Honor Your Circadian Rhythm for the Best Sleep

Good quality sleep can seem to be an elusive thing, especially as you approach peri-menopause and menopause.  Honoring your circadian rhythm can be the key to helping you get the best quality sleep.  

In this podcast we explain what the circadian rhythm is, the systems of the body that are effected by the circadian rhythm and offer solutions that you can easily implement into your routine to ensure that you get the best sleep possible.  

Stop Chasing Wellness is an online wellness coaching company founded by two Holistic Health Coaches, Gina and Kristin. Be sure to check out all of our offerings including our book, Stop Chasing Wellness; Create It, and our growing catalog of Hormone Specific coaching courses. All of our courses and offerings are designed to help you feel and live your best life in a simplified way that works for you. You can find Stop Chasing Wellness on Facebook and Instagram

Transcript

Hello, friends, and welcome to the Stop Chasing Wellness podcast.
If you're here listening to this podcast, we believe it's because you value your health
and you may be looking for answers to help you live your healthiest life in a more simplified
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You may be dealing with your own health struggles or trying to help a spouse or child find a
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As certified holistic health coaches, Kristen and I, I'm Gina, focus our health coaching
practice on the belief that what we put on our plate is a direct reflection of what's
going on in our lives.
This ranges anywhere from the quality of your social life and personal relationships to
the level of your physical activity and overall health of your spirituality practice, your
career, and your finances and education.
The foods you put on your plate are just one piece of this wheel that we call the circle
of life.
Before we introduce our guest speaker, we invite you to check out our website at stopchasingwellness.com
where you can learn more about our wellness coaching programs that we have to offer, to
purchase our book by the same name, Stop Chasing Wellness, and to learn a little bit more about
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All right, well, hello everybody.
Welcome to our podcast.
I'm health coach Kristen here with health coach Gina and we're working on putting together
a program, a health coaching program to help people get through menopause, menopause, post-menopause.
We're doing it.
I'm really excited about it.
We keep saying we're getting close.
We're getting close, but I feel like we're always really meticulous with these things.
We want to make sure that we cover everything that everybody needs and has questions about
and make sure that we really deliver a program that is really valuable to people.
We're taking our time, just getting all the details worked out on it, but one of the most
common complaints that we hear from women when we asked people like, what do you want
us to touch on as we develop this program was the topic of sleep.
It just is something that really is frustrating to women as they're approaching perimenopause
and in menopause and even post-menopause, right?
And it's like this elusive, it's like trying to herd cats or catch butterflies, right?
Just how do I improve my sleep?
And I think that that's really tricky, especially as hormones are shifting and all that stuff.
But there's this thing called our circadian rhythm.
I'm going to have Gina explain it because this is like the nuts and bolts and the key
to, I believe, good quality sleep, to nurturing that circadian rhythm.
Yeah, I agree with that completely.
So you may have heard of it, you may not have.
It's something that every living organism has, a circadian clock.
So this coordinates with different times of the day and night.
So during the day, these organisms that we have in our bodies, which we call our gut
microbes, they work hard during the day.
They're considered our day workers.
So they work at digesting food, absorbing nutrients, using the nutrients as energy that
we burn.
And then at night, our night workers go to work.
And that's when our body is detoxing, cleansing, repairing itself, preparing for the next day.
So the day workers can kick off and take over again.
And the circadian rhythm is sort of like as the sun sets, right?
I use the analogy a lot that we don't go to sleep at night, like turning off a light switch.
Most people don't anyway.
It's more like the sun setting.
So it's a process, it's a slower process, but when the sun starts setting, our body
knows to shift gears from day workers to night workers.
And that's part of why that kind of goes in with that intermittent fasting that we talk
about sometimes that we were switching roles.
So when we stop eating after a certain time, the night workers have enough hours to do
the work that they need to do, why we're supposed to be sleeping at night.
That's it in a nutshell.
Yeah.
And then when you also factor in, let's talk about cortisol for a minute.
So cortisol is like our adrenaline hormone.
It's that fight or flight hormone response that we talk about.
Cortisol rises when you're in a stressful situation, if you're in traffic and somebody
almost rear ends you, right?
And you get that, right?
So your adrenaline spikes, but that's what your body's supposed to do.
It's like a protection mechanism.
But cortisol, so cortisol is supposed to spike to protect you, to tell you to run away from
the lion in the wild, right?
Run away from the bear.
And then it's supposed to come back down.
But when we're stressed out, pissed off all the time, burning the candle at both ends,
right?
Like just can't quite, when that cortisol can't quite come down and it stays elevated
all the time, that's interfering with sleep.
Sure.
And that goes for physical and emotional stress too.
So when you're constantly in that, my job sucks, my relationship sucks, these kids won't
stop crying and fighting, and I'm always out and running from one thing to the next, or
when you're in that mindset, or even when I talk physically, if you're in chronic pain
or you have a chronic illness or something, that's putting a longer term stress on your
body compared to that fight or freeze when we have that, when we need that instinct.
Cortisol is our friend when it's working for us, right?
We need our cortisol to be working for us because that's what gets us out of a dangerous
situation or when we're trying to run a marathon or a race or something like that.
We need that cortisol then.
Those are just examples.
But when it's the chronic, longer term, physical and emotional, elevated cortisol problem,
that's where we run into problems.
And when you're talking about the circadian rhythm, one of the things that happens at
night, like when the natural, like looking out the window, you see the sun is setting,
the day is getting, like it's getting dark outside.
One of the things that happens, it triggers our brain to release melatonin.
But when your cortisol is all jacked up and you're super stressed out, right, your cortisol
is elevated, you're not, it's not allowing that release of melatonin.
And the melatonin tells your body, it's nighttime, it's time to go to bed, it's time to start
settling in.
It's like, it's your sleep hormone.
So when the cortisol is elevated and it's blocking that from happening, how the heck
are you supposed to just turn off the light switch, hit your head on the pillow and go
to bed?
The system is not set up for it.
Our cortisol peaks higher in the morning, right, and then it's gradually going lower
as the day goes on into the nighttime.
So when we're not at that part or we have that chronic elevated physical or emotional
stress going on, sometimes that switches gears, right?
So now we're not having that peak in the morning, we might be having that peak at the end of
the day, which you'll never sleep that way.
No, that's not what we, that's the opposite of what we want, right?
And what we were, the opposite of what we were designed to do.
That's just, yeah, genetically, like that's why you rise with the sun, you sleep when
it goes down.
It's, it's all the natural hormonal response and rhythm of the body.
So why fight it?
I think so.
And there's, let me just point out too.
So in our book, our Stop Chasing Wellness book, we've got a couple chapters where we
talk about these things.
We talk about intermittent fasting and the benefits that that has on the circadian rhythm.
We talk about how that affects gut health, the circadian rhythm and the, and the effects
of gut health.
And we'll be touching on that in our menopause guide as well.
And we also have a chapter in our book specifically talking about sleep and the benefits of it.
So let's, do you want to get into that?
Let's get into talking about some sleep because that's what everybody wants to know, right?
We've got, we understand how the circadian rhythm works instead of fighting it.
Let's find ways to nurture that, that, you know, that onset of, of melatonin in the evening.
And right, if we can't just go to bed, like flicking off a light switch, I mean, with
the, with the rare exception, there are times when you just flat out exhausted and you're
ready to just pass out and yeah, maybe you can go to sleep, but that might be more like
passing out.
But on a normal day, there are just some things that we can do to help with that natural progression
towards sleep.
So let's talk about that.
Yeah.
This is one of my favorite topics to talk about it.
Just like we said, wind down like the sun sets.
It's a slow progression.
So start with dimming the lights.
Like we're, it's, we're going to be getting darker soon.
I think we changed the clocks, I don't know, next week or the week after there was something
on the East coast and it's going to be dark out at like four o'clock in the afternoon.
That's crazy.
But what are we going to do, right?
We have brighter lights on because it's four o'clock in the afternoon.
But as that day goes on in tonight, it's a good approach to start dimming those lights
or use a table lamp instead of an overhead light.
Turning off those electronics and getting them away from your head and your cell phone.
We like to recommend putting the cell phone down an hour before bed or using at least
those blue, what are they called?
Blue blocker glasses.
If you're on a laptop or your cell phone, use something like that that's helping to
block that because those, that blue light keeps us from being able to wind down and
go to sleep and closing those blinds and curtains at night, like dark in your room.
I think you're a fan of that, right?
Like keeping the room real dark so you get a good quality sleep.
We call that Vegas dark.
So as the day gets well for you, yeah, I mean, you're about to head into where it's dark
at four o'clock.
It's not the same out here in Arizona, but at that, you know, we don't observe daylight
savings time, but as, as our day naturally gets darker, we just kind of naturally start
dimming the lights, create that dull dim environment.
Like after dinner, I'm just walking around, I'm always dimming the lights a little bit
more, dimming the lights a little bit more, dimming the lights a little bit more.
Yeah.
I like a really, really dark bedroom also, um, turn that air down, turn your temperature
down in your house, get a nice, cool, don't you sleep so good.
I would say I'm hibernate in the winter.
Like when I can sleep with in Arizona or we sleep with the windows open a lot in the winter
or at least cracked open if it's really cold out, but just to have that super chilly room.
Oh my gosh.
I hunkered down and sleep.
It is my job in the winter, so good.
Some other things people can do that help with that is if you use essential oils, which
I would highly recommend because it's rare if a person tells you that they have that
diffuser going to go to sleep at night and they don't sleep well.
Yeah.
There are many essential oils that just really help relax the body, calm the body down and
just help you get a really good quality sleep to the point that people are waking up like
Holy shit.
That was the best night's sleep I've had in years.
Right.
By yourself.
Yeah.
I mean, it's a simple solution.
If you don't have a diffuser, get one of those little tiny spray bottles and put some filtered
water in there with some drops of lavender oil and just spray it on your pillows and
on your sheets.
I mean, it's just a light mist.
It's not going to make your bed wet, but it just, you're breathing that in on your pillow.
It's so good.
Oh, I feel like I want to go take a nap.
How about some breathing exercises and meditation just wind down with it deep cleansing breaths
and just a few deep cleansing breaths, help reset and rebalance the central nervous system,
help calm the body and just help relax and get you in a place where maybe you might not
have felt that you could get through a meditation before, but once you start doing some breathing
exercises and bringing the body back to balance, you can get through a few minutes, five minutes,
10 minutes of a meditation and build up your practice from there.
Sometimes it's just one minute.
Sometimes it's one minute to just focus on that breathing.
How many times do you hear I'm so stressed out?
I could never meditate.
I can't meditate.
Well, I could be one of those people too.
I have a lot going on and I struggle to get my thoughts together.
But when I get out of balance, I'll start small and just do one minute and then build
it up to five minutes and then 10 minutes.
Yeah.
Set a timer, challenge yourself to do it for that full minute.
And there's guided meditations that you can do with apps or even just look up something
on YouTube and just follow along, listen along, get in a comfortable place and do that.
If you feel like it is a hard, it's hard for you to fall asleep, do that while you're laying
in bed.
Sometimes I do that.
I put your buds in.
I have an app that I use.
I listen to a meditation and most of the time I wake up and realize I didn't even make it
to the end.
It was good.
Right.
Yeah.
Yeah.
I also love to use a sound machine.
That's nice.
Yeah.
We have like all the things, it's like a whole ritual in my bedroom, but sleep is so good.
Sleep is important.
And I love it.
The older I get, the more I love it.
Yeah.
We have a sound machine and I even take that thing traveling with me.
You can even buy like these little teeny weeny sound machines that would fit in the
palm of your hand and pack that in your travel bag or just there's apps you can use on your
phone for sound machine you use on your sound machine.
What type of sound?
I just like white noise, waves or the wind or any of that.
Cause then I find myself laying there waiting for the next wave purpose.
I have a beach one up in my room.
I haven't had, I just realized when you mentioned that I haven't used it in a long time, but
I like rain and my daughter uses rain.
I use rain.
We all love rain and I'm like, how do you sleep with rain?
So then I tried rain one time and if I ever need quiet, if I ever need to drown out the
noise, whether I don't know if the kids have friends over or something and they're a little
louder and I'm trying to sleep, then I'll put on the, and that's as simple as just going
to YouTube.
I don't know, 12 hour live rain, so you don't, there's no commercials, there's no nothing
on that.
Yeah.
Yeah.
Cause I can find if I listened to like the thunderstorm one, then I'm laying there waiting
for the next roll of thunder, wait for it.
Yeah.
So that doesn't work for me, but I do like white noise.
It's really good.
I love it.
Yeah.
I mean, sleep is, it's so important.
It's really, it's just so good for the balance of our hormones and it's, it just refreshes
everything.
People that do get a good night's sleep tend to, um, way less, they have less weight, right?
Because when we're not sleeping, it's raising our cortisol, which is our stress hormone
stress and that rises your blood sugar when you're, and then when you get those peaks
and valleys, then people are tend to be reaching for like the starchy stuff, the stuff that's
not beneficial, the, the right, the sugary things and the caffeinated things and all
those things that are going to add excess weight to the body.
When you're well rested, your cortisol is where it should be.
When you rise and stays in the right place all day, you're, you just tend to make better
dietary choices.
So that's really important.
Just so good for, for the health of our hormones.
Um, and for the health of our immune system, you're sleeping, your body is resting.
Um, it's good for your heart.
It keeps your blood pressure health and healthy level.
So many benefits of getting good sleep.
So it's, you know, aside from taking, we're not prescribing medication because those medications
really aren't sleep.
Anyway, it's just kind of a sleep-like state, but that's not real sleep.
So taking the time to invest in yourself and making that effort every day, because sleep
is a, it's a, it's a big deal.
It's a, it's a process.
It's not just a function taking to invest in getting that, making sure that you're doing
things before sleep to ensure a good night's sleep will go a really long way.
And it needs to be a habit.
Don't just try it for a day.
It needs to be.
Think of sleep like it's self-care really it's essential self-care.
We really need to put ourselves first.
You can't be working all day, shuffling kids around, making dinner, doing laundry till
11, 12 at night, and then waking up and starting your morning at five o'clock and making lunches
and going on and going to work and repeating the same thing again.
It's too much.
It's too much.
You're going to burn out and you might not feel it.
You might feel energized.
You might feel like you're getting through.
You're going through the motions.
You're getting there, but what's happening on the inside.
Yeah.
Inside is where we're talking like that cortisol is starting to raise and raise and raise because
you're burning the candle at both ends and you really need to make, we all do, we need
to make ourselves priority when it comes to sleep.
My sleep time is non-negotiable.
I need my hours.
I need my hours or I'm not going to function right the next day.
And I know that about me.
So my phone goes down.
I don't answer calls.
I don't answer.
I don't do phone past nine o'clock at night.
That's it.
I'm done.
Silence the phone.
I have a do not disturb that goes on at like I think 8 PM and it's on until 7 AM the next
morning.
Is that for me?
No, you should probably do that for me because I know you probably wake up to messages from
me and you're like, thank God I use the do not disturb because here she goes again to
do list for the day.
Let me also say this, like I think we're talking a lot about menopause and like the struggle
that women have as, as our hormones are shifting, but this is some really important stuff to
teach our kids, young kids, teenagers, like kids nowadays, they're just not, they're so
glued to their electronics.
They take them to bed.
They're not using the do not disturb feature.
They don't unplug from this.
Their sleep is so disturbed that I think it's really important as adults, as parents to
be those role models and to teach kids that sleep is important to teach them that routine,
to show them and model that when they are young, when they're in elementary school,
like here's our sleep routine, like, you know, it's bath time and then like, you know, dim
the lights, let's watch some, let's watch some TV and like everybody relax and chill
out and have the house be quiet and cool and comfortable and yeah, make their beds,
make their bed and their bedroom a little sanctuary for themselves as well.
So it's somewhere that they want to be and want to go.
And cause you're setting that up later in life as they age as well so that they will
have these habits instilled in them.
And so when they get to be, they get to be menopausal, maybe they're not struggling as
much.
Yeah.
Yeah.
We talked about a lot of tips that people can do to get a good night's sleep, but what
happens if you're trying them and you're still not getting that good sleep?
One of the things that we also talk about in the book is a sleep journal.
Yeah.
Track it, log it, let's figure out what's happening.
So log the time that you went to bed.
Are you having trouble falling asleep?
Do you have trouble staying asleep?
If you're waking up in the night, why are you waking up?
Is it because you're thirsty or you have to run to the ladies' room or men's room?
How many times did you wake up?
Things like this, we go over this in more detail in the book, but what could have kept
you that night from getting good sleep?
Did you exercise?
Was it early enough in the day?
Did you have caffeine?
Was it later in the day?
Or alcohol, people might think they're having that, I'm using air quotes, well-deserved and
well-earned glass of wine at the end of the night.
That might help you to fall asleep, but it doesn't help you to stay asleep.
That's not a good approach for sleep hygiene.
And then listing down any medications.
Did you take medication too late or not late enough or things like that are all things
to keep in mind when we're trying to track why someone's not getting a good quality night's
sleep.
Yeah.
We do, we review all that too in our manager blood sugar, like a boss program as well,
because we had talked about sleep is directly correlated with blood sugar, cortisol, insulin.
So yeah, that's all part of our blood sugar like a boss program.
So we've got homework assignments directly related to that as well.
So, okay.
I think, is this a wrap Gina?
I think so.
I think this was good.
Hopefully this was helpful.
We hope everybody go out and make some changes, get those sound machines, get some essential
oils, darkening blinds, do all the things and reach out to us and we'll support you
however we can.
So we'd love to hear how you do with your sleep and what your struggles are and how
we can be of service.
Absolutely.
Thanks everybody.
Bye.
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