Join us on discussing the importance of sleep, quality sleep, how much sleep is required. Learn about the harmful effects stress has on our health, and how trauma plays a role in our stress response.
Welcome to Physician Heal Thyself, the podcast empowering you to take a whole-person approach to your wellbeing, spirit, soul, and body. Join me your host, Dr. Ana Lara, naturopathic, doctor, entrepreneur, and a servant of Jesus Christ. We are not just a body. We are spirit and soul. It’s time to integrate medicine and spirituality into our healing. Let’s get started.
Welcome back, everyone to Physician Heal Thy Self, the podcast. I’m Dr. Lara. I hope you’ve been enjoying the last episodes that we’ve been posting. Today is episode five and we’re going to be talking about the importance of sleep and stress management. The last two episodes we discussed the first two pillars of health, which were nutrition and physical exercise. Last week we had a special guest, Casey from Valley Fitness Kickboxing, talk about the importance of exercise, and we had a great conversation. If you missed it, go back. If you want to reach out to him, he is local here in Glendale, Arizona, and his website is valley fitness kickboxing.org. Check it out. He offers a free class. That’s how I got into it and I love it. So today we’re going to talk about these two last pillars of health and the importance because they all really interplay together.
By the way, did you know that there is World Sleep Day in March? There’s a day for everything. I swear I thought that was interesting, and they devote this day to really understanding and learning more about the different sleep disorders. I’m going to tell you that about 75 or 80% of the patients I see in the clinic have issues with sleep. Sleep is a big problem and I think it’s very prevalent here in the United States. How many people do struggle with sleeping, right? We call that insomnia, the inability to have quality sleep. So that can be a difficulty of falling asleep. When you go to bed, you have a hard time falling asleep. It could take you 30 minutes, an hour, sometimes hours. People will tell me I’m there for two, three hours and they can’t fall asleep. There are other people who will fall asleep, but then they wake up numerous times throughout the night.
All of that disruptive sleep also affects the quality of sleep. So you want to make sure that you can fall asleep quickly and stay asleep, and that’s very rare is what I find. I found a couple statistics on sleep disorders that contribute approximately 94.9 billion in healthcare costs in the United States every year. That’s a lot of money that because of not being able to sleep, people are just, I mean, the insurance companies are paying ridiculous amounts of money to help with this issue. Another statistic that I found very interesting is that 50 to 70 million of Americans have disorders, sleep disorders, and that was reported by the NIH. Another interesting fact is that the number one cause that was reported when they surveyed people that contribute to sleep disorders or quality, low-quality sleep, 64% of adults said that money is a significant source of stress in their life and it’s affecting their sleep.
So this is why I wanted to partner the two topics of sleep and stress management because oftentimes stress affects your sleep, right, and sleep is going to create more stress for you as well. So let’s get into it. Why is sleep so important? I just want to preface first that I hear a lot of talks online, influencers, very successful, influential people that have these conversations in social media and so forth, discussing how if you want to succeed, burn the candle on both ends, sacrifice it all, even if it’s sacrificing sleep. And I’m here to say that I highly disagree with that. I think, yeah, there are times that we have to sacrifice certain things in life, but sleep should not be one of them. If anything, if you understood the science behind the importance of sleep, you would want to make sure that sleep is something you are doing consistently well every day because so many things are happening when you’re asleep.
Also, make note that a lot of these people that I see on online social media podcasts who are talking about sacrifice and sleep are mostly men. It’s very rare that you find a woman saying, don’t sleep. And there’s a reason why women actually require to sleep a little bit more because there are so many changes in our hormonal makeup compared to men. Women have menstruation, women go through pregnancy, women go through menopause, and all of these factors disturb our sleep. When a woman becomes a mom, their sleep is highly disturbed. So I highly doubt that women, women, you’re out there. You can say if I’m wrong, but I would not tell my child, don’t sleep. Sacrifice that so that you can get straight A’s. Once we’ve grown and we’ve lived our lives, we start to see what things contribute to good health and what things have taken away from our good health.
And lack of sleep is one of them. So during the sleep time, there is a neural reorganization that is happening and there’s growth of the brain and function. So when we are asleep, our whole body is conserving energy that we normally would be using in the daytime. We’re conserving it at night so that certain processes can be happening during the nighttime. And what are those processes? You’re regenerating, you’re repairing. The body heals things in the nighttime when we’re sleeping also during sleep, it repairs muscle and tissue. There are a bunch of protein synthesis processes that are occurring. Every organ, it’s regenerating itself. So there’s a light detox that’s happening in every organ, including the brain during sleep, the brain is going to catalog memories and information that you’ve learned throughout the day. I know this to be a fact. If you’re a student, a college student, and you’re vigorously learning constantly, one of the things that I tell my patients is if you start to dream the things that you’re learning, that’s actually a good thing.
That means that the brain has registered that information and it is putting it back, organizing that information so that you can recall that information later. I remember numerous times studying for finals, studying for medical board exams, and dreaming about the material that I just studied. That’s a good thing. So when we sleep, we experience a period of time that’s called REM sleep. This stands REM stands for rapid eye movement. And this REM sleep is essential, essential for our memory, for learning, for mental concentration and for mood regulation. So if you’re not getting into those deep levels of sleep of rest, which is REM sleep, you’re not going to be able to execute these functions. And right now I see a lot of people in their forties and fifties and older, especially people who are business owners, who’re very successful people, they want to preserve the function of their brain.
The anti-aging is not just on a physical appearance, it’s cellular and it’s your brain function. People want to preserve the function of their brain. So if you’re not getting REM sleep, your brain is not able to optimize. You’re not optimizing these areas of your brain. Another thing. So what REM sleep is, it’s very interesting because I do this therapy called craniosacral therapy, and when I’m doing this therapy, I will see people’s eyes do that. So what that looks like is it’s a stage of sleep. When you’re dreaming, in order to dream, you have to be in REM sleep. And it’s during this time that the eyes will rapidly start to move behind the eyelids. So though my patient might be laying there and I’m doing the work, all of a sudden I see their eyelids rapidly moving either up and down or sideways, and I know that they’re in this REM state, they look like they’re asleep.
They think they’re asleep. Sometimes they’re like, I could hear all the noises around me. And what’s interesting when I see a patient do that on my table, I know that they’re processing something. It’s not that they’re dreaming, they’re processing trauma, which we’re going to talk about later on. So during sleep, your body’s healing and recovering. So if you’re working out, you need to make sure that your are getting adequate hours of quality sleep because this is the time that your immune system, that your body, it’s healing those muscles that you worked out earlier that day. And so when it comes to muscle recovery and weight loss, most of the time people are dropping the ball when it comes to bed. They’re not getting enough quality hours to rest and repair and have all of these metabolic processes happening while they’re sleeping. One of the important things of sleep also is that during this time there’s a lot of hormone regulation of growth, hunger hormones such as adrenalin and leptin.
And so obesity, you can see a correlation of people who are not sleeping enough and obesity, obviously, the diet is a component, exercise is a component. So I hope you’re starting to see how this is building up on each other. You can leave nutrition out, exercise out, not exorcisms, guys, exercise out or sleep. All of these three things are very important pillars, and we’re going to touch on stress in a little bit. So you want to make sure that you’re getting enough sleep because another part of this process is that hormone production is happening at night. Do you know that growth hormone, which we all produce, children produce a lot of it because they’re growing exponentially every year, every month, every day. So they need a lot of growth hormone. And when young people go through spurts, growth spurts, when they’re going through puberty, they make tons of growth hormone.
The time of the day that we make the most growth hormone happens between nine and 10 o’clock. So if you’re not asleep by that time, you’re missing out on that surge, that potential surge of growth hormone. Once again, this is why it’s important to be sleeping, not just sleeping your eight hours or so, but sleeping the right time. And I know that there are people that work night shifts, and it is unfortunately, it does throw off their circadian rhythms. It throws off their hormones, it throws off a lot of processes because whether you like it or not, the body was designed to sleep at night. Those are the natural rhythms of the world. God created the world, created the sun and the moon, and created these rhythms of these seasons. And we live according to those seasons as well, except that the problem has been that with modern life, all these conveniences that we have, it’s changed the way we live life.
But if you look at ancient cultures, they would go to bed when the sun was down. They had no option. We have all these wonderful lights that we can turn on indoors. We have electricity, we have all these conveniences that 200 years ago, people didn’t have that. So they had little lamps, oil lamps or candles that they would turn off for some lighting, but that was very minimal lighting. They would go to bed when the sun was down typically. And so the time the sun goes down changes throughout the seasons of the year. We have our summer, the longest days of the year, winter, very short daylight days, and then we have our spring and the fall. And so the times of day of daylight will change throughout the year. And so people lived according to those cycles. The sun would go down and people would generally go to bed.
There was no tv, there was no electricity, there were no streetlights, there was nothing to do out. So people would go to sleep and they would rise oftentimes before the sun was out and they were out getting sunlight into, they were exposing themselves to the sunlight out doing their work and physically moving. And so these rhythms we have gone away with. So people who work night shifts, the rhythms are different. So that would be a whole different conversation on this. But regardless of how you’re living your life, between nine and 10 o’clock is the highest peak of growth hormone that we’re going to get. And growth hormone is very important for a lot of different things that, like I said, that could have its own conversation along with the hormone production you’re talking about thyroid hormone, cortisol, melatonin is being made in higher amounts. Also, between nine and 10 o’clock, we get a high surge. Melatonin is what helps us to stay asleep, fall asleep, and stay asleep. And some people might not be producing enough, especially if you’re staying past 10 o’clock, if you’re staying at 12 and one and two in the morning while you’re kind of missing some of that production that should be made. And some of these things are only made when you are sleeping. If you’re not asleep, it’s going to make some, but it’s not going to make the same amount. So all of these things are affected during sleep time.
That was a lot. I can go on and on about how important this is. But of all organs, I really believe that the brain, it has the most benefit from sleep. Hey, when I’m really stressed and I have a lot going on, I usually don’t feel my stress, but I’ve had a lot going on. I’ve had a busy day. I’ll go home and I’ll take a nap. I don’t take a nap every day. I’m not that type of person. Some people need a daily nap. I don’t. But when I’m going through high levels of stress, my naps are usually between two and three hours. When I wake up, I feel like my brain shut down. Just like this laptop, this laptop, I get to shut it down and it powers off. Well, do you give your brain time to shut down and power off if you have a lot going on in your life, right?
A lot of trauma, maybe grief loss in your life, sleep with moderation because you don’t want to overdo it either. There’s negative effects of oversleeping too, can really help the brain to detoxify from those stressors. It’s like a reboot, right? You reboot your brain so that you can continue to handle life around you. And so this is what sleep is indicated for. It’s meant to shut our brains off. And what we do, what a lot of people do, especially young people, is they go to bed with this in their hand. And so you’re having more stimulus coming into your brain instead of shutting it down. We need to slow down as we get closer to bed. So my suggestion is if you want to be in bed by nine, you should really be getting yourself ready by seven. I think neurologists say two hours before bedtime, you should have no stimulus.
So no computers, no tv, no lights. You should start to unwind two hours before bed, which nobody does. It’s really hard for people to do. So I say at least an hour before start to unwind. I also recommend, I tell this to my family and I tell this to my patients. I do not like to have stressful conversations right before going to bed, save it for the next day, unless it’s life and death. I don’t want to talk about money. I don’t want to talk about something stressful that’s going to keep my brain up thinking about it. And so sometimes it’s about setting boundaries with people and saying, Hey, I don’t want to talk about this. Let’s talk about it another time. So one of the things that I brought my little skull here today, someone named them Fred. So we’re going to stick with Fred.
Fred, the skull. I brought this skull in because I like to always show, teach. I’m a teacher. I’m not just a doctor. I’m a teacher. I like to teach my patients the physical anatomical parts of us. I cannot take the top of my skull. You can’t take the top of your skull to see what’s going on inside. But I like to show this little demo here because this bone that you see here in red, it’s called a sphenoid bone. And the important part of this sphenoid bone, well there’s many things that are important to it, is that if you see this little groove here, there’s like a little dip in here, this little dip right here, that is where your pituitary gland has a seat. It’s called a sella turcica like a little saddle. The pituitary gland is this little gland like a bean, and it sits in here.
And if you look at the front, that pituitary of this, of the eyes, you see the red parts, you’re going to get light coming in through your eyes, any stimulus that comes in through your eyes, and it’s going to stimulate that pituitary gland. The pituitary gland is a very, very, very important gland. They call it the master gland, right? Because the pituitary gland is responsible for signaling all of your endocrine system to produce hormones or to not make hormones. So my point is, if you’re having a lot of visual input, a lot of information coming in right before you’re going to bed, whether you’re reading, there’s light, you’re on your phone, whatever’s going on, that’s what you are taking in is information. It’s going to stimulate your brain. And yes, it’s going to affect the way you dream. It sure is, it’s going to affect all of your hormones as well.
So I always caution people to be careful about what they’re watching, what they’re seeing, and what times of the nighttime they’re watching these things because it’s going to influence that children, when they see scary movies or shows or anything scary right before they’re going to go to bed, it will affect the way they dream. So children should not have definitely two hours before bedtime, and should not have much brain stimulation there. So I want to share a couple of tips on sleep hygiene. Do you know how we have bodily hygiene? Well, there is such a thing as sleep hygiene. I highly recommend no electronics in your room, not even a clock. And if you have a clock, one that’s not digital, that has red lights or blue lights that can be very distracting to someone who has insomnia. No tv. No TV in the room. People should not have a TV in the room.
Computers, phones, iPads, none of that. It should be as dark as possible in the light so that you’re not having too much stimulus to the brain. And like I said, really set up the room to sleep, not to work. I highly discouraged people from working in the room. Some people during Covid had to, and I had a lot of patience and their sleep was greatly disturbed because of that. Pray, meditate, put some soft music to fall asleep into and play music without lyrics because then you start listening to the lyrics and you start singing and it keeps you up. Put some music that’s without any lyrics and just remember that sleep is really important. So one of the ways that can help you is to get your body moving. Take sleep aids that are natural like lavender, camel mile, passion, flower, valerian, California poppy, so many other that are herbs and teas that you can take before bed to help you.
I often get asked about melatonin, and I tell people, that melatonin is good for some and not for others. If you’re kind of the person that likes to have control, you take control. Melatonin will make you have really weird dreams. So I usually don’t prescribe melatonin unless I test for them to see if they actually need it. We’re going to move into the next topic, stress management because this is something that we all are plagued with to some level. Stress is important. Stress motivates us to get going and do things. However, the problem is when we have chronic levels of constant stress, that’s not good. It starts to affect us on a very physiological level. So, I want to describe the different types of stressors because it’s not just mental and emotional stress. There could be a lot of physical stress. If you’re physically working out a lot or you’re working physically a lot or you had an injury, that is a stress on the body.
Chemical stressors are something that can contribute to how physiology is doing. So chemicals, perfumes, things that you’re using in your home to clean can create a stress in the body because it has to eliminate this. And if the toxic burden is too much, there are too many stressors, it will deplete the body. It will excessively put the body under stress. So all of these contribute to stress stressed. The nervous system is equipped to respond to stress. We have a parasympathetic state and a sympathetic state in our nervous system. Basically, it lets us know if you’re safe, or if you’re not safe. So when people are stuck on a parasympathetic state, either feel like they need to run, fight, or they freeze in situations. And oftentimes what I find when people are constantly in this fight or flight state, I have to look at trauma. So I want to discuss a little bit about ace, which stands for adverse childhood experiences, which is complex trauma.
And this could be abuse, neglect, or any other harmful experiences that they constantly experience as children. And so there’s been many studies on this on how the higher the person scores on the ACE questionnaire, the higher risk they have at developing chronic health issues later in life. So when I interview my patients, I ask about trauma and it’s pretty consistent with the conditions that they have. And why is it that trauma would cause health issues down the road? So when we are under a lot of stress, our body’s going to create more cortisol. Cortisol is a stress hormone. Cortisol is normal in the body to have cortisol is what wakes us up in the morning. It spikes up 4, 5, 6 in the morning, sorry, five or six in the morning. And that’s what wakes us up. It’s like our internal alarm clock. It wakes us up naturally.
And so it’s normal to be high in the morning. And as the day goes by around noon, it dips down between two and four when it dips the most. And usually that’s when people feel tired. And that’s also the time that people will caffeinate themselves or take energy drinks to get them through the rest of their day. But that’s actually not the right thing to do. The body will adapt to that lower cortisol and you’ll just glide through the rest of the day. Typically at nighttime, cortisol drops at its lowest so that we’re able to fall asleep, and that’s when melatonin will kick in to help us to fall asleep and stay asleep. And that is a circadian rhythm. It’s the love balance between cortisol and melatonin throughout a 24-hour period. So cortisol will be spiked throughout the day. If we have a strong emotional response to stress, we can spike that cortisol up throughout the day.
But if you’re constantly spiking this cortisol up, now you have higher level levels of cortisol. And it’s because the body thinks we need to fight something, we need to run away from something, even if it’s just psychological stress, right? So if a child walks into a home where the father is, the father is an alcoholic, he’s abusive, this child is constantly walking on eggshells and doesn’t know when he’s going to have an outburst. So that child is constantly pumping out cortisol. Cortisol unfortunately can be very destructive to certain parts of the body, one of them being the gut, the inner gut. The gut has a lining, a protective barrier covered with IGA. It’s immunoglobulin A, and this is there to protect the intestines from anything coming in and leaving out. And what cortisol has been known to do is destroy this protective layer of the intestines the small intestines in people.
And so when this barrier starts to get destroyed, you see children with a lot of gut issues. You hear children say, my tummy hurts. Well, there might be a reason why. It could be that they have a lot of stress, whether it’s at home or school in their life. And this over time, this chronic stress over time starts to really affect the digestive system. And guess that’s where our immune system, from there, everything else is affected. So then you start to see behavioral issues. Or as they get older and become adults, they develop metabolic conditions like diabetes or they start to develop autoimmune conditions like lupus, rheumatoid arthritis or thyroid issues and so on. And even developing cancers as well, depending how much the trauma. So these hormones that we pump out, it has an effect. It makes us cortisol. If we have high cortisol, make us gain weight, we’ll have palpitations.
We’ll think that we have heart issues when it’s actually the stress, it can give us high blood pressure. It just has a lot of effect. And in women, unfortunately, the impact it has is on your menstrual cycle. High levels of cortisol will steal your body from making progesterone and pregnenolone. So it’s going to throw your cycle off and it’s going to throw your sleep cycle. And it just contributes to this cascade of events that none of us like. So it’s really important to manage stress in our lives. So how do we do that? Guys eating healthy, right? We talked about that in the first pillar, which was balancing out our diet, eating fruits, vegetables, and proteins, moving your body. Because when we move our body, we’re releasing stress. It’s releasing emotional stress as well. It uplifts our mood through all the chemical changes that we’re going through, all these hormonal changes that we’re going through as we move our body.
So whether you’re walking or hiking, dancing, kickboxing, lifting, weights are great. Ride a bike, swim, do something. Move your body and you’re going to feel better with dealing with stress. Obviously, quality sleep is a good way to deal with stress as well. And some of the herbs that are good for dealing with chronic stress, ashwagandha is an herb that’s very gentle. I usually tell people to take it at bedtime, unless you’re one of the few, the small percentage of people that give you energy with it. I don’t. I take it at bedtime. And it supports your adrenal glands. It supports your stress response, passion, flower. It’s passion flower, not passion fruit. Passion flower is a flower. It’s a purple, beautiful flower, and it really helps to tonify our nervous system, especially if you are the person. This goes to a lot of women who think a lot when they’re lying in bed.
You’re thinking about your day. You’re thinking, I should have done this. I didn’t do that. I have to do this tomorrow. If you’re that person, Passion Flower is for you. It’s lovely. Licorice shrewd is another herb, lavender tincture. There’s lavender, not essential oils, but there’s actual lavender tinctures, and there’s a great combination of Camel Mile and lavender tea. Beautiful. I love it. I highly recommend it. There are a lot of stress herbal supplements out there that you can try as well. Try something for that stress. But diet and physical activity are definitely going to be part of it in getting your sleep in check, and also seek professional help if you need help with trauma and so forth, pray and meditate. I can’t emphasize that enough. There’s something about praying and meditating that gets you out of your mind and gets you to a calm state, right?
Silence the chatter is what meditation is. Silence the chatter and connect to your creator and work with a naturopathic doctor. I’m not going to tell you go see your doctor because if it’s a medical doctor, they’re going to dismiss all of this. They’re going to say it’s just in your head. Well, yeah, it is in your head, but there’s a physiology to that, and we need to fix that. So you wouldn’t take your car to a mechanic, right? And if that mechanic told you if engine’s wrong and you’re like, what do I do with my engine? Oh, well, it’s just your engine with a problem. Well, yeah, well help me fix it. So the same applies to your physical body. Work with a doctor who knows what they’re doing and who can help you, and help treat you in a holistic approach. So we’re going to wrap up a lot of information here.
A lot of good information. If you guys have any questions on this, like I said, these things can really be broken down into even bite-sized pieces. This is really meant to be an introduction to those four pillars of health and why they’re so important. You cannot cheat your way out of these guys if you don’t have your nutrition, exercise, sleep, and stress management. You’re going to have a wobbly table. You want to a balance table and everything off of that. We build a foundation. Yes, hormones are important. Yes, community connections are important. There’s a lot of other things that contribute to that. But this is the foundation that you have to start with. Get these four things in place in order, and then from there you can build on. These conversations are not meant for the professionals who know this information. This is information for someone who has never heard this.
So if you find this is helpful for you, share it with someone else that it can also be helpful for them, because I understand that not everyone can afford to go see a functional or naturopathic doctor, but this is free information for you that you can start implementing on your own. Now, if you find it difficult, then you can work with a naturopath. You can reach out to me if you’re not in the Phoenix area. I do telemedicine if it doesn’t work for you. There are other doctors that I can also recommend. We’re going to go into our segment of the good, the bad, and the ugly in our current medical system.
It is going to tie to our conversation today, which is that doctors really do not understand and do not acknowledge the effects that trauma and stress have in our life. They do not. They don’t think that stress will spike your blood sugar, and it will obviously if you’re eating donuts, that’s going to make it worse. But stress will affect the way the physiology functions. Hey, I hope you’ve had enjoy this conversation. I know it’s been a lot of information. I look forward to chatting with you guys next time in the next episode. You don’t want to miss it. I’m going to have one of my colleagues and a good friend of mine join me in on some naturopathic conversations. So until then, have an amazing day and stay blessed. Thank you for listening to Physician Heal Thyself, the podcast. If you like what you’ve heard, please like, share and subscribe, help this message, reach more people who may need to hear it. Leave your comments. I want to know what you think. If you’re interested in learning more about raices, visit our website. Until next time, be blessed.