Waking Up Hungry at Night? It Isn't Hunger. It's a Glucose Alarm.

The Blood Sugar Rhythm Webinar is coming May 21st, 2026, at 8:00 PM CST

Waking up at 2:47 or 3:00 a.m. with a racing heart, sweaty heat, and a loud “I need to eat” signal can make you feel like your sleep is broken. We take a different angle: 

What if that hunger is actually a blood sugar crash, and the real culprit is a stress-hormone surge that yanks you out of deep sleep?

We walk through the crash-rescue cycle step by step, from dinner-time insulin to overnight glucose drops, and why your adrenal glands respond with cortisol and adrenaline to protect your brain. That protective response can leave you wide awake with anxious energy, restless legs, and racing thoughts that don’t even make sense at the time. We also explain why common tests like fasting glucose and hemoglobin A1C can look perfectly normal while nocturnal hypoglycemia and blood sugar swings keep happening in the middle of the night.

We connect the dots for women’s health as well, including why symptoms can worsen in the luteal phase when progesterone rises and increases insulin resistance, why estrogen changes can shift insulin sensitivity, and why perimenopause can be the first time you notice this pattern. Finally, we talk about practical next steps, including using a continuous glucose monitor (CGM) to capture real-time overnight data and get answers you can actually use.

If you’re tired of guessing, listen now, share this with a friend who wakes up at 3 a.m., and subscribe so you don’t miss what’s next. After you listen, will you leave a quick review and tell us what your wake-up time tends to be?

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Transcript

Welcome And Upcoming Webinar

SPEAKER_00 0:53

Hello and welcome to the Art of Healing podcast. If we have met before, nice to see and hear you again. If this is our first time to meet, welcome. It is so nice to have you here. The Art of Healing Art of Healing podcast comes on roughly about once a week, every couple of weeks, depending on our schedule. And most recently, we've had some really great guests that'll be coming on the podcast. If you want to make sure you stay up to date with new episodes, I do recommend you sign up for my newsletter, which you'll find the link in the show notes. Otherwise, also there are regular webinars. My webinars I highly recommend if you are wanting to get a deep dive on great health topics. The next webinar coming up, you don't want to miss this. If you are a woman who has fluctuating blood sugars, or think you do, you're not sure, but you know that your energy is changing and you're just not feeling yourself. You do not want to miss this webinar that's coming up, the blood sugar rhythm. The webinar will be live May 21st at 8 p.m. Central Standard Time. This is an interactive webinar, so it's not on Zoom. So what I like about the new platform that I'm using is that you can sign up from the comfort of your home in your PJs and no worry that your camera's going to accidentally turn on and show you. That's my secret fear. But with this upcoming program, if you want to join in the link in the show notes, you'll be able to sign up. Join us Thursday night at 8 p.m. Central Standard Time. And there is a handy dandy quiz that you want to take prior to coming to the webinar. So I have a question for you. Have you been waking up at 3 a.m., like night after night, or several nights a week? Do you wake up feeling really hungry or you don't know what wakes you up at that same time every night? Today I'd like to talk about why you're waking up hungry, and that it may not actually be hungry. You might sense hunger, but it's something else. So picture this you wake up and it's 2:47 a.m. Your heart's beating really fast. You might be warm or sweaty, just really uncomfortable. All of a sudden, your mind just starts off with some random nonsense that makes no sense. But at the time it seems to make a lot of sense. You're feeling really hungry. It's that empty, shaky feeling. But you had a really good, healthy dinner. You made sure to get your protein in, your vegetables in, and so this just doesn't make sense. So, what's going on? So, what I'd like to talk about is that maybe this isn't really hunger, maybe it's something else that's going on. What I strongly suspect may have happened to you, and I even discovered this myself, and I'll share with you in a little bit how I discovered this, is that around that time that you woke up, your blood sugar may have dropped very low. When your blood sugar drops low, that triggers a type of emergency response within your system, and that causes the release of stress hormones. Doesn't mean that anything happened, not like someone broke in or you heard a scary noise or baby was started crying, you had to wake up. It really was that your blood sugar suddenly dropped much lower than it had been the few hours before that. When this happens, your body's attempting to go into kind of a rescue mode, and the result of that is that you're awake and you're anxious, and because of that whole cascade of the blood sugar drop, the release of the stress hormones, you feel like you've got to get something to eat. I see this pattern multiple times a week in my practice. These are women that often say, I'm a light sleeper, I'm not a good sleeper, I wake up at the drop of a dime or is it drop of a hat, I'll wake up very easily, is what they'll say. But when we really get into the specifics of what's going on, they don't really have trouble falling asleep. They're waking up in the middle of the night about the same time every night. Sometimes it may even be multiple times that they wake up the same way, but it's always this cluster of symptoms that all point to the same thing: nocturnal hypoglycemia that is triggering our counter-regulatory stress response. Or said another way, the blood sugar dropped too fast, and the adrenal glands didn't like it, thought something was going really wrong, and helped to wake you up. The frustrating part is that most of these women have normal blood sugar. So they may get some blood work checked, they get blood work done when they're fasting. So that's the labs you do, like when you first wake up in the morning. You might go into the lab and they draw a panel of labs, and anything less than 100 is going to come back as normal. Their hemoglobin A1C is in a normal range. A hemoglobin A1C is a blood sugar average over a 90-day period. It's actually checking how your red sorry, how much your red blood cells are coated with glucose. So you could have some pretty dramatic ups and downs, highs and lows, and actually have a normal hemoglobin A1C. So when you're working with your doctor, the labs will look totally fine. Normal fasting glucose doesn't mean that your blood sugar is okay overnight. It just means that by the time you wake up in the morning, you get the labs done. The stress hormones did their job by getting you up, getting you to eat. Your blood sugar actually went up and maybe even went up really high. But by the time you check it with those traditional labs, it's stabilized and it's fine. The crash and the rescue that are happening when you're sleeping, if that's happening every single night, that's really very hard on you. Waking up at 3 a.m. isn't random. If you're waking up roughly the same time every night, every night, if it's within about 30 minutes, that's probably not insomnia in the way that we normally think of it. That's your circadian rhythm that is interacting with your metabolism and it's getting into kind of an emergency. So what happens is you eat dinner around 6 or 7 p.m., your blood sugar rises appropriately because it should go up. Insulin is triggered to release from the intake of a meal. If everything's okay with your metabolism, your blood sugar should stabilize and stay stabilized throughout the night. And your liver also assists in this because your liver should be releasing a small amount of sugar or glucose through a process called glucone glucogenolysis. Sorry, glucogenolysis, which is breaking down stored glycogen. So glycogen is a form of sugar or glucose that your liver stores. So it should be releasing a small amount of that throughout the night, and that should help you maintain a normal fasting blood sugar. So if everything works okay, you should be able to sleep through the night because your liver will kick in with this process and keep things stable. If you're getting resistance to insulin, even it's just a little bit, and granted, you might have your insulin levels checked and it may come back normal. But you're if you're getting insulin resistance, that means that when you eat dinner, your insulin response is exaggerated. So you actually release more insulin than you actually need to get the blood sugars to stabilize and more insulin that's needed than to get the glucose within the cells and out of the circulation because we don't want free-floating sugars all over the place. Blood sugars come down, but then it comes down too far. And on top of that, your blood sugars are diving, and the insulin is still circulating. Insulin is a hormone, and we talk quite a bit about hormones. Insulin often doesn't get seen as a hormone, but it's actually one of the most common hormones that you make. A lot of the hormones that we make in our body can be blocked or there's something that opposes it, and then typically in hormones that we make, they break down into something else. Insulin doesn't have anything to block it, and it also doesn't break down that easily. So any insulin that you make, it's got to do its job till it finally breaks down on its own and then gets excreted out through your waste, through your urine. So if you make too much insulin when you eat, that means that excessive insulin just runs around in your body being crazy. Not being crazy, it runs around in your body making your blood sugar drop. And if this keeps happening by about 2 or 3 a.m., and that might be about seven or nine hours after you ate dinner, your blood sugar starts to drop, and then it gets below the threshold of what your body deems is safe. What that means, our brains, the your brain in your head can only run on a few types of fuel sources, which is very interesting because the brain is an organ in our body that actually uses a lot of energy, which it should. It holds our memories, our cognition, it generates electricity, it makes its own neurochemicals, does a lot of communicating with the rest of the body, but it can only run on glucose and ketones. So if your glucose becomes too low, that actually puts your brain's function at risk, and it's a very serious consequence of that can be seizures if someone has severely low sugars. So your body's not going to let that happen. So that's when the adrenal glands step in and release tons of cortisol and adrenaline. These hormones signal your liver to dump glucose into your bloodstream through gluconeogenesis. That brings your blood sugar up, and then that blood sugar crisis is averted. So, granted, your adrenal glands did exactly what they were supposed to do. They prevented this emergency, but they did it at 3 in the morning. So that means that you're awake, you have more adrenaline that you need it than you needed because you were asleep. So you wake up with a fast heartbeat, your body temperature's up, your nervous system is activated, you feel hot, or you might have even had a hot flash triggered, and then it may be very hard to get back to sleep, and you might even feel that you're hungry. So if that sounds like you, in your show notes, I invite you to download a copy of my quiz, which is the cravings root cause quiz. You can complete it within a few minutes, and then it will guide you through what might be happening with your blood sugars. So, that hunger that you're feeling, it's unfortunately probably not that you need the actual calories, it's just that your body just went through a minor trauma with this blood sugar swing, and then the adrenaline went all the way up, and then it woke you up, and then your cardiovascular system is activated just from the adrenaline. So you might get up, you might go ahead and get something to eat, you might even notice it's carbs that you really crave, and that's because that insulin level might actually still be pretty elevated. Hopefully, you can get back to sleep, but you might have trouble getting back to sleep, and so that's what's happening. If you're a menstruating woman, you might notice that this gets worse around your period. Some women notice that waking up in the middle of the night and the hunger are much worse the week before they have their period. This relates to progesterone. Progesterone rises in the luteal phase, and that's about two weeks between ovulation and your period. Progesterone increases insulin resistance. This is normal, and that's what progesterone is supposed to do. And the reason why is that it's progesterone wants to assure that energy in the form of glucose is readily available in case of a potential pregnancy. If you are already prone to insulin resistance or you have dysregulated blood sugars, then that additional insulin from that progesterone rise becomes more dramatic. So, what that means is that the same dinner that would have worked for you earlier in your phase or the follicular phase, the first two weeks of your cycle, causes a more exaggerated insulin response during the luteal phase. Insulin gets overshot, you make too much of it, the blood sugar comes down way too fast, and then unfortunately, you're waking up around 3 a.m. Some women might notice that if their period starts, that seems to level out and it gets better. Sometimes working with our patients, we can even predict what's going to happen just by what's happening during the cycle, especially if they're telling me it's about two weeks before they start their period and it gets better once the bleeding starts. Estrogen also plays a role in insulin, but it's different. Estrogen improves insulin sensitivity. So when your estrogen's when your estrogen is high around the time you would ovulate, that's when blood sugars tend to be more stable. When estrogen drops, and that's right before your period, then you lose that protective effect. So that kind of adds to that whole insulin resistance, over-exaggerated insulin response. For some women, they don't notice this pattern until perimenopause. That's when they start to notice nighttime awakening. And the reason why is because estrogen is becoming unpredictable, it's starting to go down gradually, and blood sugar stability is also going with it, and insulin is becoming a little bit erratic as well. So the whole culmination can mean waking up frequently from the blood sugars in combination with the changes of perimenopause. We frequently talk anything about talk about waking up with hot flashes, but sometimes the heat you're waking up with is just an increased body temperature. It's not necessarily the full-on hot flash. If you wake up hot, but not quite the nights, night sweats, that's probably related to the adrenaline increasing your metabolic rate, which raises your body temperature, and it's part of your fight or flight response. So this is your body's normal response to an emergency. That could happen if something startles or scares you, but in terms of our discussion, this is happening because the blood sugar dove went from being normal to going way, way down. If you're feeling restless and your legs feel twitchy or uncomfortable or even agitated, this may also relate to that same insulin having a little too much and the blood sugar is crashing. So your body is just keying up for a threat to come, your nervous system is overly activated and there's no real threat. You might even notice that your heart rate is even a little bit elevated. And if this is if you have the ability, if this happens to you, if you've got a blood pressure cuff, just working with your doctor, you might even want to check your blood pressure. And if you've got one of those automated cuffs, it'll give you a pulse, or if you have a wearable device that you might be wearing, and see if you're noticing that pulse rate seems to go up, and that's a good indication to you that the adrenaline levels are spiking and they're going too high. Correspondingly, the racing thoughts, because I've heard for years in my medical practice before I had any functional medicine training, waking up with these racing thoughts and these to-do lists, and it's just going insane. And some patients will even notice that the to-do list, it's these thoughts, it doesn't even make sense. It's just going, and it's why is this even starting up now? And this is because those cortisol levels that went too high raise glutamate, which is an excitatory neurotransmitter and suppresses GABA or GABA, which is an inhibitory transmitter. So the balance shifts towards activation and away from glum. So your brain is doing exactly what it thinks to do. It thinks it's daytime, you need to be activated, it's go time, and in fact, it's really not. It's the night you should be asleep. So these responses, and they're subtle in traditional medicine. We almost don't even have a good term for them. They're all responses to that blood sugar crash. The typical advice we're told to follow is to try to eat protein before bed. For some people, that might be enough, but oftentimes for women, that's not enough. So they may try snacks such as almond butter, hard-boiled eggs, cheese, full fat yogurt, but they still wake up at 3 a.m. And the reason is because that insulin resistance is still occurring. So unfortunately, even consuming a good, healthy, high-protein snack, that insulin is overly stimulated, fires off way too much and causes that blood sugar to still drop. The other part to that is your liver might have trouble doing that whole dripping out that teeny bits of glucose overnight. So if your liver glycogen stores are depleted, and it might be because you've been trying to fix this by cutting your calories, going extremely low carb, or you've been working out and it's maybe too much for your body where it is right now, that's like chronic stress, or if you're going through chronic stress and that keeps your liver from storing up sugar the way that you need it to in order to keep you stable throughout the night. So, again, if you want to check your show notes, I'll make sure include that link. That if you want to take the root cause quiz to assess this for yourself. And before I forget, I do want to remind you that we'll also be covering this in a lot more depth during the upcoming webinar. Conventional testing often misses this because we look at a couple of tests, and for a lot of women in perimenopause or menopause, they're going to come back more than likely normal. So we do the hemoglobin A1C, which is that blood sugar average of about 90 days, and you could have all this blood sugar drama going high and low, but it might come back with a normal A1C. Likewise, if just your fasting blood sugar is checked, it could very well be normal by the time you get to the lab. But that one-time blood sugar doesn't tell us what you need to know as far as what was going on overnight. So, one way that you can easily address this is there are wearable glucose monitors or CGMs, continued glucose monitors that are available to all of us. You actually don't need a doctor's prescription to get started with them. The devices might look a little bit intimidating, but they're actually pretty easy to put on yourself and to start wearing. You actually want to purchase a continuous glucose monitor, start tracking your blood sugars. Most of them are going to do it through a cell phone app, and that's going to give you real-time data. I've started having my own patients do continuous glucose monitoring as a part of their program, and so many of our questions could be answered with that simple test. So, in addition to wearing the CGM, there's probably several more interventions that we need to consider. If you've taken the quiz, you've figured out that there is a problem with your blood sugar, or you've even already started tracking and you're seeing that your blood sugars are unstable. So, my next steps of advice for you are A, make sure you download the quiz. I've had several people download it and they've been just excited to discover what this quiz is telling them. And then also make sure you sign up for the upcoming webinar, May 21st at 8 o'clock p.m. Central Standard Time. So make sure you check for your time zone. If you miss the live webinar, there will be a replay. Available for probably a week or so after the program, in case you can't catch it. But make sure that you do tune in if you want to go into more depth as far as what your next steps would be if your blood sugars are unstable. And of course, I am always available, particularly if you reside in a state that I'm licensed in. I am accepting new patients. I've been pleasantly surprised at the number of people who've reached out to me who've taken the quiz and how it's been revealing. And we have already got them started on their plan to getting their blood sugar stable. And I've been really excited with like how quickly we're starting to see some response to tracking this information. So that being said, check your show notes for both that quiz and also check your show notes to sign up because you still got some time to sign up. And then we will be back in the coming weeks. Again, we'll have some very exciting guests. We've got an animal Reiki specialist who's going to be coming on. We've got an optometrist who's going to be coming on the show. So make sure you check your show notes to make sure you signed up for my newsletter so that I can notify you when those episodes go live. It has been great to be with you today during the podcast. And I hope to see you soon. Take care.