#16 Use Your Five Senses to Improve Sleep Quality and Quantity

The information provided in this podcast is educational and not intended to diagnose or treat medical conditions. Dr. Donnie Wilson struggled for decades to solve her numerous health issues and heal her body. But with focused determination, she healed herself. And in doing so, she discovered the Dr. Donnie stress recovery Protocol. On this show, you're going to hear from doctors, nutritionists and Experts along with Dr. Donnie who will give practical advice and wisdom to help heal your body. This is how humans heal.

Hey guys.

This episode is from one of Dr. Donnie's live Facebook streams where she answered listeners questions live on Facebook.

Today we're going to talk about sleep and sleep hygiene. What is sleep hygiene? And one of the first things I think of when I'm helping someone with their sleep because now we know how important sleep is to our health.

But.

Then we have to kind of figure out how to make sure to get it into our schedule. And also for some people, it's just no matter how much you want to sleep, it may not just happen easily.

And for some of you, maybe you think you're sleeping okay, but maybe you, you know, I think it doesn't hurt for all of us to think through our sleep hygiene every so often and to see if there's ways we can even improve our sleep a little bit more. Because here's the thing is when we, if we look at the big picture about sleep, what we know is that as humans, first of all, we need seven and a half to nine hours of sleep every night. And studies have shown that's where we get the most recovery from the day. And I used to think, oh, you know, I'm not doing anything while I'm sleeping. But actually our bodies are doing a lot while we're sleeping. In fact, studies have shown now that not only is there a lot of tissue repair that happens while we're sleeping, but also.

There'S a, essentially like a brain clean out process that happens. There's a lymphatic system in our nervous system that works especially well while we're sleeping. Plus all of our memories are integrated while we're sleeping. And so sometimes that's why you might even dream about the day before is I think because we're processing what happened in our lives and our brains are kind of putting that all together into a form that we can use them moving forward.

So that's some of the reason, some of the things that happen while we're sleeping. And at the same time, I wanted to mention something called autophagy or autophagy, I see it pronounced both ways. So it's spelled A U, T O P H A G Y. And autophagy or autophagy is. It can feel like this kind of like hard to grasp concept. But what it essentially is is really acknowledging that our bodies are constantly making new cells all the time. I think I saw recently that all the cells in our body are replaced in a relatively short period of time. It's really amazing when you think about it, because we see ourselves the same all the time, but actually our bodies and our cells are constantly replacing. And that process where our body recognizes cells that need to be replaced, it can notice the damaged cells, it can notice the cells that have had a lot of oxidative stress. It can remove those cells and make space for new cells. And that process of replacing the damaged cells is called autophagy or autophagy. And as most things in our body, there's a healthy amount of cell replacement that should happen when we're under a lot of stress. Sometimes we get too much cellular damage and too much. There's such a thing as kind of too much turnover of cells, but there's also such a thing as not enough turnover of cells. And so you really want to try to find this.

Balance of cell turnover, how to get to that, you know, perfect amount of cell turnover. And part of what helps our bodies do that is sleep. And we'll talk about some other ways to help with supporting healthy cell development as well. Like there's some dietary things you can do as well. But for today, we're focusing on sleep. So sleep is one of the ways to help your body to do that kind of cell cleanout process.

Which is super important for every different organ, every different cell in our bodies.

So there's why, you know, sleep, some of why sleep is so important. And I know for those of you who really want to be sleeping but can't, you know, that frustrating. Like, you know, why is it that I'm not sleeping? You know, how do I get myself to sleep? And so.

We'Re going to talk through today and it starts with sleep hygiene. What's often called sleep hygiene. And I don't know the word hygiene sometimes for me even turns me off to this concept because it kind of sounds like you're supposed to be perfect or super clean or something. And really to me, the concept of sleep hygiene is just giving us a chance to look back at how you set yourself up for healthy sleep and kind of go down checklist and think through, hey, am I really giving my body the best chances to sleep? Well, you know, is there anything you might be doing that you know, that maybe isn't giving your body the best chances at good sleep. So.

You know, we want to just think that through. And in the blog post I recently posted, so if some of you like to also read the blog, please head over to drdonnie.com and you can find this blog post. It's about looking at our sleep hygiene from the perspective of our senses. Because I think the fun thing to realize is that here we are laying in bed with our eyes closed, but our whole body and nervous system is picking up on our environment through our other senses. So through, you know, so even though your eyes are closed, you know your body's responding to your environment and that can affect your sleep. And so that's how I think of sleep hygiene is we want to just think through the five senses and think about what maybe could you do differently to really help ensure best sleep? Because another thing that can happen is you might be laying down and falling asleep, but are you really getting good sleep? Are you getting deep sleep? And there's ways to measure that. People use apps and different Fitbits and things. You can check how deep your sleep is and kind of evaluate. And then it can be kind of like a fun game if you wanted to, a little experiment to test your sleep now and then implement some of these things and then retest it later and see if it gets better. So let's talk through these senses, our five senses, and use that as a way to, you know, kind of a checklist of how to evaluate your sleep. So there's.

One of the first, even from eyesight, would be looking at the bedroom and see if your bedroom is cluttered. Like, if there's like piles everywhere and it's hard to even get from the door to the bed and out of the bed, that can actually affect your sleep. And I did an interview not too long ago with one of my friends who's a clutter expert, and she really emphasized what a difference it can make when you just put your laundry away and clean up the space. So that's one thing to consider. But also, you know, look at your bedroom in terms of, does it feel cozy to you? How's your. How does your bed look? How does your. How do you have. One of my favorites is to make sure you put some blackout shades on your windows so that you're gonna make sure that the light is not, you know, any lights that are outside are not going to disrupt your sleep because our bodies are so responsive to light, even when our Eyes are closed. So now also responsive to light during the day and in the evening. So even before you go to bed, if you're exposed to a lot of blue light, which is from, like, phones and.

Computer screens and also from.

I'm just distracted from this Instagram that doesn't seem to be working.

Or even blue light from a tv. What happens is there's a gland in our brain called the pineal gland. And the job of the pineal gland is to make melatonin, which is our sleep hormone. That's one of the jobs of the pineal gland. So it really sets our. What we call our circadian rhythm. Circadian rhythm is our wake and sleep cycle when we're awake and when we sleep. So melatonin, it's really cool. It responds when we're in darkness. So when it's dark and there's no blue light exposure, the pineal gland makes melatonin. And the melatonin then helps us go to sleep. And if we're exposed to light, even in the evening or while we're trying to sleep, it's going to lower our melatonin levels. Do you know what the other thing that affects the pineal gland is? Stress. When we're exposed to stress, which, of course, we all are, and, you know, I love to talk about that, but when we have more stress than stress recovery, we. It also affects the pineal gland's ability to make melatonin. And another cool fact about melatonin is that it's made from serotonin, one of our neurotransmitters. And serotonin is mostly made in the gut from the amino acid tryptophan. So we really. If your melatonin levels are low, which, by the way, you can measure your melatonin in a urine or saliva test. So if you're wondering, do I have low melatonin? Is that the problem? We can do a urine or saliva test and find out if your melatonin is low. If it is, then we know we've got to start paying attention to the darkness signals in your bedroom. But we also need to start thinking about, have you been exposed to too much stress that affected your pineal gland? Have you been. Do you have leaky gut that's affecting your serotonin production? Do you have a lack of amino acid or protein consumption that's affecting the precursor nutrients to making melatonin? So I just say that because I want you to know that, like, we can actually figure out. We can think this through and figure out what is it your body is lacking or needing in order to improve your sleep. And some of these things you may try on your own. Like you can certainly try getting a blackout shade, making sure your bedroom's dark. You can get software to block blue light on your phone, your devices, you can get blue light blocking glasses that you wear during the day, during night and the glass prevent the blue light from coming into your brain and affecting your melatonin levels. So there's things you could do, but if you've tried all of that already.

And it's still an issue, then you may want to do a test for melatonin so we can really get into this deeper and understand what your body needs.

So that's part of the sleep hygiene is just understanding your darkness, the darkness you're exposed to. But you also want to think about the sounds and noises you might be exposed to. Like.

If there's maybe you're sleeping somewhere that's noisy and you might get woken, then you may want to use earplugs so you can block the noise or say you have pets. I know for me a lot of times it's my pets that make noise and wake me up. So I tend to actually like to use a sleep sounds which you can look up on YouTube and find a lot of different.

If you search 528Hz you'll find sleep or if you just search sleep music or binaural beats, you'll find sleep music you can play now again here. Sometimes we also need to consider exposure to our phone and wifi while we're sleeping. So. So I encourage you to think about that for yourself. Can you put your phone far from your head and your body while you're sleeping?

And if you want to play some music, use a different device potentially so that you can still hear the music without exposing yourself to wifi while you're asleep. Some people are more sensitive to WI fi exposure than others, but it's something to consider. And I definitely look around the room to look for lights. Like I don't, I want to block if I have an air filter in my room, but I make sure the light is not shining because I don't want the lights shining or alarm clock, I don't use an alarm clock. I use. I use a different wake up on my phone if I need an alarm. Usually I just try to wake up naturally. And what you want to try to do when you're planning your sleep is to go to sleep, get in bed and going to sleep in time where you're going to be able to get that at least seven and a half hours. It's interesting because I find that some people actually are trying to go to sleep too early. You know, like, so if you go and lay down and maybe you can't fall asleep, or you fall asleep, but then you wake up, you know, a few hours later, it could actually be that you went to bed too early for your body. And we need to work on shifting your. I think of it like your time zone. You know, if your body circadian rhythm and time zone is set so that it really is wanting you to go to bed later in order to get good sleep. That's important to know. But then you can work on shifting when your body goes to sleep. The key with that, by the way, is you only want to expect that your body can shift no more than an hour per night. So if you've been going to bed at 2am, don't expect you're gonna be able to go to bed at 10pm you're gonna need to gradually shift that I would say even in half hour increments of time. So you might then go, okay, can I go to bed at 1:30? Can I go to bed at 1? Can I go to bed at 12:30? But at the same time as you're shifting your bedtime, you're going to want to make sure you're addressing all these other factors like the light exposure, the sound exposure. You also want to think about what would be like touch, including temperature. Studies show that we actually sleep better when it's cooler in the room. So that's something to consider too is being able to either turn down the temperature or you can also get, they have these chili pads where you can sleep on it and it helps you stay cool while you sleep. And blood sugar is also an important factor, you know, like in terms of when do you eat before bed? Like sometimes it's tempting to if you stay up late, especially I think that's when the carb cravings really come on is the later you stay up that through for me anyway. So try to not have something to eat within two hours of going to bed. That also helps to give your body more time to fast overnight. So if you eat and you stop eating at like 9pm or even 8pm Then you're going to be ready to go to bed by 10pm that gives you two hours without eating before going to bed. And then you're going to have no eating while you're sleeping. So that gives you. We need, our bodies need a break from Having food coming through. And that's where a lot of people refer to as intermittent fasting, which is really when we're having.

No eating overnight. And it really, I find it varies from person to person how long that period of time can be. I think it has to do with your stress exposure and your stress recovery. The more you're recovered from stress, it means you might be able to go a little bit longer before your blood sugar drops out in the morning. But this is also something you want to go about gradually and you really want to listen to your body. What time should you eat your last meal before going to bed at night? And then what time should you eat the next day? Can you do a 10 hour fast before you really feel like you need to eat? Can you do a 12 hour fast? And sometimes people go longer and that actually that overnight of not eating is also a way to stimulate autophagy or autophagy, which is that clean up that cleanup of our damaged cells and producing new healthy cells. So I think it ties in because sometimes when people wake up in the night, it'll feel like you need to eat. And that's a sign that your blood sugar may be imbalanced during the day also. And I find the more you then can be predictable about small regular meals during your eating time, then it's going to help you to be able to go overnight without your blood sugar dropping. And if you are having times where you wake up in the night and you're like, oh my gosh, I have to eat, that also tells me that your stress is out of balance. We need to look at your cortisol, your adrenaline and really help reset these hormones so that we can get the signaling back on track for you. So don't be. The tricky thing with sleep is when you're not sleeping well, it can, you can. It's one of those things that can trigger us into being negative about our own bodies and feeling really hard on ourselves about it. You know, it can become a spiral, in fact, where you wake up and you're like so angry that you can't sleep. Believe me, I say this from personal experience. You feel so angry at yourself for not being able to sleep that then you definitely can't sleep. Because now you've got your stress hormones triggered with adrenaline and cortisol and you're just up and ruminating over why can I not sleep? So if you wake up in the night like that, then I would say if it's been 15, 20 minutes, then get up and go do something else. You know, you could do a meditation, you could do some nice yoga, you could read, you could journal, you know, something to just kind of like get. You leave your bed for sleeping. So if you're not sleeping, get out of bed, give your body something else calming to do, keep the lights low and or off and then go back into the bed when you feel like you can go back to sleep. Which by the way I just mentioned meditations. Definitely bedtime meditations can be helpful or evening meditations to just start to tell your brain that this is the time to calm down, decrease the cortisol, decrease adrenaline. And actually the other day a patient of mine said to me, I thought it was amazing. She said to me, thank you Dr. Donnie for teaching me that my sleep is so important. She said, now when my friends want to talk to me on the phone in the evening, I say to them, I can't talk right now. I'm going to get all myself all excited and wound up. I need to be calming down so that I can go to sleep. And I just, it was so amazing to hear that from her because it really showed me that she's honoring herself, she's honoring her health and she's communicating to the people in her, her friends and her family. She's communicating with them to say my health and my sleep is important. I'll talk to you tomorrow. Right now is my sleep time. And then you can do whether it's calming music, calming meditation. You could also look for probably on YouTube, something called a body scan, which is a type of meditation that helps you to just guide you to relax every part of your body. And so that's another way to just help your senses to experience that relaxation and sleep mode.

Something a lot of people don't know is that too much stress can actually create an abundance of health problems like high blood pressure, high blood sugar, anxiety, migraines, insomnia, even fertility issues. This is because high stress puts your adrenal glands on overload. They release cortisol and adrenaline. Adrenaline which controls your digestion, hormones, immune system, energy, focus and even your emotional response. So how can you beat stress when you don't know where to start? That's why we have a free 7 day stress reset program. It's designed to help support weight loss, digestive healing and hormone balancing. It includes support for integrating self care Daily tips come to you by email and video. Gluten free dairy free meal plans as well as grocery shopping lists, journal pages and more. This free program will help you beat stress and put you on the path to wholeness in your body. Get your plan now for free@drdani.com.

These senses I would even include in the taste in the mouth. We talked a little bit about blood sugar balance, but I also like to pay attention to food sensitivities because it's possible that you might be eating a food, food that's inflammatory or stimulating. I mean, a lot of times people think of caffeine, right? That seems a little bit obvious. You know, are you having caffeine, are you having chocolate? That might be stimulating. But the thing that people find not so obvious is to think about inflammatory foods like gluten, dairy, or whatever your food sensitivities are. And we can test for that. We can test for the food sensitivities with a finger poke test and, and find out are there certain foods you're eating that are inflammatory and they're inflaming your nervous system and affecting your sleep. Have the same with the cortisol, adrenaline and neurotransmitters. By the way, we can measure those as well. And either we can measure the cortisol in either saliva or urine. We can measure the neurotransmitters like serotonin, gaba, dopamine in urine and we can measure adrenaline in urine. So if this is something where you're trying all these steps to help with your sleep, but you still can't sleep and you know, you've been stressed and anxious, then it's time to do these kind of tests. And I offer these through my office and in my programs, but you're not going to find it at the usual doctor's office and they are out of pocket, these tests. So it's something to consider.

So again, you may want to try everything you can to help your sleep first. But then if you're really struggling.

Then you're going to want to do some testing so we can get more specific about what's going on for you. I was going to share a few common supplements that people use for sleep and usually what you'll find when we mentioned melatonin in the United States, melatonin is available over the counter and sometimes people might take a low dose, like between 3 and 5 milligrams of melatonin to it's really known and researched to help reset the circadian rhythm. Like we talked about, it kind of fills in for your pineal gland to give you more melatonin. And you can, it's especially helpful for jet lag, right, if you're changing time zones, but it can Also help if you're just having trouble, you know, getting your body to sleep. And again, when we're stressed, our body, it throws off our melatonin production. And so you almost need something to help reset that. So, yes, you can take melatonin and try that. But I also recommend that if you find that you're doing that and you're still not sleeping, that's not the end of the search. There's so many more things we can do. In fact, one of my other favorite ways to address the pineal gland and melatonin production is with the Russian Kevinson peptides, which are proteins that signal to reset the function of the body. So there's a peptide called endoleutin, which is the peptide for the pineal gland, and it can reset the function of the pineal gland after being exposed to stress. So what we're doing is we're helping your body reset and make more melatonin versus taking melatonin, which is replacing what your body should be doing on its own. And so, yes, I would say you can use melatonin, but I. I really encourage you to think through, why is it I'm needing melatonin? Why is my melatonin not being produced in a healthy way? Is it because I need stress recovery? Is it because I'm getting exposed to light at night? Is it because I'm getting exposed to blue light in the evening? You know, really ask yourself, why? Why is this? And then use the melatonin if you need to, but also find out, you know, how can you really help your body get back to healthier function on its own? And then so melatonin and then the cabezin peptides, those are common supplements that you might try. There's also a lot of herbs that are calming. So we think about. Valerian is a common one. Passion flower. There's California poppy. There's scutellaria, which is, you know, hops. These are all herbs that are called nervines, which means they're calming to the nervous system. So if you find that you're anxious or you feel like your nervous system can't calm down and your mind is racing, those calming herbs can be very helpful. They've been well researched. And for some people, that's all you need, is just some herbs to help calm your nervous system. Of course, some of these other things we talked about, like a meditation, can help calm your nervous system. Calming music.

Many things that you can do to help calm the nervous system and help your body know that it's okay. And good time to sleep.

And then, let's see. So those are the calming herbs. There's also calming nutrients or amino acids. So there's. When we think about the neurotransmitters I mentioned, neurotransmitters are the messengers in the nervous system. And we have neurotransmitters that are more stimulating. That would be like dopamine and adrenaline and glutamate. They wake up our nervous system. So if we have high dopamine, high adrenaline is going to stimulate us. We're not going to sleep well. So we want to help. We can test those levels, but you can also just try things that support, you know, getting those levels to decrease. Now, at the same time, we have calming neurotransmitters. The calming neurotransmitters are serotonin and gaba. And gaba, I call it our stress buffer. But when we're under a lot of stress, our stress buffer gets depleted. So we end up most times getting depleted in serotonin and gaba. And so no wonder we're not sleeping well. We don't have enough calming in our nervous system. And our body can make these substances from our nutrients from our food all the time. But it's just if we have more stress and not enough stress recovery, we get depleted. And so sometimes it helps to add in the nutrients that help your body make more of these calming neurotransmitters. So you. For serotonin, you would add in 5 HTP, which is a precursor nutrient that comes from tryptophan. And 5 HTP can be used, usually 50-100mg. I like to measure serotonin levels first. If you're taking a medication like an ssri, then you want to check with your practitioner because you don't want to do too much serotonin support either. So if you're on a medication, then it's important to check in on that. But if you're not taking an SSRI, you might try 5 HTP at about 100mg to see if it helps. And then if you're wondering if you really need it, then I would work with a practitioner like me to get your serotonin levels measured. So you know for sure if you need five htp and there's a process of gradually increasing your serotonin if it's really low. So definitely get help with that. If you're getting stuck, if you're finding it's not going smoothly for you, that tells me you need more help. Let's really help your body get there. We know what your body needs, let's help it happen.

So that's 5 HTP. To support GABA, we can use theanine, which is T H E A N I N E. Theanine is a amino acid from protein that's calming to the nervous system and supports gaba. You can also take actual gaba. GABA comes in supplement form liquid capsules and chewables. So you can take actual gaba. For a long time they were thinking, well, how does this GABA that you swallow actually get your nervous system? But it, it seems to work for many people. You can either it's that it leaks through from a leaky brain, gets into the nervous system that way and or it signals through our gut bacteria to the GABA in our nervous system. Either way, many people find GABA to be very effective for calming during the day and for sleep. And so you'll see products that contain gaba. GABA is the initials for the long Gamma butyri.

So you can think of it as gaba. And so this is a way of calming the nervous system. Right. So we think through how do we calm, support the calming part of our nervous system. If you feel like you have high adrenaline which is stimulating, then you would use magnesium because magnesium is going to help move that adrenaline out. And a lot of people do find that taking magnesium helps with sleep. There's magnesium citrate which is actually more commonly used for helping constipation. And then there's magnesium.

Like magnesium threonate or glycinate which are more calming to the nervous system and can be used during the day or at night to help move that adrenaline out. Let's see. So then what other ways can we, what other supplements are there that help with sleep? I just want to kind of think through and see if there's anything else that you guys might be trying.

And some of the common products, for example, this is a sleep support from nature empowered and it has, so this has like a combination. So you might find a product that has multiple of these ingredients together. So it has the calming herbs like valerian and passion flower and chamomile, like chamomile tea is calming. It has the gamma we were just talking about to build your stress buffer and your calming neurotransmitters as well as theanine. It has five HTP that supports serotonin and it has melatonin as well. So it's covering many things in one. So sometimes it's for some people it's better to go one at a time. You might try just the herbs or just the five HTP or just the melatonin. But instead of having like five different products you're taking, you may want to use a combination product because then you're hitting on several of these things at once and in one product. So that can be helpful too. And the way I think about it is these are all ways to help your body get the nutrients it needs and the calming it needs to reset your ability to sleep and really help with your stress recovery. Because again, stress is what just causes in the first place. Stress is what affected melatonin production, stress is what depleted serotonin and gaba. Stress is what activated your nervous system. Right? So yes, it comes back to stress and helping your body recover from stress. And these ingredients help your body to do that, help you to recover from stress. Which is possible. I mean, because sometimes I think people feel like you might just be randomly swallowing supplements and nutrients and feel like is this even doing anything, let alone is it just masking something? But actually when we think it through like we just have been, we see that we're not masking something. We're actually addressing the things that got affected by stress and helping your body recover from stress. Now hopefully this is something you may take short term to help your body recover and then maybe not need to take these nutrients and herbs all the time. If we can help you to implement your self care, really do your stress recovery day to day on a maintenance level, then your body should be able to make its own. Melatonin should be able to make enough GABA and serotonin. We do the leaky gut healing and avoid the food sensitivities. You see what I mean? So it's all about getting at that deeper root cause to help your body recover so that you at some point you're not, you may be only using sleep support products when maybe you're traveling or you're under stress. Then you can recover again, but you may not need it all the time if you really get your self care and your stress recovery done.

Let's see. So I just, I'm checking to see if you guys have any questions for me and.

Make sure that I covered everything for you.

And.

Let'S see. So we got sleep hygiene. I invite you all to go in your bedroom today next time you get a chance and just look around and evaluate, you know, is there anything I can do about the clutter? Is the air clean? Do I need an air purifier? Do I need to dust. Do I need to open the window? What do I need to do to really get this environment? Oh, I know one of my other favorites in the sleep room is to think about your mattress and your bedding too. Because what I realized when I was getting the migraines for so long is that I was sleeping on a memory foam mattress that was filled with flame retardant. And the flame retardant soaks into our bodies and can cause a lot of different health problems. So I would definitely encourage you to think about, do you need a new mattress? Do you need, can you get an organic mattress so that you're not sleeping on chemicals? And also organic bedding, like, you can get organic sheets and pillowcases and blankets, and that makes a huge difference. So you're not getting exposed to chemicals while you sleep. And in the blog post I mentioned, I have links to some of the products that I recommend for getting organic materials in your bedroom. And I'll also add my favorite air filters, because this way you can, if you need an air filter in your bedroom. And then there's also the blackout shades and considering the blue light blocking glasses that you would use not while you're sleeping, but while you're awake, and the blue light blocking software on your computer and your devices. And then, you know, so you kind of have to like, think through and really get prepared for sleep. And of course, you don't need to do this all at once. So don't feel stressed about this right this moment, but make a little checklist for yourself and think through, hey, have I tried this? Do I have this? What can I do next to really optimize my sleep? And I invite definitely those of you who have been traveling trouble with sleep, but also any of you who maybe you've been sleeping okay, but you really want to optimize your health. Like say you have an autoimmune condition or you have you're trying to prevent cancer or you're trying to improve your fertility or reverse autoimmunity. These are all reasons to improve your sleep. So even if you're sleeping okay, let's think through if we need to improve it even more. Again, because so much good stuff happens while you sleep. If you can get good sleep, you're not going to have to do as much stuff during the day for your health because you did all this good stuff while you're sleeping. And so that's kind of cool because then you're almost multitasking while you sleep. I like that idea. So, yeah, so I really encourage all of you to do that. So check out the blog and then also check out my book. I have a book called the Natural Insomnia Solution. And those of you who are struggling with sleep, I encourage you to dig into that book, which you can get at Amazon. And we also have it in my office. And I'm happy to send you free printed copy of it. You'll see it at the Dr. Donnie store where you can order. You just pay the shipping and we'll send you the book. And it guides you through the steps of thinking about your sleep issues and how to systematically go through and identify what are the issues for your sleep and how to address them at a root cause. Because a lot of times when you'll hear about sleep, it's kind of superficial or, you know, sometimes people are, you know, you need, if you're really not sleeping, you just need to take something. And in fact, a lot of people are taking medications for sleep, even benzodiazepines, which are one of the most highly addictive medications for sleep. And I just really want you to know there's so much more we can do. Yes, you might need a medication. If you're really in a spiral of insomnia, you might need, need to be on a medication short term. You know, of course, that's up to you and your doctor. But I want you to know that that's not the end of the road. That doesn't have to be that the only thing you just get used to because there are, there's a reason you're not sleeping well. I want to know and help you discover why is it, why is it that you're not sleeping well? How do we, how do we solve that? By going through the systematic approach of understanding the physiology of sleep and the physiology of your body and the physiology of stress. By understanding that we can usually, and it's not usually just one thing, it's usually multiple things that need to kind of orchestrate together and get your hormones balanced, your neurotransmitters balanced, your digestion recovered, your stress recovery done, so that you can actually just have your body lay down and go to sleep. But it's not, you know, there's a lot that goes into it. I think that even someone who just has a really busy, busy day and just lands in bed and isn't thinking about their sleep hygiene, I think they also need to be thinking about this and go, wait a minute. When I land in my bed and I'm exhausted, I want to make sure that my body is getting the most out of my sleep, the most recovery. Because the other thing that happens, the other health issue that's associated with not getting good sleep is dementia and various kinds of neurodegeneration. So if you're wanting to improve your memory, improve your mood, improve your energy level, prevent these health issues, prevent dementia, then we need to make sure you're getting the best. And that's why I wrote the book the Natural Insomnia Solution. And that's why I'm here today talking it through with you and posting on the blog. And I'll continue to give you sleep tips. It's also in my seven day Stress reset, which you can get on my website@drdani.com and the 21 day stress remedy really helps you to implement better sleep. And what I do in the Stress reset and the stress remedy is daily help you implement these sleep hygiene tips so that you can really gradually because I believe that when we implement steps incrementally in baby steps, we're much more likely to be successful and create lasting change. So we implement little by little and always giving you a chance to notice how your body's responding, journal about it, notice what comes up, help your body through it and gradually create a shift in your routine and in your sleep so that you can create change that's going to last into the future. We don't want just something that's going to be for the next few days or the next week. We want to create change that's going to last ongoing into the future so that you're really preventing health issues now and.

20 years from now. So okay. Well, thank you so much for joining me and I look forward to talking with you next time.

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