139: Your Dreams (Or Lack Thereof) Are Telling You Something Important About Your Health

Dream recall and sleep quality serve as critical biomarkers for overall health, nervous system function, and performance potential. Experiencing consistent fatigue, poor sleep, or lack of dream memory indicates potential systemic imbalances that can be addressed through targeted interventions.

• Different sleep phases serve distinct recovery functions with deep sleep repairing the physical body and REM sleep processing emotions and memories
• Liver function significantly impacts sleep quality, with excessive toxic burden often causing 1-3 AM waking and reduced dream recall
• Functional lab testing like the Stress Mood Metabolism Test provides data-driven insights into hormone balance, recovery potential, and sleep disruption
• High-leverage habits include morning sunlight exposure, early movement, and evening wind-down rituals without blue light
• Quarterly functional medicine detox protocols can reset liver function and improve sleep metrics within days
• Magnesium bisglycinate chelate with GABA support and guided breathing techniques directly improve sleep quality
• Even one alcoholic drink can reduce REM sleep and HRV by 30-40%, making it a key factor in poor recovery
• Strategic sleep optimization creates measurable improvements in heart rate variability, hormone balance, and cognitive performance

Take the free toxicity assessment at jeffreymort.com to measure your current liver burden and recovery potential, or book a free 20-minute optimization consultation to develop your personalized protocol.

Chapters

• 0:00 Dream Recall and Recovery Signals
• 4:28 The Performance Trio: Stress, Sleep, Liver
• 7:02 Testing and Measuring Your Recovery Status
• 11:24 High-Leverage Sleep Improvement Strategies
• 17:04 Sleep as Your Strategic Edge
• 19:11 Closing and Action Steps

Transcript

Speaker 1: 0:00

If you haven't been dreaming much lately, or even for a long time, or you can't remember the last time you actually felt rested. Although this may be common, it's certainly not normal. It could be your nervous system stuck in overdrive, your liver working overtime or deeper imbalances blocking your body's ability to fully recover. Today I'm going to break down what dream recall, heart rate variability and nighttime recovery really say about your performance and the steps that I took after dealing with chronic inflammatory syndrome to get heart metrics better than most 30-year-olds. Let's dig in.

Speaker 1: 0:50

Hello, I'm Jeffrey Mort. If you're like most entrepreneurs, you're busy taking care of business. Yet who's taking care of you? If you're ready to take your energy and performance to the next level in your life and your business, then this podcast is for you, because today you're going to start breaking boundaries of your mind, body and business with integrative health, and when you do that, your possibilities are limitless. I'm grateful you're here yes, always grateful for you joining me here on Breaking Boundaries. I'm your host, jeffrey Mort, your personal high-performance health coach, and I'd like to share a quick little story that you know.

Speaker 1: 1:26

You may have heard me mention this before if you're a regular listener to the podcast, but this, you know, a little bit different spin because it really had a profound effect on so many parts of my life, and that is two years ago. After recovering from long COVID and a clinical diagnosis of chronic inflammatory response syndrome that's C-I-R-S I felt like I was operating at half capacity and in some days honestly you know that would be 50%. Some days I felt like I was operating at 10% or even 5%. You know, physically I was moving but I was not fully alive. I had brain fog, I had poor sleep and no dream recall, which is what we're kind of diving into here today. I had low heart rate variability and honestly, I didn't realize how bad it was until I saw the data. I'd open up my health dashboard and I would stare at metrics that used to be my bragging rights and now they were just a reflection of. You know, I can refer to it as internal chaos, because that's really what it felt like. It wasn't just my body that was out of sync, it was my entire nervous system, my hormones and my ability to recover. But now fast forward to today. At 52 years old, my resting heart rate is in the low 50s. My heart rate variability is regularly closer to triple digits than ever before.

Speaker 1: 2:59

And I wake up energized and I dream vividly most nights. And I didn't get there by luck. I got there through a process and that's what I'm going to share with you today what your dreams actually mean and don't mean. So first, let's break a myth If you don't remember your dreams, it doesn't always mean that you didn't dream. Dreaming happens in REM sleep. R-e-m sleep stands for rapid eye movement and that's actually the physical activity that happens when you're in this stage of sleep, and that rapid eye movement sleep cycles throughout the night. But lack of dream recall can actually be a red flag. So let me translate that for you you may not be getting enough quality REM sleep or your nervous system is too taxed. It's too stressed to transition between the sleep stages efficiently.

Speaker 1: 3:59

Your body does different things in different sleep phases. So deep sleep repairs your body. Think of your muscles, your bones, your immune system. That's what gets repaired and restored during deep sleep phases and then, during REM sleep processes, you restore things like emotional resilience, you process emotions, you process memory and neural recovery. Think of REM sleep as restoring the brain or restoring the mind, processing all of those things. It happens during REM sleep. So if you're not getting. And then of course, there's other stages of sleep, such as light sleep. Different sleep trackers track things a little bit differently, but deep in REM is really where the recovery happens. So deep sleep, it repairs your body, your muscles, your bones, your immune system and REM sleep processes those emotions, that memory and that neural recovery. And if you never remember dreams or you wake up exhausted, that means that your REM sleep might be cut short.

Speaker 1: 5:07

Or and this is what most people don't think about or realize and most conventional medical practitioners won't they just don't know this information your liver might be waking you up between 1 and 3 am, when it's busiest, processing toxins. We'll talk, we'll dive a little bit deep into stress and sleep and liver load. This is the performance trio. Your brain and body are in constant communication via your nervous system. But if you're wired all day, you're scrolling at night, you're eating late or struggling with detoxification, that signal gets scrambled. There's static there. So let's talk about liver function. Most people don't realize the liver is a key player in recovery and sleep quality. If your liver is overburdened with toxins processed food, alcohol, medications, plastics, even chronic stress your sleep suffers.

Speaker 1: 6:12

You might be wondering, jeff, what are the symptoms of poor liver efficiency? Well, let me give you four of those right now. If you're waking up between 1 and 3 am, that could be a sign of poor liver efficiency. If you have grogginess in the morning, that could be another very common sign of poor liver efficiency. If you have lack of dream recall, which is today's primary topic, you could be showing signs of poor liver efficiency. And then, of course, despite getting eight hours of sleep, you just you wake up feeling exhausted. That is a key sign of poor liver efficiency.

Speaker 1: 6:53

So how do we know? How do we know if this is the case? Well, we always like to turn to functional lab testing, getting real data, not guesswork. If you're serious about optimizing your performance, of course, you need clarity, and here's where I recommend starting lab tests that can be done for this. It's called the Stress Mood Metabolism Test and all of these lab tests. These are CLIA certified lab tests, that is a gold standard in laboratory testing for biological markers and these labs. You know you don't have to go to a lab core or any place like that, no need for a phlebotomist. These labs come to you right at your home, wherever you are, whether you're traveling, whether you're at home and you do these samples by yourself. They're completely private. Your information is confidential. It's not shared with anybody unless you choose that.

Speaker 1: 7:48

But the primary test for this is called the stress, mood and metabolism test. This is done with a saliva sample actually four saliva samples throughout the day and a blood spot sample. So just a simple finger prick, a couple of drops of blood on a card and this tracks cortisol throughout the day through the saliva. This is key for sleeping and wake cycles. And the stress metabolism test also measures thyroid function through the blood spot. It also measures a cardiometabolic panel as well as vitamin D3. And it's important to know your thyroid function beyond just a TSH. That's not even a thyroid hormone. It's a thyroid stimulating hormone, which is typically where conventional medicine stops, and the full thyroid panel tells us about what is controlling that metabolic rate and the energy that you may or may not have. And then, unlike blood work, this lab test also provides bioavailable hormone levels for energy, things like testosterone, dhea, estrogen, progesterone. These are all so important, but, understanding them from a functional medicine perspective, using saliva rather than blood serum, we're looking at what's actually bioavailable to the body rather than something that's bound to a protein and actually not available when we're looking at it through blood, very, very important, and this is important for energy levels, for mood, for libido, for so much more.

Speaker 1: 9:20

Now, next, I'm just going to roll through these a little bit quicker. The minerals and metals test this is done with a simple hair sample and that reveals mineral deficiencies and heavy metal toxicities, both of which impact sleep and neurological function. And then, of course, we have the organic acids test. This is we also call this the candida metabolic and vitamins test. This is a simple urine sample. It helps to identify gut dysbiosis, neurotransmitter imbalances, which is super important for mood and for energy. It also looks at detoxification pathways and so much more.

Speaker 1: 9:55

And for those that are just not ready to start with functional medicine, lab testing you know, I completely understand that I feel as though everybody and I usually don't generalize like that, but I feel as though everybody could benefit from understanding these levels on an annual basis. But for those that are not ready yet and they just want to start with something simple, you can start with our free toxicity assessment over on our site, jeffreymortoncom, and you'll see that right up at the header, and this toxicity assessment answer a few questions uh, it's more than a few, is maybe, I don't know, 30 questions on there, and it gives us a surprisingly accurate picture of your liver burden. It's why I call it a toxicity assessment your liver burden like how pressurized is that toxic tank? As well as your recovery potential. Now you might be wondering what do we do with this information? Where do we go from here? Well, that's why you know we don't just do the testing. We provide solutions that actually work safely, effectively, sustainably. And these are solutions that you might be thinking well, is this just, you know, another pitch for supplements? Supplements are second, lifestyle is first. So let's be clear you cannot out supplement, you cannot supplement your way out of bad habits, and you don't need a dozen hacks either, just a few consistent, high leverage habits. So here's what works. And when I say what works, we have clinical data proving that these strategies work.

Speaker 1: 11:32

So, morning light and movement. Number one get outside within 30 minutes of waking. Sunlight actually sets your circadian rhythm. If you go back to episode 127, I explain how sunlight can actually be considered an essential nutrient for your body. So be sure to check out that episode 127 of the Breaking Boundaries podcast and next, move your body early to trigger dopamine and cortisol on your terms.

Speaker 1: 12:00

So you know, I personally this is part of my routine. I get both of these done right out of bed. I drink my electrolyte water and that's just simply organic lemon. I squeeze in there with a little bit of Redmond real salt. I'm getting my sodium, my potassium balance and then I go for a walk. I take my dog, luna, for a walk and, you know, hopefully the sun is shining and I'm getting that early morning sunlight within the first. And it's not a very long walk, 10 or 15 minutes. I'm getting my body moving. I'm getting that dopamine triggered. Um, I'm getting that dopamine triggered. I'm getting that cortisol triggered naturally, and I'm feeling amazing. It's a great way to wake up every single day.

Speaker 1: 12:37

And then, of course, something else that works is a functional medicine detox protocol. Either a seven day. You could do a 14 day. If you've never done one before, highly recommend that you do a 21 day functional medicine detox protocol, which resets the liver. It balances blood sugar, helps to eliminate toxins. I do this, uh, seven days every 90 days. So every change of season I'm recording this now. It's almost summertime here, the first day of summer, the summer solstice. I just ordered my functional medicine detox kit. It should be in this week. I'm looking forward to starting next week because it's such a reset. It's so refreshing to be able to reset my body and it's amazing just in 90 days. You know, it creeps up on me and I don't realize how good I feel until I feel good, until I feel better. And this functional medicine liver detox is an amazing reset every single 90 days. You can check that out. It's linked up in the show notes or you can check it out at jeffreymortcom slash transform. You can learn all about it.

Speaker 1: 13:40

You know most people report better sleep and dream recall within the first week of the functional medicine detox. If you're, you know if you're doing a 21 day or 14 day. For me personally, you know I got this down to uh, really to a precise routine. And day three is when I wake up feeling absolutely amazing every single time. So just in a matter of two to three days I can get some great results.

Speaker 1: 14:05

Um, on this program, on this reset, and and then rounding this out, evening wind down rituals Very important. Why do I call it a ritual? Because it's more than a routine. So cutting blue light 90 minutes before bed. I know this is really difficult for me because a lot of times when I'm putting my phone in airplane mode and, you know, putting on some sleep hypnosis or something to fall asleep to maybe it's some white noise or something else I'll be. Oh, I'll just check Instagram one more time or I'll just see if I have any messages to respond to that I might have missed earlier. I really need to break that habit. But cutting blue light 90 minutes before bed is one of the best things that you can do. Another great thing in getting back into supplementation magnesium, but a specific type of magnesium Magnesium biglycinate chelate very, very good for right before bed. I'll talk just about that in a little bit more depth in just a minute. Add GABA support to that.

Speaker 1: 15:05

This is backed by science, absolutely going to help with sleep right out of the gate the night that you start that routine. Absolutely going to help with sleep right out of the gate the night that you start that routine. Absolutely going to help with sleep. And then, of course, guided breathing or a hypnosis track to be able to downshift the central nervous system. So I highly recommend trying resonance breathing. So look up the breathing app. It's absolutely free. There's resonance, breathing on there, to improve heart rate variability. That's simply seven seconds in for your inhale and then 11 seconds out, so as long as your exhale is longer than your inhale, that's going to improve heart rate variability. Do that for three minutes, five minutes, 10 minutes before bed, not just once, but try it for a week. That's going to absolutely change, be a game changer for your heart rate variability metrics.

Speaker 1: 15:56

And then a bonus tip if you can avoid alcohol, it really it crushes rapid eye movement sleep. Even one drink can reduce HRV and dream sleep by 30 to 40%. Nothing If you're. If you're going to have alcohol on a daily basis, try to do it. Uh, before you know 5 PM, maybe with dinner, um, and not closer to bedtime. That's absolutely going to be a game changer for you.

Speaker 1: 16:22

And if you can eliminate it completely, like for me personally, it's no longer worth it. It really isn't. Um, I've pretty much cut out alcohol completely out of my life and you know that was just because I value the way that I feel. You know there was a point in my life where it was a problem for health reasons and I realized that and decided that every choice that I make is either going to move me closer to my goals or further away from them, and that was one of the things that was moving me further away, or at least holding me back from achieving the health goals that I wanted. So that was my personal choice. And then you know what if sleep was your edge? What if that was your advantage?

Speaker 1: 17:05

You're not lazy for needing seven to nine hours of sleep. You're strategic, because sleep isn't just rest. It's not, it's recovery, it's neuroplasticity, which is the brain's ability to be able to reorganize and produce new neural networks. Sleep helps with that as well as performance enhancement. So, instead of chasing harder, you're recovering smarter. That's right. Your ability to lead others, be able to lift others up, to be able to build your business or your legacy, be able to connect it all starts in your sleep cycles. That's not motivational BS here, it's measurable. It's measurable in your heart rate, your heart rate variability, your cortisol levels, your testosterone, your estrogen and progesterone balance and your cognitive sharpness as well. So most people in their 50s are slowing down and you're not most people.

Speaker 1: 18:01

If you're like me, if you're the kind of person who's ready to take your recovery, your sleep, your performance, your optimization, to the next level, we we've got the blueprint, you can grab the free toxicity assessment. Caution no money, just take a couple of minutes to fill that out. No email required either. It's completely confidential. I don't know who. I see the scores come in, but I don't see whose score that is. So if you do fill out that toxicity assessment, it's completely digital. Remember your score when you set up your free call with me. You know I completely support anybody that wants to come on for a free 20-minute optimization consultation.

Speaker 1: 18:42

You know, if you're interested in the sleep health protocols that we mentioned earlier, we have a sleep health protocol and we have an ultimate sleep health protocol. You can find both of those at jeffreymortcom slash shop. Click on the supplements type in sleep and you'll see that come up right there. I can't link them up in the show notes, but you know where to find them now. So let's map out your personal path to peak performance and recovery, and remember high performanceperformance. Health isn't about doing more, it's about doing less better. It's about recovering deeper and operating with precision and optimization. So until next time, keep breaking those boundaries, keep pushing those limits and we'll see you on the next show. Bye-bye.