Do you have an inability to fall asleep?
You get into bed and you’re just tossing and turning,
your mind is on overdrive, and you just can’t seem to sleep?
We understand that very well in adrenal fatigue.
I’m Dr. Carrie Lam. This is Dr. Michael Lam.
Can you tell us about why someone would have this inability to fall asleep?
This is one of the very common complaints.
In adrenal fatigue remember, the body first goes through different stages;
the alarm reactions then the resistance response.
As the body gets stressed, the cortisol output goes up.
Cortisol is kind of a miracle hormone because not only does it stabilize the body,
it also gives the body more energy to overcome stress by breaking down sugar, etcetera.
So, this cortisol, if it comes out too much during the day,
it has to be broken down before you can go to sleep.
In fact, high cortisol is mandatory in order for you to wake up in the morning.
If you have low cortisol, too low, you’re going to be waking up kind of slumpy,
but when you have too high cortisol, then it takes a long time to break them down
and some of this may not be at the level that is required, low enough to go to sleep.
So oftentimes you can be going to sleep at eight, nine, ten o’clock at night but your cortisol level is still high.
If you measure the cortisol level throughout the day by saliva,
you can sense what is sometimes called a reverse curve
or a curve that stays high but it fails to come down.
So this is one of the reasons that people have difficulty falling asleep until the body…
It may take them one hour. It may even take them two hours.
It may even take them a lot longer, but there are other reasons as well,
but this is just one reason.
So when you’re talking about the cortisol curve, normal people have a high cortisol in the morning
and then it kind of tapers off down throughout the day so that you’re able to feel calmer and be able to sleep at night.
When you’re talking about the reverse curve instead of being high in the morning and going down,
it basically could start out high or in the middle throughout the day
and then the cortisol ramps up at night and therefore prevents you from feeling calm
and you actually might feel really wired.
Even though you’re tired, you’re unable to fall asleep.
Also,
another possibility is that you go high in the morning but it’s just not high,
it’s too high,
and it refuses to come down.
Or if it comes down too slow,
so instead of coming down like this, it’s coming down still high.
So therefore, you have an excessive amount of cortisol at nighttime.
Now, these are just some of the possibilities,
but it’s very important to understand that this is not about only cortisol.
Cortisol is only part of the picture
because oftentimes I will see people making the common mistakes- they try to say,
“Well, if the cortisol’s high, let’s normalize it. Let’s come and press it down.”
When you press it down, the body may not like it
especially if you’ve already been used to this type of high cortisol for a long time.
In fact, you can actually crash yourself.
So what to do with high cortisol or problem falling asleep has to do with multiple circuits.
It involves different systems and you have to be able to balance this throughout the whole day,
not just at nighttime.
So the concept of unable to fall asleep tracing back to the physiological construct of the cortisol,
the neurotransmitters, the bioenergetic circuit,
the cardiovascular circuit can also the effect the norepinephrine especially.
That’s why some people for example, you have an argument at nighttime or watch an action movie,
you will not be able to fall asleep because just the norepinephrine itself,
regardless of the cortisol curve, can trigger.
So there are a lot of issues that we have to work through in order to isolate which is the real problem
and then we give the body the nutritional support the best we can and allow the body to self-regulate,
and that way the body is able to effect the feedback loops to regulate itself and calm itself down.
That is the key to success.
Otherwise, you can take all kinds of sleep-aids
and eventually you end up on sleep medications
and you can get hooked onto it and then you'll be on it for a long time.
That also not only has a dependent issue, but it also has a lot of side effects after a while.
Right so finding the root cause of the inability to sleep is very important.
Is it the cortisol? Is it norepinephrine, epinephrine?
Is it your sympathetics? Is it your hormones?
It’s very important to find someone who can find your root cause of your inability to sleep.
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