mean that you have just an insane amount of stress in your life and that, you know, you’re super far down this road of all kinds of stress.
There are four different stages.
In the first stages, you just ramped up all the time.
And this could be a very acute stressor like work, family stress, life, you name it, stuff like that.
And it could be that your adrenals really aren’t fatigued.
They’re just in OverDrive and you’re driving too much cortisol to your system.
And that’s the case if you’re, you know, figuratively running from a bear, you know you’re not going to feel like sleeping.
And so cortisol is going to negate production of melatonin and it can throw this whole thing off.
Whenever you have too much cortisol, you’re going to get a decreased tone of your vagus nerve.
And your vagus nerve is your 10th cranial cranial nerve.
And what that does is it promotes a very calming stimulus to your organs, allows for resting, allows for digesting.
You know, they like to say the parasympathetic nervous system is your rest and digest side of the autonomic nervous system.
And so everything that’s centered around chilling out, relaxing, digesting, well, all those things, it is a parasympathetic stimulus and it’s something that cortisol will negate.
And so we always need to talk about Vegas nerve function, things that will influence that, as well as other things that will produce cortisol beyond just stress.
So blood sugar issues.
So we have on this list eat right, eat right, exercise, all those things need to be done appropriately.
And what does that even mean to eat right and exercise appropriately?
So for a long time, listeners, you know, we’ve had probably 76, this is episode 76, so 76 episodes in a row now where we mentioned blood sugar and how important it is to regulate that to mitigate cortisol.
So whenever we don’t need it often enough, what will happen is blood sugar dips low.
And as soon as it dips a little bit low, if you get hangry, if you get jittery, if you get a little bit anxious, whatever the stimulus is that lets you know blood sugar is a little bit low and you’ve gone a little bit too long without eating, that is your sign that you are having cortisol bring blood sugar back up.
And it’s a very, very common problem.
And that is 100% why I am against intermittent fasting.
Most of the time everybody comes into the office and says, well, I went to this other doc and they said I need to fast.
Well, if you’re going to a doc who says you need to fast to fix your problem and you already have cortisol issues, they don’t know what they’re talking about.
I don’t want to sound like I’m ripping on people, but quite honestly, that is one of the worst things you can possibly do.
If you already have hormone issues it causes more cortisol production into your system.
And so when I say eat right, mainly what I’m getting at is eating three meals a day, five hours apart, plenty of protein and fat to anchor your meals in, and then not too many carbs.
If you keep blood sugar within a good range, you will not produce cortisol to regulate blood sugar.
If you have it within a, a, a good range of, you know, sustaining yourself with protein and fat throughout the day, all day, then when it comes time for resting and going to sleep, you are not going to require cortisol to bring blood sugar back up and therefore throw that rhythm off.
So a good telltale sign that your circadian rhythm is off is 1.
You struggle to fall asleep where your brain just can’t shut down or two, you’re waking up throughout the night because you get a cortisol surge to raise blood sugar back up.
So what I like to do in the office is draw, draw just some bumpers that blood sugar should fall between and from 1 yield to the next.
You should have a nice bell curve that comes up back down, doesn’t go above or below those lines, and therefore does not utilize hormones to regulate itself.
So say at that 5 hour mark your blood sugar is creeping down to that bottom line.
Well, if you don’t eat at that 5 hour mark, things are going to continue a little bit low.
And if it goes too low, and this is a chronic problem for you, that’s where stress hormones kick in, cortisol specifically to raise blood sugar back up.
And that’ll wake you up.
Because if you’re stressed and in need of running or fighting danger, you’re going to wake up.
It’s a fight or flight, it’s a survival response.
And sleeping during that is not going to save your life.
But in the, in the, or I guess if your, if your body is more regulated and this is the, the thing that happens where blood sugar dips low, you’ll secrete a hormone called Glucagon that does a good job of raising blood sugar without driving stress.
So in the short term stress, long term stress, anything that’s involved around stress or involved with stress, you’re going to produce cortisol to regulate this versus if you do a really good job during the day, you won’t necessarily use cortisol to fix this at night.
And so eating properly is going to mitigate that.
But as far as it goes for exercise, if you are already fatigued, as far as the adrenals go, you’re, you’re down that road of adrenal fatigue.
Exercising super, super, super intensely to drive more cortisol is not necessarily going to be beneficial whenever somebody is really fatigued with their adrenals, more so like stage 3 or 4 where the battery that is the adrenals is, is pretty drained.
I’m more so encouraging people to do more parasympathetic exercise where it’s, it’s, it’s walking, it’s zone 2 cardio, it’s, it’s yoga, it’s Pilates, it’s, it’s all those things that aren’t necessarily super intense.
CrossFit, powerlifting, sprinting, you know, interval training, things like that because those drive a lot of stress.
Whenever you are trying to regulate the circadian rhythm, you need to mitigate stress hormone production where it is not necessary unless it is at an appropriate time throughout the day.
And so like Doctor Joel said before, you know, a five mile run at 9:00 or 8:00 or 8:00 or 9:00 at night isn’t necessarily something that I would, I would argue most people are doing.
But if you get off of work and you’ve had a stressful day at work and then you do an intense exercise and you need some pre-workout, that’s caffeine and, and all this stuff, you’re going to throw things off.
And when you can’t sleep, you’re going to wonder why or hopefully not because it should be pretty obvious at that point.
But down the road when, when sleep issues get worse and worse and worse, and even without the stimulus of exercise and caffeine and all those things, if you, if you can’t sleep at that point, you’re going to wonder why.
And it’s because you’ve screwed your metabolism, you’ve screwed your hormones and you’ve screwed your circadian rhythm.
And you won’t be able to regulate this independently from those activities.
So if you’re going to do more intense exercise earlier in the day it is better.
Because if we remember what I said before, cortisol should be nice and high in the morning and fall throughout the day.
If we are driving a ton of cortisol first thing in the morning, it’s not really necessarily a bad thing unless it’s too much and we’re just fasting all throughout the day.
Now, if you have an intense workout and then have a good, you know, protein and fat rich breakfast or do it right after breakfast, whatever it is, you’re going to have that same normal rhythm.
But if you say, you know, have an insanely intense workout after work, for example, when cortisol should be falling throughout the day, you’re going to get this nice spike upward and it’s going to have to come down again.
And so it could just delay a normal bedtime and, and lead to some problems.
So anyway, that’s my long winded soapbox and exercise and food.
Yeah, that’s awesome.
So, Doctor Tim, let me clarify some things.
So what would be the biggest signs and symptoms that someone’s circadian rhythms are off?
So would you say as far as the evening time, if cortisol has been dysregulated throughout the day, whether it’s because of poor nutrition, high stress in general, maybe working out too close to bed, Would you say the main symptom there is you, you try to go to bed and you’re just not sleepy and you can’t fall asleep?
And then, the second question is morning time. Would we say that the biggest sign and symptom is when it’s time to wake up, your body does not feel like it’s time to wake up and your body is more sleepy.
Would those be the main symptoms that someone would experience?
You think if the cortisol regulation is off and therefore the circadian rhythms?
Oh yeah, 100%.
You know, we like to talk about some pretty in depth stuff when we get into the nitty gritty of things on the podcast here.
But when it comes to this topic, it is if you, if you are not feeling energized in the morning and you’re not feeling like going to bed at night, your, your rhythm is thrown off and all these things are applicable to fixing your problem.
So if, if you’re super tired in the morning and then night time comes along and you’re just like a night owl and you’re like, oh, it’s time to go.
Some people just.
Really stuck at regulating this rhythm.
And it’s not that they’re a night owl, it’s just that their cortisol rhythm is thrown off.
So 100% any sort of issues that revolve around sleep, if you struggle to fall asleep because your brain won’t shut off if you’re waking up throughout the night.
And a lot of people.
So on that note, a lot of people say, you know, I just, I just drink a lot of water, so I just have to wake up to go to the bathroom.
If you sleep really hard and you’re actually, you know, in good sleep, you shouldn’t be able to sense that you have to pee.
You should, you should be able to sleep through that throughout the night.
And you know, if, if you’re an adult and you are, you know, potty trained, you should be able to hold that and make it through till morning because you’re asleep.
You know, before kids learn how to hold it and stuff, that’s where they went to bed and all that stuff because they sleep really hard.
They just sleep right through it.
But with adults, normally what’ll happen is around like one to three, maybe 4:00 AM, you’ll get this cortisol surge and you’ll wake up and you’re like, OK, well, I feel like I got to pee now.
I can’t fall back asleep if I get to pee.
And so you just get up and you go to the bathroom.
But it’s not the, I have to go to the bathroom that wakes you up.
It’s the cortisol that wakes you up.
And then your brain goes, oh geez, my bladder’s full time to go to the bathroom.
So anyway.
Agreed.
Good.
Little side tangent.
Didn’t know you needed it.
Didn’t know you wanted it, but you needed it.
That’s good.
Yeah, cool.
All right, a couple other things here.
So we talked about cortisol, we talked about regulating that through nutrition, exercise, movement.
We’re going to talk about a couple.
So a couple other factors here.
I wanted to mention Doctor Tim, and then we can kind of move on to our next piece.
A couple other factors I found in my research that will impact circadian rhythms is actually social interaction and temperature.
So social interaction, I think obviously everyone’s a little bit different, you know, introverts, extroverts, all those things.
But generally social interaction is going to put your body in more of a heightened state.
And so if you are hanging out with people late at night and then you try to go to bed immediately, it might be a little bit difficult.
If you are talking to somebody late at night and then trying to go to bed immediately might be a little bit difficult because social interaction in general tends to kind of make us more alert and that kind of thing.
And then the other thing is temperature.
So, you know, you’ve probably heard that roughly 69° is where you want your temperature to be at when you are sleeping at night because it helps your body to cool down.
And at a lower temperature, your body’s generally able to be more restful, sleepier, and things like that, whereas the higher temperature is going to make your body feel a little bit more alert.
Now, if you have hot flashes, night sweats, different things like that, different issues with temperature regulation, obviously, that’s kind of a separate thing that will definitely impact your system.
And that usually goes back to overall hormone detox and just liver support and things like that.
But yeah, social interaction and temperature, Doctor Tim, anything to add to that?
Anything else we want to jump into when it comes to the systems, healthcare, muscle testing, what we find in the office and then eventually here we’ll jump into, OK, how do we go about fixing these things?
Nothing too crazy to add to that other than I totally 100% vouch for the body temperature and temperature of the room that you’re sleeping in because this is a, this is a point of contention in my relationship.
I’ll be super, super vulnerable with our listeners today.
My wife tends to run pretty cold and so she always just says it’s cold in this house.
And she says it just like that versus I’m like, man, it’s, it’s hot in here.
And when I sleep, I get really, really warm.
And so if I do not have a cool house to sleep in or a cool room to sleep in, then I ain’t going to sleep.
It’s as a kid, my parents.
So me and my brother shared a room and it was on the 2nd floor and it was just about as far away from the furnace as you could possibly get.
And once we actually got older, my dad went through and actually realized that the vents to the room were closed.
And so we didn’t get any heat or air conditioning in that room.
And my parents slept on the 1st floor and they got a good cross breeze through their room and they’re like, oh, just turn a fan on, you’ll be fine.
I slept on the top bunk on the 2nd floor away from the furnace.
And they would keep the air conditioning at 77°.
And so there were nights throughout the summer that I would just sweat my butt off and I just couldn’t sleep as a kid.
And so now I think that scares me.
And now that I’m the one who pays the bills, I refuse to let that be the case.
So we keep it at a nice crisp 67° and it’s wonderful.
So anyway, totally unnecessary to get into that, but it’s a point of passion in my life that you need to have an appropriate temperature to sleep in because I personally do not sleep if it’s not cold enough, so.
Yeah, so many thoughts on that real quick for other people because I’ve had patients that asked about that too, different, different things with temperature.
I mean, obviously I like practical solutions, right?
So you can get for the person that’s generally a lot colder, you can get obviously blankets, heavier blankets, weighted blankets.
I mean, I’ve, I know some people that have gotten like a heating pad that they’ll kind of lay on.
I’m generally not a huge fan of that.
If you’re laying on something plugged into the wall, just for, you know, radiation and things like that, not a huge fan.
What about?
What about grounding sheets though?
You plug those into the wall.
What do you feel about that?
Yeah, that’s kind of a different topic cause I’ve seen those work really well, but I’ve also seen those cause issues for people.
So that’s kind of an interesting thing.
I’m, I’m still kind of investigating that a little bit.
Yeah.
What about, I’ve actually had some patients who they get I, I don’t know if it’s a sheet or if it’s like a blanket to sleep on, but it’s, it’s like they, there’s like an air pump thing that circulates cool air underneath you while you sleep.
So it’s like an air conditioned type bed thing.
And quite honestly, to me that sounds wonderful.
I haven’t done that, but I have some patients who they just couldn’t sleep because they’re too hot and they got that and they sleep great now, so.
Yeah, well, and you know, there’s cooling mattresses as well, which is really interesting.
I don’t have one, I haven’t really looked into those and shop for those, but I’ve heard some people talk about how that really helps them kind of keep cooler and more relaxed at night.
So we recently bought our bed. Before you know, for people who are watching the video, we had our nice respective divots in the size of the bed that we slept in because our bed was getting pretty old.
And so we actually got a like we bought a floor model from a mattress store that was closing down of a Tempurpedic and it has the like the, their top tier cooling technology or whatever supposedly cools you down like 10° or something like that.
And it’s been pretty awesome so far.
I can’t quite say that I think it’s 10°, but I don’t know.
I’m also.
Asleep at seven.
What is this?
Yeah.
I don’t know, I feel like it’s a big marketing thing too, but I mean, I’ve been sleeping well.
We’ve been sleeping really, really well.
So I don’t know.
Temperature is super important with sleep though.
So if you are not comfortable, you are not going to sleep well.
And then if you don’t sleep well, you’re going to throw off your rhythm, you’re going to throw off cortisol, you’re going to drive stress.
So if you like to be more warm while you sleep, all the power to you, more blankets, all that stuff.
If you like to be cool, all the power to you just find ways to balance with your, with your spouse or significant other because in my philosophy, a cooler room is better in that situation.
Of course, I’m biased.
You can always put more blankets on.
You know, I, I, I cannot, even if I have no blanket on, it’s hot.
I just, I can’t sleep.
So do what you can, meet yours, meet your partner halfway and try to figure out what you guys can do to both be comfortable because it is very important.
There you go.
And our podcast just turned into a marriage counseling session.
So just kidding.
All right, so let’s keep moving here.
So overall, we’ve talked quite a bit about different lifestyle things when it comes to regulating the circadian rhythms.
Dr. Tim, we have really, really, I think valuable insights into things through functional medicine and our experience with patients and using the system’s healthcare technique to figure out what is throwing off patients.
Cortisol, melatonin, balance and rhythms and just their circadian rhythms in general.
Let’s talk about those things a little bit.
Let’s kind of segue into what we find with the muscle testing and you know, obviously there’s a lot of different approaches with muscle testing, but what we found is through the systems healthcare technique that there are very specific root causes that we’ll find.
And of course the treatment for that is going to be different for every person because everybody’s a little bit different.
But let’s kind of jump into some of those things that we find.
What if, you know, if I were to ask, hey, what are the top things that you see that will throw off this cortisol balance from a root cause perspective?
What are some things that come to mind?
And I’ll, I’ll chime in as well.
So when it comes to the process with which I go through and assess patients with assistance and healthcare techniques, I like to start off with working abroad.
This is too specific.
And what I mean by that is usually the adrenals, usually the thyroid usually are, are just our master regulators of our metabolism are the, some of the first things that are going to be affected as far as it goes for broad things.
And so what we can do is assess, do you have, do you have some sort of adrenal fatigue or adrenal pattern going on where your, your adrenals are working in OverDrive under working, you name it, all that stuff.
And then from there we can go through and figure out what sorts of organs are feeding into that.
And so when it comes to sleep issues, usually, honestly, it’s a liver issue.
Liver super, super high on the list.
And our listeners might be like, well, why?
Why?
What does the liver have to do with sleep?
Well, cortisol, yes, it’s secreted by the adrenals, but cortisol ends up being secondary to other problems.
So not sleeping well, not eating well, exercising before you go to sleep, ladies, you have a cycle.
Every single month there’s a huge surge of all kinds of hormones that need to be detoxified.
And would you believe it or not, estrogens, testosterone, insulin, all of those hormones have significant crossover with cortisol.
And so if you do not detoxify hormones properly, maybe it’s, it’s, it has nothing to do with your lifestyle habits.
Maybe you’re doing great.
Our nutrients are, I’m sorry, our foods are not as nutrient dense as they once were.
And so if you have to break down a ton of estrogens every single month, chances are you’re going to struggle to break down cortisol as well, because at some point you’re going to run out of awesome good resources to break that down.
And so when that’s the case, your liver is the victim there.
The liver is the thing that lacks the resources to break that down.
Think about it like your liver is an Amazon warehouse and you lack workers to package things and, and send out those, those packages to people.
And so it just quits working.
And so estrogens, cortisol, all those things hang out in circulation longer and just throw off your rhythm, throw off your nervous system, throw off your vagus nerve, throw all these things off.
And so liver by far and large is the most common, the most prominent indicator that we will find with sleep issues, in my opinion.
I’m interested to hear your take, Doctor Joel.
But there’s also indications for issues with REM sleep.
So when you’re, when your eyes are closed and your eyes are looking around, rapid eye movement, sleep, that’s where dreams are super prominent.
All that stuff you can test and see how that’s functioning usually points to a hormone.
The thing through the liver, you can gather pineal gland dysfunction indicators through the SHC technique also typically points to the liver.
But beyond that, anything that drives significant stress or vagus nerve dysfunction.
So it can be infections, it can be gut issues, it can be gallbladder issues, it can anything that can just irritate the heck out of your nervous system can contribute to sleep issues.
So it doesn’t have to just be a chemical driver of stress.
It can be something that just pisses your nervous system off significantly.
Because inherently all of this, all of our endocrine system, you know, our nervous system, all these things are directly intertwined through nervous system stimulating things, but then also hormone stimulating things.
And so if you have significant stress driven by the nervous system, you’re going to secrete more cortisol.
But also if you have significantly more cortisol, for whatever reason, your nervous system is going to be more in a stress state and it’s going to be more in OverDrive.
So it’s just the question is where, where does that stress come from?
The nervous system, chemical stress from cortisol and what organs or things are triggering that?
And quite honestly, I feel like we are getting to the point in the podcast, at least with what I’m saying now, where we get every podcast of, oh, it can be just about anything.
You know, any sort of chemical dysfunction in her body can lead to sleep issues.
I’ve seen all kinds of weird stuff with patients and I’ve, I’ve seen Emfs.
I saw a lady who had her phone on airplane mode, messing with her sleep.
She turned on airplane mode.
She’s good to go.
So the list is crazy long.
These are just the most common things I.
Would say, and and that’s, you know, to piggyback off that last statement that it could be from anything.
That’s where we try to, at least on the podcast, try to hey, give like the top things that we see.
And then hopefully, you know, the listener, you are kind of going investigative mode for yourself and trying to kind of analyze things yourself to understand, OK, what areas might be the weaker areas for yourself that you can kind of start to work on and improve yourself.
But also we want to talk about things from a broad perspective, because when we go in with patients and we’re checking things, we’ll find that it’s obviously different for every person, but the thing can range, you know, very, very broadly.
So things that will throw off circadian rhythm, throw off cortisol, melatonin balance.
You mentioned I, I think you mentioned all of them.
But yeah, where I kind of focus in on and, and kind of simplify is usually anything that’s going to impact the liver, usually hormones and things like that, too much sugar, high insulin, things like that.
But then a lot of times infections and the infections usually revolve around gut health.
And so I would say those are kind of the top things.
And then like the third category I would say is inflammation.
But inflammation is such a huge and unspecific category that that can make it really difficult.
So when I say inflammation, yes, it can come from infections.
Yes, it can come from eating bad food, eating seed oils, it can come from Emfs.
It can come from toxic thoughts and holding on to different emotions that you weren’t meant and designed to hold on to.
But at the same time, it could also be something you’re taking.
It could be a medication or supplement that you’re taking that’s causing a lot of inflammation issues in your body.
It could be that there’s food sensitivities going on, which you know, those are things that you can reverse and ultimately are rooted in gut health.
But there could be some different foods that you’re kind of eating occasionally that are causing issues.
One of the things I see all the time, Doctor Tim, is people are, you know, trying to eat healthy, but they they’re lacking knowledge and they don’t realize that, hey, there’s actually either certain things in those foods that are bad for you or maybe where you’re getting that food from is not a great quality.
And so over time it’s kind of causing some inflammation and things like that.
Those are the most frustrating cases for people, I would say, because they’re like, I’m doing everything right.
I’m eating healthy and spending the money on these things.
But again, that lack of knowledge makes it really, really frustrating because ultimately there’s something there causing issues.
So, Doctor Tim, we’ve, I think we’ve done a really good job breaking this down and we need to start wrapping up here.
Let’s do this.
How do we, how do we fix, how do we fix these things?
What are some things that our listeners can start to consider and think about when it comes to fixing these things?
And, and maybe this would be helpful, Doctor Tim, if we broke it down into like an overall kind of cortisol balance piece more.
That’s kind of more of the deeper root issue thing, which is kind of difficult, but we’ll get into it.
And then the second piece being more general of like hey, bedtime routine, morning routine and things like that.
Yeah, good idea.
So the more clinical side of things with how to fix this.
So like we said, the most common thing that’s going to cause problems with this is stress hormone detoxification, issues with the liver.
And so when it comes to hormones, you have to think of the stimulus to produce hormones, which is the faucet, and then the inability to break it down, which is the drain that’s clogged.
So the drain will clog as time goes on, the more hormones that we produce.
And so we need to make sure that we’re not, you know, putting a fire hose worth of hormones into our, you know, bathroom sink.
And so turn that down to an appropriate drip, which means don’t exercise super intensely at 9:00 at night, not going to be good for you.
Don’t sit on your phone all night.
What you should really be doing is eating three meals a day, five hours apart, heavy on protein and fat, not too many carbs, and then mitigate things like caffeine.
You do that, cortisol is going to come down.
It’s going to greatly reduce the amount of cortisol that’s produced to regulate blood sugar, which is awesome.
And that’s what’s going to turn that faucet down to an appropriate drip.
Beyond that, we need to make sure that we’re unclogging that drain, and so ways to do that support the hormone detox pathways.
Take some artichoke extract, take some vitamin B6 period, Oxy 5 phosphate in its active form, take some glutathione.
Those are all going to be awesome things to help detoxify cortisol and other steroid hormones as well.
And then from there, you know, if you just have a really stressful job, stressful life, all that stuff, there are some things you can do that will help you weather storms.
But then also if you just can’t sleep because your brain won’t turn off beyond doing these other things, you can take some things like valerian root, passionflower, L theanine, stuff like that, ashwagandha and that will help push something called GABA, which calms your rain down and allows you to sleep, helps reduce anxiety.
And so sometimes you just need to put a Band-Aid on things to get the ball rolling.
And then once your body kind of recovers and stress goes down, you’ll feel a whole lot better.
So that’s the way to help with regulating stress that’s out of your control.
Rhodiola root is a great idea for that.
But all in all, the lifestyle of eating properly really is the overall route to fixing this.
And then of course, if you can go see somebody that can help you figure out what exactly is irritating your nervous system and your vagus nerve.
Because if it is an infection or it is something beyond things that you can help on your own, these recommendations might just end up being wasted money and time on your part.
So if these things do not work, try to find somebody in your area, the systems healthcare website, Systems Healthcare Net, we have a list of all the practitioners that are certified in the technique.
Doctor Steve Gianjemi does a great job with his website and gets that all out there.
So you can find people that do this technique.
So take a look there and see if there’s anybody near you.
If not, reach out to somebody and see if they know somebody that is at least trained within applied kinesiology in a way that they would recommend.
So anyway, that’s like clinical stuff.
Doctor Joel, do you want to take us through what sort of lifestyle recommendations you think are good?
Yep, love it.
And I’ll add to that too, just one note is that, you know, to our listeners, you can, you can balance these things out and generally you can balance these things out naturally and by yourself through good nutrition, movement, healthy lifestyle, all these things.
But it might take a long time.
It could take three months, six months, nine months, depending on how you know what’s going on with your health.
But it can be done on your own.
Where people like Doctor Tim and I come in is we help you get to the bottom of things really fast.
To fix these issues really quickly, take a lot of the guesswork out, take a lot of the time out and just make it a super efficient process.
But it can be done on time.
And that’s why we love to talk about the different lifestyle things, things that you can start doing today that are going to help you and be a blessing to you.
So yeah, from more of the, you know, practical kind of side with things, I recommend two things.
I recommend a bedtime routine and a morning routine.
The bedtime routine kind of consists of this being done eating 2 hours before you’re trying to go to bed.
I would also say exercising 2 to 3 hours before you’re going to bed.
I think walking is a great thing to do.
You know, probably not like 30 minutes to an hour before bed, but I think walking is a great thing to do.
And then limiting light exposure.
So with your phone or computer or whatever you’re on at night, turn it on to a red light mode because blue light, which is going to stimulate, is on the other end of the spectrum from red light, which is going to be more calming, has a longer wavelength, which means less energy.
And so there’s different things that you can do on your phone and computer that actually in the color filter settings can turn it on to just a red light mode, reducing overall social interaction close to and before bed.
Getting the temperature regulation right can be also very helpful for some people that are, you know, considering a bedtime routine, just consider different things that help you kind of slow down and rest and relax.
For a lot of people, what I’ve seen is, you know, if you’re going to exercise, do it early in the morning or in the kind of early evening sometime and then eat your dinner.
Generally, going on a walk after dinner is a great idea, helps with digestion, all that stuff.
And then once it comes time, maybe you’re going to bed at 10, once 9:00 rolls around, it really kind of slows things down for the technology way.
Read a little bit, spend time with God, things like that.
When it comes to the morning time, having the light wake you up is amazing for your body.
Some people will get the different clocks like the Hatch and things like that, that kind of do that.
But I think, you know, just overall being by windows, a lot of people use the block out curtains or use a sleep mask when they sleep.
I’m not a huge fan of that because it doesn’t really allow your body to wake up kind of smoothly with the light.
So I don’t. I don’t love love that.
But having a morning routine where you wake up and you have that light exposure and you’re kind of able to get going.
I think one of the mistakes people often make when they wake up is they either start slamming caffeine immediately, in which case it’s going to just accelerate overall cortisol production in your body.
We’re number 2.
They kind of have a really, really slow morning routine.
And they kind of lollygag, as they say, kind of through the morning.
And I think that, you know, if you can kind of train your body a little bit more to, OK, morning is here, boom, let’s get going.
I think that that can encourage your circadian rhythm.
So, Doctor Tim, anything else to add that you might add to that there?
In our house we use the term dilly dally instead of lollygag, but beyond that, that all sounds great.
OK, let’s wrap things up.
Why don’t you tell everybody where they can find you and all that stuff?
Yeah, love it.
I’m Doctor Joel Miller.
The practice here is Freedom Health and Wellness in the Dallas, TX area.
We’re in Flower Mound specifically.
You can find me online on Instagram.
You can find me online at my website, drdualmiller.com.
If you have any questions, please reach out.
We’d love to help you or get connected with somebody that can.
How about for yourself, Doctor Tim?
So I’m Doctor Tim Augustyniak down here in Bentonville, AR at Flourish Functional Wellness Center.
If you want to find me online, my website flourishfwc.com
If you have any questions, comments, concerns, or suggestions for future episodes, feel free to reach out.
All of my tech contact info is on the homepage of the website, as well as links to all the socials.
Thanks everybody for listening, this has been a really fun one.
And TuneIn for the next one.
We’ll see what next week’s episode holds for us, but I’m sure it’ll be a good one.
Thanks.
Bye.
See ya.
