Fall Asleep And Stay Asleep Naturally! (Adrenals Keeping You Up? )

Adrenals and sleep problems do they have anything to do with each other?

Well I'm gonna explain hey I'm dr. Ekberg with Wellness For Life and if

you'd like to truly master health by understanding how the body really works

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anything so a lot of people have stress and a lot of people have sleep problems

so we're going to talk about one mechanism that is very very commonly

involved with that adrenals what do they do well your adrenal gland sits on top

of the kidney right about in here but in the back and it is the gland that

responds to stress so when your brain detects that there's something urgent

that we have to defend ourselves or deal with then it signals to the adrenals to

increase hormones for energy production so that we have more energy available to

deal with that and the energy comes from the short term energy comes from two

things from adrenaline that increases blood pressure heart rate

vasoconstriction and the second one is from cortisol which is also a stress

hormone produced by the adrenal gland that raises blood sugar because if we

need fast energy blood sugar is the fastest way to get that for an emergency

situation the other thing to understand it when it comes to sleep as cortisol

relates to sleep is that the sleep hormone is called melatonin and it is

released it's secreted by your pineal gland that sits right about in the

middle of your head right there it's a tiny tiny little thing like a tip of

your pinky finger but it's very important because melatonin is what

allows you to go to sleep it regulates your sleep cycle and cortisol and

melatonin are directly opposed to each other meaning cortisol will turn off

melatonin and vice-versa but cortisol is always going to have the

upper hand because it risks Bonz to stress and whenever we have

stress then there is no time there is no second option to delay we whenever we

have stress we have to act on it because if we don't we won't might not get a

second chance so cortisol helps regulate your blood

sugar and it does that during the night also

so cortisol is supposed to be the lowest when you go to sleep because presumably

you have fed yourself during the day so your blood sugar is is high and your

cortisol is low because it's not needed to produce blood sugar and because

cortisol is low it allows your melatonin to be high and put you to sleep then

during the night your blood sugar drops because you're not eating and now the

body has to create blood sugar from other sources and cortisol is the

signaling molecule that does that so cortisol is gonna rise through the night

until you get ready to wake up in the morning then it's gonna be at its

highest because it's maintained blood sugar through the night the longer you

go without eating the more cortisol is needed to bring that blood sugar up then

when you wake up in the morning cortisol at is at its highest which means it

opposes melatonin the most so your melatonin is the lowest and you wake up

it's a beautiful system then during the day when you have opportunities to feed

yourself the cortisol is supposed to decline it's supposed to drop during the

day and then until it's at its lowest level around bedtime and this cycle

starts all over the problem now is that we don't have stable blood sugar anymore

in our society because we have introduced too many refined foods too

much sugar too much carbohydrate grains and pasta and all those things that

stimulate the trigger blood sugar when our blood sugar is high then we trigger

a lot of Celyn so blood sugar comes crashing down

and it overshoots and we create these roller coasters of blood sugar and

whenever it's at a low whenever we have a valley that's called hypoglycemia and

guess what now the body releases cortisol because

your blood sugar is low and whenever it's low that's an emergency it's really

important it's stress so as long as we have the ability to

feed ourselves during the day and if we eat the right things then our blood

sugar is going to be stable so cortisol is not really supposed to be much of an

issue during the day as far as regulating blood sugar but when we

create a blood sugar rollercoaster we get these episodes of hypoglycemia where

we don't have enough blood sugar and the body has to release cortisol and the

more that happens during the day throughout the day the more we fatigue

the adrenal gland it's like a horse that it's pulling the the plow in the field

and it's getting really tired and we need to give it some rest but we got

these important things to get through so we just keep whipping the horse until

it's just totally fatigued and that's what we're doing to the adrenals as well

when we keep demanding cortisol during the day so the more fatigue the adrenals

are and the more we invoke cortisol during the day the more irregular our

cortisol rhythms are going to be so if we can't if we have unstable blood sugar

so that blood sugar really starts crashing throughout the night now the

body has to do a burst of cortisol during the night and it turns off the

melatonin and we wake up so a lot of people wake up in the middle of the

night because of blood sugar imbalances the other factor of course is when the

cortisol starts becoming unregulated then this curve that's supposed to be

nice and predictable starts becoming very random and haphazard and anytime

that we get a blood sugar drop and a cortisol spike we tend to wake up the

long-term solution of course is to stabilize blood sugar stop eating

refined foods and processed foods and sugar and grain and pasta and donuts and

all those things because that's what sets up this vicious cycle in the first

place then once you eat real food and you have some stable blood sugar then

it's a great idea to start doing some relaxation practice and we have some

other videos on that but we're not going to get too much into details that's a

whole other topic we just wanted to talk about how the adrenals and cortisol

relate to the sleep problems that a lot of people have so I hope that was

helpful if you have any questions or comments or suggestions please let me

know down below I'll try to answer as best I can and we can also make

additional videos on these topics if there's something that you'd like to

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