Ep. 53 Why You Can’t Seem to Get Deep Sleep—And How to Fix It Naturally

Hey Friend,

Waking up tired—even after 7 or 8 hours of sleep? Or maybe your Oura Ring is telling you what you already feel—your deep sleep score is stuck in the toilet.

In this week’s episode of The Balanced Hormone Solution Podcast, I’m breaking down what’s really keeping you from getting that juicy, restorative deep sleep—and exactly what to do about it.

You’ll learn:

👉 The 3 root causes of low deep sleep (and how to fix them tonight)

👉 Why cortisol is the #1 sleep saboteur for women 35+

👉 How a 2am wake-up call is probably a blood sugar crash in disguise

👉 What your Oura Ring data actually means—and how to use it

👉 The bedtime snack that stabilizes blood sugar and promotes deep sleep

👉 Sleep-supportive foods (hello, pumpkin seeds + tart cherry!)

👉 And the #1 thing you need to cut out if you’re serious about sleep 🙅‍♀️ (spoiler: it’s alcohol)

💡 You’ll also walk away with a simple 3-step nighttime routine that calms cortisol, supports blood sugar, and tells your body: “You’re safe. You can rest now.”

🎧 Listen now: Why You Can’t Seem to Get Deep Sleep—And How to Fix It Naturally

Because deep sleep isn’t a mystery—it’s a message. And when you start sending your body the right signals, it responds.

In health & hormone harmony,

Tracy Erin

Registered Nurse + Integrative Health Practitioner

Balance your hormones. Elevate your life.

💤 BONUS: Ready for real solutions?

✨ Join The Balanced Hormone Solution—my 90-day program that helps women 35+ heal their hormones and get their energy, sleep, and metabolism back without prescriptions, restrictive diets, or burnout.

✔️ Functional testing (like DUTCH, Blu Poo & thyroid panels)

✔️ Personalized protocols

✔️ Sleep, stress, and blood sugar support

✔️ Weekly coaching + community

💌 Apply now at tracyerinwellness.com and let’s get you sleeping (and thriving) again.

Transcript

Speaker 3: 0:09

Welcome to the Balance Hormone Solution Podcast. If you're a woman 35 plus feeling exhausted, struggling to lose weight, and wondering where your libido went, this is for you. I am Tracy Aaron, a functional medicine practitioner who helps women balance their hormones naturally. Without prescriptions, guesswork, or trending Nonsense.'cause here's the truth, your symptoms aren't random. They're signals. And if you know how to listen, you can fix the root cause and start feeling like yourself again. If you're ready for real solutions, let's get to it.

0:50

Are you waking up tired even after eight hours of sleep? Or maybe you have an AA ring and you wake up and you check it. Wondering why your deep sleep score is still in the toilet? Today we are going beyond melatonin and sleepy teas'cause I'm gonna break down the real root causes of your poor deep sleep in women. 35 plus. And exactly what to do about it. So I am your host, Tracy Aaron, a registered nurse, integrative health practitioner, and your go-to guide for decoding your hormones and rebuilding energy without the guesswork. I'm also a mom of five, so I know what sleep deprivation feels like on a cellular level, and trust me, tracking it on my very favorite tool, which is the AA ring, only helps you. Know how to fix what it's showing you. So I remember the exact moment a couple years ago when I realized that something had to change. I went to bed at 9:00 PM I slept all night, and when I woke up, my aura ring said I got over seven hours of total sleep, but only 35 minutes of deep sleep. And I started to pay attention and I realized that I could feel that. I felt like I was dragging through the next day, like some zombie version of myself. And here's what's interesting. Most people don't have tracking tools like an Aura Ring. I, this is my favorite tool. I've had it for many years and I absolutely love it and recommend it for all of my clients. But you wake up the next morning, you're like, oh, great. I slept seven hours. I slept eight hours. And you wonder why you're still tired, right? So the AA ring is my favorite tool because it helps break down my sleep, and I see how much of that. Overall, seven to eight hours was light versus REM versus deep, right? So when I started to realize that my deep sleep was suffering, even though my overall hours was where it should be, I wasn't getting the amount of deep sleep that I needed. I did what I do best, and I began to dig into the science. I started to experiment on myself, and since then I have helped dozens and dozens of clients do the same. So let's break down three root reasons why your deep sleep is suffering and how to finally fix it. So number one, cortisol is probably hijacking your sleep cycles, right? It's not just your stress hormone, it directly impacts your ability to get. And to stay in deep sleep. So if you have high cortisol at night, you are not getting enough deep sleep. This means if you're doing activities like scrolling on your phone late at night, or you're working on a laptop, or doing any kind of mental exhaustive activities, or even working out late at night, taking exercise classes when you should be winding down for the night, right? You're basically telling your body that it's time to hunt. Not to rest. Remember we've got those two parts to the autonomic nervous system, right? We've got, um, well, we've got the parasympathetic and we've got the sympathetic, and those are in, in many ways we could describe them as opposing one another. We've got the sympathetic, which is that fight or flight response, and we have the parasympathetic, which is that rest and digest, and the body likes to pick one and prioritize one. Not both at the same time, right? You can't be running for your life and you know, digesting food it, we are gonna do one or the other. And the priority typically runs to sympathetic, typically runs towards survival. So if we're having high cortisol, that's gonna be our focus. We're not gonna be focused on restorative rest at night. So if you have that aura ring and you notice that your heart rate variability is low. And your resting heart rate is staying high at night, you can know that your nervous system never shifted into that rest and repair that rest and digest mode. So pay attention to these numbers. What is your heart rate variability doing over the course of the night? Does your AA ring give you a notification that your heart rate lowered late last night? If you've got both of those things at play, we can know that you're not shifting into that restorative mode for sleep. So what do we do about this? Like how to fix it? Well, we need some type of cortisol calming routine, like 60 to 90 minutes before bed. Remember what it was like to raise those babies and toddlers and everybody thrived on a nighttime routine. Well, you're no different. You need that too. And so we can do things like something that relaxes us, a warm bath, Epsom salt's, really wonderful. Or taking extra magnesium. I love magnesium glycinate before bed. Uh, something called the 90 degree angle. Legs up the wall pose. This is. Super, super underrated. Love this move though. All you do is lay on the ground, put your bottom next to the wall, and put your feet 90 degrees like perpendicular to you, right? So your, your hips are flexed, your feet are up against the wall, and you're laying flat on the ground. Does that make sense? So you're like in an L shape in a 90 degree shape, right? And I just want you to sit like that for a couple minutes. Take some deep breaths, relax. Think about your day. Envision a great night's sleep. Try to bring your heart rate down just by thinking of peaceful, calming things. You want to switch yourself mind and body into that rest and digest mode. So this pose right there automatically communicates safety. To the body. It's a really nice thing to do in term, in times of, uh, stress and anxiety as well. And then definitely no screens. Screens are those things that are like, that blue light is signaling to your cortisol. It's time to wake up, time to get the day going. So we really, really, really wanna minimize those as we, um, can at night. And if you absolutely can't, then that's when you know you need to bring in something like blue light blocking glasses or red lamps next to your bed, et cetera. Another thing is like blood sugar roller coasters, right? If we're having, uh, spikes and valleys at night, we're gonna be waking up in the middle of the night. Your brain needs stable glucose, glucose to stay in a deep sleep, but if your blood sugar's crashing at like two in the morning, your body's gonna spike cortisol and it's gonna wake you up. Okay?'cause those, those two things go together when your glucose dips. Uh, unnaturally and unnecessarily cortisol is going to take over to raise that glucose for you. So you're gonna have that artificial cortisol spike, not from stress, but this time from blood sugar. So this might be like you, you probably fall asleep just fine, but like you, you're up at two to three in the morning, like just wired and alert, right? This is probably linked to blood sugar. So. If you have an AA ring, you can look for those mid sleep disturbances or like higher than usual movement. In the second half of night, you can see your entire night's sleep and see where's the movement happening and where's your most solid sound sleep occurring. And if it's not the second half of the cycle, you can kind of assume are you waking? Is it a blood sugar thing? And if that's the case, how about a small balanced bedtime snack? Like think about half a banana with some almond butter or eggs aren't just for breakfast, right? Have a hard boiled egg with a few olives, like we need some fat, we need some protein to prevent those overnight drops in keeping glucose stable all night long.

Speaker 5: 8:43

Perimenopause got you. Feeling like a hormonal hostage. Your period's unpredictable. Your sleep's trash, your mood's, a mind feel, and no one prepared you for this. Enter the Balanced hormone solution. My 90 day program for women, 35 plus who are done guessing and ready to feel like themselves again.'cause we test not guess. We detox, rebalance, and get your hormones and your life back in check.'cause you're not broken, you're just burned out. So let's fix that. Head to tracy erin wellness.com and let's get started.

9:18

The third thing is, is that maybe your nervous system feels unsafe. Right. Deep sleep is only going to happen when your body feels safe enough to let go, and this means you've gotta like calm your inputs. I want you to think about these factors. Light noise, stress. All these forms of stimulation, how can we calm these down? If you're experiencing like racing thoughts, right before you drift off to sleep or you clench your jaw at night, or a racing heart, right when you lie down. It is time to start calming your inputs before you lay down so that you can communicate safety to that nervous system. If you have an aura ring, you'll notice this by like a low readiness score the next morning, plus a low deep sleep. This usually indicates an overwhelmed. Nervous system. So if you've got those two things matching up together, we can know that that's what that means. So again, how do we fix it? This is the the bedtime routine. We need to get into sleep mode before we actually attempt to sleep. I. So we can do things like dim our lights in our bedroom and in our house 90 minutes before bed and definitely avoid like heavy conversations late at night. I had a friend who went through marriage counseling recently and their therapist had told them, no talking seriously, like, don't ask any of these inflammatory or kind of probing questions after 8:00 PM and that I was like, that's a great advice. You know, we don't need to raise our heart rate and get riled up and feel the stress of life right before we go to sleep. We want things to be peaceful and calming as we sail off into dreamland. So best you can, avoiding heavy conversations at night, both with your spouse, your children, work, anything like that, um, that really kind of gets your heart rate going. You can also try that 4, 7, 8, breathing right, which is, you know, breathing in for four seconds, holding for seven seconds and exhaling for eight. Or another tool I love is like binaural beats. You can find so many free. Playlists out there now, like Apple Music, YouTube, Spotify, they all have them. So just look up binaural beats. You can choose them for different phases of your day, like deep sleep or concentration or energizing, et cetera. So obviously choose like a relaxing or a deep sleep one, or really nice way to drift off to sleep. So. Another kind of bonus tip here is, let me give you some sleep supportive foods to eat right before bed. You know, so many of us think like we can't eat so often, we're just gonna gain all this weight. But if we're not sleeping, I. It's gonna be hard to lose weight. So we want our digestion to be calm and we wanna time these things. Right. Okay.'cause you don't wanna just put food in your mouth and then put your head to your pillow and expect that you're gonna sleep soundly because we still have this process of digestion happening, right? So we wanna make sure that we have at least three hours between when we finish dinner and be when we go to bed. That's why I recommend is any woman in my program. Especially a perimenopausal woman if you're trying to lose weight, like let's not eat after 6:00 PM if you need a bedtime snack. I understand. Um, but you wanna keep that maybe 45 minutes to an hour before your normal bedtime. And a couple ideas here would be like tart cherries. Those are really good natural sources of melatonin. And typically I would like tart cherry juice, but I would say. Definitely not more than one ounce at a time. Um, you can take, uh, capsules and you can also do tinctures of this, and that will help keep down the glucose and the sugar spikes. A kiwi, like half a kiwi or a kiwi right before bed is linked to improve sleep latency and deep sleep. So if you have a hard time falling asleep. Half a kiwi or a kiwi can help with that and it can help with improving the length of deep sleep as well. Pumpkin seeds are amazing'cause they're really high in magnesium and that, um, tryptophan also, uh, calming teas like chamomile or something with that medicinal mushroom reishi in it. They're very calming on the body, but they don't give you that like drowsy side effect. Something like, um. Uh, Benadryl would do, right, and, uh, one thing I absolutely don't leave home without is my doTERRA Serenity Oil. I absolutely love Serenity Oil. I have the actual oil, I have the sleep capsules, and I also have the sleep stick, which I love to rub on my neck and my upper chest, and I can smell it as I go off to sleep. I love to put a couple drops on my pillow every single night. It's so much more than just the scent of lavender, although lavender is in it. That is definitely one of my very favorite oils there. If I could just give you like one. Number one. Non-negotiable though it's to avoid alcohol, like we cannot, as we get older, we cannot drink alcohol and expect to sleep good. We just can't. It's, I, I, you know, we can lie to ourselves as long as we want, but it's just, it's not going to work out in our favor as we get older. Alcohol has a harder time getting processed and eliminated out of the body. So that time that we're spending dealing with this alcohol, particularly our liver metabolizing it is the time that we are not spending in deep sleep. So. We need to just nip it in the bud. If you're not getting a good sleep night, after night after night, you really need to take a serious look at the alcohol consumption and then of course, anything like a heavy meal after 8:00 PM that's really going to wreck deep sleep as well. I. So let me give you some quick wins, like some action steps that you can do today. I don't want you to think that balancing your hormones is just, you know, it's for the birds, or it's like just for the people in the white coats, right? We have the power to take health into our own hands and to give ourselves the best possible chances at living life. Optimally. So in my view, giving you some quick wins, like some action steps, things that you can do today is one of the easiest and fastest ways that I can help you. So tonight I want you to create a deep sleep, wind down routine, and here's some, some pillars, like three pillars that you can use. Tonight. Number one is a 32nd nervous system reset where you're gonna do that. 4, 7, 8, breathing for 30 seconds. Set a timer on your phone if you need to use a kitchen timer, whatever you have. Inhale for four seconds, hold for seven, exhale for eight. That's the breathing pattern that I want you to do. Number two is calm that cortisol. Magna, um, at least two caps at night. You can take up to four or five magnesium glycinate is going to work on your bowels, but it's not a direct action on your bowels, so don't worry. Um, you will know if you've had too much because you have loose stool the next day, but it's nothing like magnesium. Citrate. Okay. Uh, some people can just take one magnesium citrate and they empty their bowels, and it's not the case with magnesium glycinate. There are different forms, and I like magnesium glycinate for sleep before bed attempt. Blue light blocking glasses, like you don't have to spend a fortune in order to get them. Now, I personally love my raw optics. I think that you'll get a better result if you do invest in blue light blockers that have been proven through studies to actually block blue light, however. You can get cheapies on Amazon as well. The point is that we just reduce the amount of blue light coming into our vision, and that goes right into our pineal gland, which directly affects the amount of melatonin we're producing at night. So we have to pay attention to that. And then number three, the thing that you're gonna do tonight is do that balance snack. Like have half a banana with a little bit of nut butter, or a very small amount, like two tablespoons of pumpkin seeds. Just toss those back before bed and see if you can fall asleep Soundly. Okay. If you have an Oura ring, track your deep sleep. I wanna know, like watch what happens if you put in some of these tips here. Like, I wanna know how you can increase that deep sleep and um, get your numbers back where they need to go. Because remember, it's not just about the overall hour, right? That's the same thing as saying. All we care about is the amount of hormone in your bloodstream. No, no. We need to know not just how much. We need to know how your body is utilizing these hormones and how your body's getting rid of hormones that are already being produced. So same thing. It's not just the amount of hours that you sleep per night, it's the quality. Okay? So just know that your deep sleep. Isn't gone, it's just waiting for the right signals. This is like the rest of your body.'cause you're not broken, you are just hormonally misunderstood right now. And the good news is that your body is built to heal when you give it the right rhythm, the right support, and a little bit of nighttime TLC. Okay? So. Put into practice some of these tips and send me a message on Instagram or use my email. I'd love to hear how they have helped you. You a good night's sleep is just one day away. And here's the thing, I tell all my clients this, the best night's sleep starts the minute you wake up. So don't underestimate how you spend the first 15 to 30 minutes of your day. Improving your deep sleep at night. Okay, last tip just came into my mind. I can't, I, I can't even leave a podcast here on, um, improving deep sleep without mentioning this, but the best and highest deep sleep I ever record. Is after a fast. So if you really can't get your deep sleep numbers up, try a 24 hour water fast. Tell me how that goes. I'm almost ready to guarantee you that your deep sleep is gonna improve just with that. Okay? So, all right, take care and I will see you in the next episode. I.

Speaker: 19:30

That's it for today's episode of the Balanced Hormone Solution Podcast. If this resonated, don't just listen. Do something about it. Make sure to subscribe so you don't miss what's coming next. And if you know another woman who's tired of feeling like a stranger in her own body. Send her this way for more support. Check out the show notes. I've got resources to help you get started. Just remember, your body isn't broken, you just need the right tools. See you next time.