Adrenals and sleep problems do they have anything to do with each other?
Well I'm gonna explain hey I'm dr. Ekberg with Wellness For Life and if
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anything so a lot of people have stress and a lot of people have sleep problems
so we're going to talk about one mechanism that is very very commonly
involved with that adrenals what do they do well your adrenal gland sits on top
of the kidney right about in here but in the back and it is the gland that
responds to stress so when your brain detects that there's something urgent
that we have to defend ourselves or deal with then it signals to the adrenals to
increase hormones for energy production so that we have more energy available to
deal with that and the energy comes from the short term energy comes from two
things from adrenaline that increases blood pressure heart rate
vasoconstriction and the second one is from cortisol which is also a stress
hormone produced by the adrenal gland that raises blood sugar because if we
need fast energy blood sugar is the fastest way to get that for an emergency
situation the other thing to understand it when it comes to sleep as cortisol
relates to sleep is that the sleep hormone is called melatonin and it is
released it's secreted by your pineal gland that sits right about in the
middle of your head right there it's a tiny tiny little thing like a tip of
your pinky finger but it's very important because melatonin is what
allows you to go to sleep it regulates your sleep cycle and cortisol and
melatonin are directly opposed to each other meaning cortisol will turn off
melatonin and vice-versa but cortisol is always going to have the
upper hand because it risks Bonz to stress and whenever we have
stress then there is no time there is no second option to delay we whenever we
have stress we have to act on it because if we don't we won't might not get a
second chance so cortisol helps regulate your blood
sugar and it does that during the night also
so cortisol is supposed to be the lowest when you go to sleep because presumably
you have fed yourself during the day so your blood sugar is is high and your
cortisol is low because it's not needed to produce blood sugar and because
cortisol is low it allows your melatonin to be high and put you to sleep then
during the night your blood sugar drops because you're not eating and now the
body has to create blood sugar from other sources and cortisol is the
signaling molecule that does that so cortisol is gonna rise through the night
until you get ready to wake up in the morning then it's gonna be at its
highest because it's maintained blood sugar through the night the longer you
go without eating the more cortisol is needed to bring that blood sugar up then
when you wake up in the morning cortisol at is at its highest which means it
opposes melatonin the most so your melatonin is the lowest and you wake up
it's a beautiful system then during the day when you have opportunities to feed
yourself the cortisol is supposed to decline it's supposed to drop during the
day and then until it's at its lowest level around bedtime and this cycle
starts all over the problem now is that we don't have stable blood sugar anymore
in our society because we have introduced too many refined foods too
much sugar too much carbohydrate grains and pasta and all those things that
stimulate the trigger blood sugar when our blood sugar is high then we trigger
a lot of Celyn so blood sugar comes crashing down
and it overshoots and we create these roller coasters of blood sugar and
whenever it's at a low whenever we have a valley that's called hypoglycemia and
guess what now the body releases cortisol because
your blood sugar is low and whenever it's low that's an emergency it's really
important it's stress so as long as we have the ability to
feed ourselves during the day and if we eat the right things then our blood
sugar is going to be stable so cortisol is not really supposed to be much of an
issue during the day as far as regulating blood sugar but when we
create a blood sugar rollercoaster we get these episodes of hypoglycemia where
we don't have enough blood sugar and the body has to release cortisol and the
more that happens during the day throughout the day the more we fatigue
the adrenal gland it's like a horse that it's pulling the the plow in the field
and it's getting really tired and we need to give it some rest but we got
these important things to get through so we just keep whipping the horse until
it's just totally fatigued and that's what we're doing to the adrenals as well
when we keep demanding cortisol during the day so the more fatigue the adrenals
are and the more we invoke cortisol during the day the more irregular our
cortisol rhythms are going to be so if we can't if we have unstable blood sugar
so that blood sugar really starts crashing throughout the night now the
body has to do a burst of cortisol during the night and it turns off the
melatonin and we wake up so a lot of people wake up in the middle of the
night because of blood sugar imbalances the other factor of course is when the
cortisol starts becoming unregulated then this curve that's supposed to be
nice and predictable starts becoming very random and haphazard and anytime
that we get a blood sugar drop and a cortisol spike we tend to wake up the
long-term solution of course is to stabilize blood sugar stop eating
refined foods and processed foods and sugar and grain and pasta and donuts and
all those things because that's what sets up this vicious cycle in the first
place then once you eat real food and you have some stable blood sugar then
it's a great idea to start doing some relaxation practice and we have some
other videos on that but we're not going to get too much into details that's a
whole other topic we just wanted to talk about how the adrenals and cortisol
relate to the sleep problems that a lot of people have so I hope that was
helpful if you have any questions or comments or suggestions please let me
know down below I'll try to answer as best I can and we can also make
additional videos on these topics if there's something that you'd like to
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