Do you have difficulty falling asleep? Staying asleep? Do you frequently wake up feeling fatigued? Do you tell yourself “I just have to make it through the day.” Do you need coffee or caffeine to keep going? Do you frequently require naps during the day?
If you answered yes to any of those questions, your sleep is not optimal. Sleep is essential for brain health, immune functioning, and recovery from the days stresses. Without good sleep we just don’t feel like ourselves. Poor sleep not only affects how our brain functions, how our body feels, but also how we look.
WHAT CAUSES POOR SLEEP?
From a functional medicine perspective there are many causes to not sleeping well, usually more than one cause happening at the same time. It is important to consider both external stressors and internal stressors as factors impacting your quality and quantity of sleep.
External stressors:
- Shift work
- Pain
- Illness
- Caffeine close to bed or later in the day
- Alcohol
- Work stress
- Financial stress
- Family stress
- Having young children
- Eating to close to bed
- Poor diet
- Lack of movement
Internal stressors:
- Infection -bacterial, fungal, viral, lyme disease
- Toxic overload – mold/mycotoxins, heavy metals, plastics, PFA’s, BPA, herbicides and pesticides
HOW DO TOXINS AND INFECTIONS CAUSE POOR SLEEP?
As a stressor comes in, cortisol is released. Cortisol in short bursts is beneficial – lowers inflammation, increases focus and agility, gets us to safety. The problem comes when the stress never goes away, internal or external, and cortisol is continually pumped out as the body tries to get us to calm down and to safety….
Prolonged cortisol breaks down our “borders” – gut mucosal lining and blood brain barrier (BBB) -, depletes us of healthy bacteria in the gut preventing adequate digestion and absorption of our nutrients, depleting our immune system, and allowing for pathogenic overgrowth – 70% of our immune system sits in our guts and our immune system is controlled by our gut bacteria.
As our borders get weak we get what is known as leaky gut. Read more about leaky gut here. As bacterial toxins and food particles are released through our now permeable mucosal lining our immune system is chronically activated requiring more cortisol production. This all leads to immune activation and inflammation throughout the body, even the brain.
When the immune cells in the brain, known as microglia, are exposed to pathogens through a leaky BBB they can become chronically activated and become stuck in an inflammatory stage and actually recruit more microglia and mast cells which carry histamine1,2. Histamine is stimulatory and can keep our brain on fire preventing good sleep.
Hint: histamine usually dumps about 2am. If you find yourself waking at this time frequently, histamine may be the culprit
The immune system eventually becomes confused with all the inflammation and can start attacking native tissue such as joints, skin, or varying organs leading to an autoimmune disease presentation and chronic disease development.
IDENTIFYING TOXIC AND INFECTIOUS TRIGGERS:
It is important to identify toxic and infectious triggers that may be stimulating an immune response in the body bringing more histamine, prostaglandins and stimulatory cytokines. As well as optimizing mineral and vitamin balance in the body such as zinc, copper, vitamin c, b vitamins, and vitamin d. After all, everything in the body is nutrient dependent, literally everything.
Through a thorough history and testing we can identify the biggest triggers to chronic immune activation that are keeping you up at night and treat them.
Insert restful, restorative sleep once again 🙂
LIFESTYLE TO IMPROVE QUANTITY AND QUALITY OF SLEEP:
While identifying internal toxic and infectious triggers is important, it is also important to have a plan to address those external stress factors by teaching stress coping techniques such as:
- vagal nerve exercises,
- brain retraining (neuroplaticity)
- how to reset circadian rhythm
- movement
- diet and nutrition education to lower total body inflammation.
At Wave on Wave Health we use a variety of herbs such as gotu kola, chinese skullcap, panax ginseng, magnolia, licorice, feverfew, holy basil and more, as well as neutraceuticals to calm down immune activation in the brain and the gut, support the borders (gut mucosal lining and BBB), and healthy bacterial growth.
By combining lifestyle interventions with a functional, whole body systems approach we are able to bring back balance and homestasis to the body resulting in resolution of symptoms and avoidance of chronic disease that will come if the symptoms are not addressed. Symptoms are the first sign of a disease state.
If you struggle with sleep schedule a free consult today to see if we can help!
References:
- Ji K, Miyauchi J, Tsirka SE. Microglia: an active player in the regulation of synaptic activity. Neural Plast. 2013;2013:627325. doi: 10.1155/2013/627325. Epub 2013 Nov 3. PMID: 24303218; PMCID: PMC3835777.
2. Samuel Deurveilher, Tatjana Golovin, Shannon Hall, Kazue Semba, Microglia dynamics in sleep/wake states and in response to sleep loss, Neurochemistry International, Volume 143, 2021, 104944, ISSN 0197-0186, https://doi.org/10.1016/j.neuint.2020.104944.
