Why You Can’t Sleep at Night—and How to Fix It

You're getting a bunch of energy and you know like happy hormones because your body is telling you, you got this. You can do the thing because you need to run away from the tiger. Even though it was I was booking payroll, but the body doesn't know the difference.

Claudine Francois, welcome to Beyond Diagnosis. It's always a pleasure to have you. I believe this is our fourth time, and there's a reason for that because you share fantastic. information around functional medicine and how it can help. And today we're gonna be talking about insomnia and why insomnia plagues thousands of people. And a lot of the time there's no resolution. You know, you get told a lot of the just relax or have something warm or warm bath, or it doesn't address the root cause of why you're having the insomnia. So So what I'm curious about is, first, let's talk about what are some of the common symptoms of insomnia that, you know, you see in your practice?

So many of the people I've worked with who have had insomnia, they've done the CBT, the cognitive behavioral therapy. They've gone to the doctors, they've taken all the drugs. There are so many people on antidepressants for insomnia, it's crazy. Or benzos— you've probably heard of benzodiazepines.

Yes.

Super addictive. So yeah, to get to the root cause of insomnia is super important. And typically when people come to me, they either have type 1 insomnia or type 2 insomnia, and those are difficulty falling asleep or staying asleep. So some people can go to sleep just fine, but they wake up at 3:00 AM and they're like, why can't I go back to sleep? And other people, they can't go to sleep till 3:00 AM, right? So there's 2 different kinds. Some people wake up frequently during the night or too early in the morning. They tend to be very tired and fatigued. Some people are very tired and fatigued despite sleeping or being in bed for 9 hours, right? So you'll have some people who say, I slept for 9 hours, but I wake up exhausted. Other common symptoms that people will come to me with are brain fog, irritability, difficulty concentrating, right? Because if you're not getting enough sleep, your brain's not going to be sharp. Yeah, restlessness or that ability to unwind before bed is really common. And then that increased anxiety because the mind won't shut off, those are really common as well.

They are, and I can relate to a lot of that. And can you be both? Can you be a person who finds it hard to fall asleep or wakes up But you can switch between them. Like, you might have a week where you've just struggled to fall asleep, and then you, then you do, and you think, oh, thank goodness. But then you start waking up early, like, like you said, at 3.

I mean, that's happened to me personally. There have been times when I'm really, really stressed and I can't fall asleep because I have that wired but tired. Your brain is on, you can't turn it off, you're tossing and turning, you're nervous about something or anxious about something. And then there are other times, like when I had my mold toxicity, where I'd just be waking up constantly throughout the night. So you can definitely have, depending on what's going on in your life, maybe that week, that month, that year, you can definitely have different kinds of insomnia.

What are some of the most common root causes for insomnia that you found?

As you mentioned, for people's personal lives, it can have a huge impact on their relationships, right? Because If you're not sleeping, you're not going to be the nicest person. Let's be real. I mean, and then of course, professionally, you're thinking about how effective are you going to be at your job if you're not getting any sleep? You could just be staring at the computer all day long. But yeah, you're right in thinking about the root causes because why just slap on a prescription when you can actually get to the reason why you're having the insomnia? There are a few different things I see, and there are some commonalities. One is one that I kind of touched on, which is what I call nervous system dysregulation. So that is your nervous system is on high alert because of chronic stress. Some people would call that the cortisol response. For other people, they may have hormonal imbalances. So this is really common during perimenopause and menopause because when your progesterone drops. You know, progesterone is something that some people do use as a sleep aid, but when your progesterone drops, it makes it harder for you to fall asleep. Other people, they'll have gut issues. I like to say that gut bugs party at night. So when they get, they get, it's kind of like, you know, when we were pregnant, you know, like the kid wakes up when you're laying down. It's like the gut bugs do the same thing. So they, they're partying. They raise your cortisol alarm. And it wakes you up. Similarly, people may have blood sugar imbalance or what we call liver issues, right? So if your blood sugar is imbalanced, like let's say you have a glass of wine before bed and your liver's busy detoxing the wine, and then all of a sudden at 3:00 AM it's done. And so your blood sugar drops and that causes the cortisol alarm in your body and says, oh, wake up, we're low blood sugar, you need to go get something to eat. So that can cause nighttime awakenings. And then also neurotransmitter imbalances. So if you think about serotonin, which creates melatonin, GABA, there are certain neurotransmitters that if they are off-kilter, you're not going to be able to fall asleep because your brain is literally not making the neurotransmitters needed for sleep. And then chronic pain or inflammation. If you're in pain, it's going to be hard to fall asleep, right? Because that pain is causing another cortisol response. Um, and then one that I don't see as often, but it still can happen is mold toxicity. When people are, uh, have been exposed to mold and it's stuck in their body, mold just messes up the whole thing. And that was my, one of my problems when I was waking up all the time. I'm like, what is my deal? Yeah. Why can't I sleep? I had this mold toxicity I didn't know about.

For the mold toxicity, obviously you would test for that and that's how you would find that. How would you work out if someone has these, you're talking about neurotransmitter imbalances and We know that melatonin is the sleep hormone. Serotonin is like the happy hormone, I think. I don't want to speak out of turn here. And dopamine is the motivation or something, isn't it?

Dopamine is the, um, I'm not— for some reason I can't think of the right word, but it's like the exciting, like, uh, you know, the pleasure hormone. The pleasure. Oh, the pleasure one.

So how will someone know if they're really struggling with their sleep How would they even know if these hormones are out of balance?

If you break it down, there are, there are minerals, there are hormones, and then there's your gut. And if any of those are off, it's going to create this knock-on effect. So like, for example, 90% of your neurotransmitters are made in the gut. So if you do have low serotonin, low dopamine, low GABA, any of the neurotransmitters, The way to fix it is through your gut. We can do temporary patches, you know, through supplementation to help increase your serotonin or your dopamine or any of those. But to truly fix it, we need to fix whatever the problem is in your gut that's preventing your body from making those things. Same thing with hormones. Hormones are tied to the gut. Minerals. So if you think about minerals like calcium, magnesium, sodium, potassium, those are the 4 main ones. If they're out of balance, you aren't getting nutrients into your cells. And if you don't have— if you have nutrient deficiencies, that causes this whole other problem, like a whole knock-on effect of, well, your body can't make certain things and it can't perform well and it's sluggish all the time. So those are the 3 things I start with. I start with minerals, hormones, and gut. And from there, if we need to look at, say, mold or neurotransmitters, there are also tests for those.

I love that. I love that you've gone beyond just kind of like the obvious, and you haven't gone to— you don't go to a supplement first. You sort of have a look at downstream what's happening right at the root, root cause. And I, you know, I think minerals a bit of like the unsung hero. Everyone talks about the macro, the vitamins, you need this sort of vitamins, but it's the, it's the minerals that really help, uh, you know, a lot of conditions and really give you a bit of that vitality in life.

Well, absolutely. They're like the tugboats. Like, if you think of a port and all, all the big ships that need to go everywhere, they're not getting anywhere without the tugboats. Those tugboats go on vacation and nothing's happening. Like, they're on strike and forget it, the whole port is shut down. So minerals are doing that. They're getting all of the nutrients where they need to go so that they can get in your cells so that you can get the benefits Of all that kale salad that you're eating, right?

Exactly. I know the kale— the kale salad is right at the other end. You know, we have to start opposite so you can actually absorb it and digest it.

Exactly.

So you obviously test. We don't guess. You actually test for that sort of thing so you're not taking something unnecessarily. How much would you say— I mean, it's quite obvious that stress has a huge impact on our ability to fall asleep. Um, what can people do? What do you, what do you find about stress? I mean, a lot of people are told to, you know, try and de-stress, meditate. Is there an inherent stress in us, like our nervous system is just wired? It doesn't matter what someone's doing, they just can't seem to lower the shoulders and take that deep breath.

Well, the worst thing to tell someone who's stressed is, can't you just stop stressing? Can't you just calm down? Why are you so stressed?

And then that person wonders why they've just been punched in the face.

Right? Yeah, I'll show you how to unstress. I'm taking it out. Exactly. I, as an aside, I did have a client get a punching bag so she could use that as her stress release. Point. We live in a very go, go, go all the time. Stress is the norm. If you're not stressed, you're not doing it right. type of society. And so I can tell you, as a recovering stressaholic, I was using stress as my motivator, right? I mean, I was in accounting for 25 years. It was deadline after deadline after deadline, and I loved it, right? I love the high that you get from that stress because if you get a quick stress burst, you're getting a bunch of energy and happy hormones because your body is telling you, you got this, you can do the thing because you need to run away from the tiger, even though I was Booking payroll, but the body doesn't know the difference. So we live in this society where it's like constantly pushing us to be stressed.

Yeah.

And what I noticed after 20 years of this was I didn't actually know how to not be stressed. I actually Googled how to relax because I didn't know, right? I was— I, I think I had a Sunday afternoon during COVID off, and I'm like, What does one do with a Sunday afternoon when you can't go anywhere? So, yes, we— when I have a lot of clients who are in this, what I call chronic fight or flight. And so we have to rewire the brain, and that takes a lot of coaching. So this is why functional medicine, we spend more time with our clients than, say, a doctor, because the doctor's like, take this pill, do this thing, and come back in 6 weeks. Whereas in functional medicine, we're teaching you how to rethink We're teaching you how we're like lifestyle changes that are not easy. Because if you think of the way your brain is wired to do certain things, like if you think about your brain as a superhighway, right? There are shortcuts it has created. Like when you leave your house to go somewhere, you automatically turn left. If you have to turn right, you have to consciously think about turning right. Like you're going to automatically turn left. So it's the same thing for a lot of us. We automatically go to this stress response. Or this nervous, this nervous system dysregulation. If we want to fix that, we have to A, notice it, right? We have to start to notice when we do that. And then B, we have to create a new road. We can't take the superhighway. We have to get the axe pick out and like chip our way to a new road, which takes a lot of work and repetition. And it's actually really common for people who can't sleep, who have insomnia, To talk about it all the time, right? Oh, I'm so tired. I didn't get any sleep. You know, my day's gonna be awful. I'm not gonna be able to do this report. It's gonna suck. That is their superhighway. And we have to train them to, A, notice when they're doing it, and B, make up a new story. Because telling yourself that story, it just makes it worse.

Mm-hmm.

Right? It makes the impact of not sleeping worse. And so to— and then at night, They'll start to get anxiety because they're like, oh, it's gonna be another sleepless night. This is gonna be terrible. I'm gonna be sitting staring at the ceiling. So they have these thoughts rolling through their head, and in order to fix it, you have to, A, notice that you're doing it, and then B, come up with a new program because they're running a program. And we need to take out that floppy disk, put in a new floppy for all of the other things we're doing on a physical level, on a biological, biochemical level. to, to take hold because our brain is really powerful. If we decide we can't sleep, we're not, we're not, we're not a sleeper. I'm not a sleeper. I don't sleep well, right? I'm putting a label on myself. I'm telling my brain I am not going to sleep. Please, brain, don't let, don't let that be me telling you I'm not sleeping tonight. But have you— Well, if I'm not a sleeper, my brain's gonna believe it. Right. It wants to prove me right. And so it's a self-fulfilling prophecy. Yes, we live in a society that is very stressful and we have to relearn how to not be in chronic fight or flight, not to be stressed all the time.

So for someone who is a chronic insomniac hearing this, they're thinking, I can just hear it. It's going, well, that's easy for you to say. You know, you are not the one. It's me that can't sleep. Because we, I, We identify with our conditions. You know, we almost make, you know, we make them our identity. Like you were saying, I am, I'm an insomniac, you know, I won't sleep. It's all about, you know, keeping it embedded in us, keeping our story alive. So what's something— how can someone reframe what you were just talking about? What's an example?

So instead of going down, do you want the, like, falling asleep or the waking up early one?

I guess one of both. Yeah.

Okay. So the falling asleep, like, if you walk into your room and you have anxiety because you're like, I'm not going to sleep tonight. This is going to suck. It's going to be terrible. I'm going to be staring at the ceiling. I'm going to wake up. I have a big meeting tomorrow. So the first thing to kind of— in marketing, we say stop the scroll. You have to find a way to like stop that, that thought process. So doing something different. So whether it's change, it's like a change in your routine. Some people, I, we would just create a whole new bedtime routine. We start with, how about we do a nice relaxing Epsom salt bath? Because that magnesium is going to soak into your skin. So no matter what's going on in your gut, it's going to absorb, right? Because it absorbs through your skin. We might do some meditations, or there's some great like yoga nidra Type things that you can do, or even just like listening to certain meditation podcasts or anything that like helps calm you down. Some people use prayer. It doesn't really matter. Whatever works for you. Doing like an essential oil routine. Some people love that, like taking care of yourself, giving yourself that gift, and then telling yourself, it's okay if I don't sleep. I know that I'm gonna survive. I have done this before. I'm just going to see what happens and I'm not going to worry about it. Easier said than done, right? Because this takes time and like, remember, we're making a new road. That superhighway is calling us. It's like, turn left. And we're like, no, no, but I really want to turn right. I need to turn right. So it takes repetition, right?

Yeah.

So I know we're so used to like the immediate gratification thing. Like I push the button on Amazon and it arrives the next day, or I take this pill and I have this effect. This is something that takes time. So that's why it's really important to have somebody taking you through this process to remind you doing it once isn't going to do it, fix it once, right? You have to do it night after night after night. And eventually you're paving that new road. So then you can go down the new road instead of the superhighway. You can create a new superhighway.

I like it that you said you actually have to really become aware of it because We have so many habits that we do automatically that we're not aware of. And sometimes those habits are actually what we say. It's not necessarily always what we do. So it's—

Mm-hmm.

Yeah, I, I love that. I love that terminology you have of create a new superhighway and turn left when your brain is screaming for you to turn right. That actually takes a little bit of, um, it does take courage, I think. I think it takes determination, a bit of courage to go, you know what, I'll be safe Turning left, you know, and doing something different. And I know myself, I used to— when I suffered more from insomnia, I used to always say to my husband, I just don't feel tired. I'm not going to sleep. I'm not going to sleep. You know, of course. And he kept saying, well, of course you're not going to sleep. You've just convinced yourself you're not going to sleep. And, you know, it's really making us—

Yeah.

Aware of our dialogue. So there's Insomnia type 1 and type 2. So one who wakes up early and one who wakes up in the middle of the night.

One who can't fall asleep. Yeah.

We want to test, not guess, because we want to see actually what's happening in your body, what's causing this on a biological, you know, um, level. We want to look at the hormones. We want to look at our stress. We want to look at our superhighway, developing a new superhighway with our language.

Well, there are definitely certain strategies, or I don't love to say the word diet just because to me it has a negative connotation as a woman.

Yes, it really does.

All these diets. So, yeah, I love to say nutrition. Why is nutrition important? Well, one of the things is blood sugar. We talked about that blood sugar dysregulation, and I used the example of alcohol, but it could be that you're eating too many carbs at night, and it's the same reaction where your blood sugar is high from the carbs, and then by the time your body finishes metabolizing all those carbs, it drops, and that creates a cortisol response. Or maybe you haven't eaten enough and your blood sugar drops in the middle of the night and your body's like, hello, food. Actually, this used to happen to my husband quite a bit. He wouldn't eat enough, and then he'd wake up at 3:00 AM and have to go eat something to come back to bed. So there's the blood sugar, and it's really key. I mentioned this with all my clients. We need to make sure we're getting enough protein. Now, asterisk caveat to that, I'm not talking about eating your body weight in grams of protein, which is like the thing of the day, right? The fitness influencers are like, you need to have 150, 200 grams of protein. I'm like, hello, this is not happening. This is not happening. But in order to have a stable blood sugar, you to have about 20 to 30 grams of protein per meal. And we're talking 3 meals a day, right? When someone's in a healing protocol, they need to have 3 meals a day. Even though I know fasting is another fun thing that people are doing these days. Fun?

Nothing fun about it in my book.

All right. But when we're doing a healing protocol, we need to make sure you're getting enough nutrients and we have to keep that blood sugar stable. So the 3 meals, 20 to 30 grams of protein a day. If you're eating enough protein, you shouldn't need a bunch of snacks, right? And you should have stable blood sugar between meals. Now, I have a lot of clients, especially my women, who get busy. They forget to eat lunch, and then they're like, I don't know why I'm so tired or why I'm so grumpy. And it's like, oh yeah, and you forgot your water. And it's like, your body needs stuff, right? It needs fuel, it needs nutrients, it needs hydration. So blood sugar is huge. Another thing is addressing nutrient deficiencies. So in addition to the nutrients you get from your food, a lot of us are deficient in magnesium, potassium, and B vitamins. Why do I mention those 3? It's because when we're stressed, those are the first 3 your body burns through. And girl, we're all stressed. So the magnesium, you know, a lot of people will take a bunch of magnesium pills. I, I just love to do the Epsom salt baths because again, you're absorbing it, or even magnesium lotion or spray, because you're getting it through your skin. The nice thing about the bath though is it's like a threefer. It's— you're, you're absorbing the magnesium through your skin. If it's a warm enough bath, you're also sweating, which means you're detoxing, and it's forcing you to sit somewhere for 20 to 30 minutes.

And that, that's actually training you, isn't it? Actually, if you're doing something like a bath and, and thinking, I'm doing this for myself, A little bit of self-care before you go to sleep. It's sort of training you to stop and do— can be nothing for, like you said, that 20, 30 minutes. So that's creating that pathway in the brain that you were talking about for change.

Absolutely. Yes, absolutely. Creating a new paradigm for yourself. The last thing about nutrients is I really focus on anti-inflammatory foods because we have so much inflammation already. Because stress causes inflammation. All the toxins that we're exposed to in our food, in our water, in our air, like those cause inflammation. You know, there's so much inflammation everywhere. We don't need to put more of it in our bodies. And this is partially like a truism for me, right? The anti-inflammatory foods. But I also look at the individual person's, what they're already eating and what their lifestyle is, and we come up with a Give us an example of an inflammatory food that you could be eating just before you go to sleep that's starting—

that's ruining your ability to have a deep sleep.

Yeah, the 4 biggest ones are— and now, and people are going to be like, the 4 biggest ones— I know, cringe— gluten, dairy, refined sugar, and alcohol. I find substitutes because I literally, I'll have a migraine if I have gluten. And I grew up, I'm half Polish. Our job is to feed the world. So I grew up, everything was flour, butter, sugar. I'm like, there's no wheat. So I had to find ways to make things that were good that don't have that, which I now have those recipes on my website if anyone wants them. But there's Pinterest, there's tons of stuff.

Yes.

There are ways to do it. And now they're becoming better products on the market. It used to be that if you were gluten-free, it was like, enjoy Enjoy your cardboard.

Yes, yes, I can relate to that. Absolutely. It's terrible. It's— well, you know, years ago, like 10 years ago, it was just awful and the selection was so poor. Is it what people say, if you eat just before you go to bed, you've ruined your sleep?

Kind of depends. It depends on a lot of things, right? It depends on what you've eaten all day, what has your stress been like all day, What are you eating? Like, so some of my clients, if they are waking up because they're hungry, I'm like, well, you need to eat— either you need to eat more dinner, have more protein, or have some nuts before bed. Have something with protein and fat before bed. But if you have something with carbs right before, you know, then you don't pair it with a protein or a fat, then it is probably going to do that blood sugar spike and dip that I was telling you about, and that would wake you up. Well, you should be done eating about 2 to 3 hours before bed. But let's say you have a little bit of turkey, something with protein, or maybe some garbanzo beans. And both of those, by the way, have tryptophan, which turns into melatonin. So you're good. You're creating the melatonin, which is going to help you too, right? But yeah, you don't want to be full, full when you go to bed. But if you just have a little bit of something, that should usually— And it's Like I said, protein and fat, then you should be okay.

You've shared so many great tips and strategies around insomnia. And I really think that people listening to this have a lot to take away. So we're talking about the 2 types of insomniacs. We've talked about minerals, which are really the basis, the first thing you should be looking at. We've talked about it from a functional medicine lens. How you do root cause testing and individualize to see what's happening for you, because what's happening for you as an insomniac isn't happening for someone else. Creating new habits, creating new pathways to de-stress, nutrition. So when we put all that together, what is something our listeners can do? today after they've listened to this episode to start developing better sleep hygiene?

Well, I would say the first thing is to understand insomnia is a symptom, right? It is your body giving you a heads up that something is wrong. So then you can start to be curious. You can start looking at, is it my blood sugar? Am I eating all day? Am I eating a lot of carbs throughout the day? Am I snacking? Am I eating a lot of high sugar or alcohol? Like, What's my blood sugar like? And a lot of people wear these CGMs now, so they don't have to guess. They can just look at their data from their CGM, which is pretty eye-opening when people do. Even people who think they're healthy, when they wear one, they're like, whoa, I had no idea.

For anyone listening who doesn't know, what's a CGM?

Continuous glucose monitor. So they used to only be available for diabetics, but now it's all the rage in the health space, right? Everyone's wearing them. You see people with a little patch on their arm, like, oh, That's my CGM. That's how cool I am. I know my blood sugar. Do you? So looking at your blood sugar, looking at your stress throughout the day, when I work with people, they start to notice how a stressful day impacts their night and they start to make the connection, which is really key because you can't stop being stressed. You stop— can't— you can't like stop the external stressors. But you can take steps to release the stress. So if I have a stressful day, first thing I'm doing is I'm going in my sauna blanket, right? Sauna blanket is— it's like a sleeping bag, but it makes you hot and it has an infrared light. So it's like healing and it makes you sweat. So it's like a detox and liver support. I do that. I put on my— then I take a shower and everything, and then I put on my magnesium lotion. Right? So I got my detox, my magnesium lotion, if I'm not taking a detox bath, right? Because I know if I don't, I'm gonna wake up the next morning, either I'm not gonna sleep well, or I'm gonna wake up the next morning and I'm gonna not feel great. So having the awareness can change what you do to deal with it, which can then change the outcome. So I would say those 2 things are probably the biggest, is stress and blood sugar dysregulation. The rest you can If you want to, you can test and see like what's going on in your gut, what's going on with your hormones and your neurotransmitters. But those two things alone can make a big difference for a lot of people.

And I would encourage everyone to seek out you or someone like you if if they're in another country. But you do consult internationally.

Yes, Europe, New Zealand, Australia.

Yes.

Parts of Latin America.

Because as you said, we're all individual. Don't follow something that's— don't follow something blindly on social media because that's very generic. They're not speaking— you think they're speaking to you, they're not speaking to you because you will have a different problem than the person sitting next to you. Claudine, this has been very informative, and I really encourage anybody who does have sleep disturbance Or full insomnia, to reach out to Claudine. All her details will be in the show notes. As you've heard, she can help you start with the basics and get— or get right down to the testing, whichever way. But you can get over your insomnia with the proper care and help.