There are a handful of symptoms that are a useful gauge of health status. These are more heuristics then infallible truths, but I find that they are pretty accurate. And somewhere near the top of this list is sleep.

Sleep is definitely getting more attention these days but it’s still significantly undervalued.

So why is sleep so important?

I talked about this at length in my podcast on the topic. In short, because it equals repair. While in the land of zzzz’s, your immune system is heightened, muscles and bone are being rebuilt, and new cells are being created.

If you have been exercising during the day, sleep is vital to make the most of this exercise and for your body to adapt.

Sleep is also crucial for cognitive function. At night while you doze, your mind is piecing together everything that happened throughout the day and helping you make sense of it.

It assists your brain in creating memories and connections that increase creativity and enhance performance, learning, and recall.

This also means that sleep impacts on every organ and system within the body. Which is why so many diseases are correlated with poor quality or insufficient amount of sleep.  

What does a good night’s sleep look like?

I want to set the record straight here, as often people have unrealistic standards of what good sleep looks like.

Some believe that the goal is to fall asleep within minutes (or seconds) of your head hitting the pillow and to be out cold until you wake up the next morning. This isn’t actually the case.

It takes a while for the mind to shift into sleep mode, so anywhere from about 10-20 minutes is a normal amount of time to go from awake to sleep. Any less than this can be an indication you’re in need of going to bed earlier or getting more sleep in general.

 It’s also completely normal to wake for brief moments throughout the night.

Sleep actually happens in approximately 90-120 minute cycles. During each cycle, you move through different states, with times of being in deeper sleep and times of being in REM sleep where you dream. At the end of each cycle, you go into a very light sleep, so it’s common to wake up briefly, maybe turn over, before starting the next cycle again.

So just because you remember waking a handful of times in the night doesn’t mean there’s an issue and you’re sleeping badly. If these are brief moments of awake time, this is completely normal as part of good quality sleep.

When sleep is a problem…

Many of my clients aren’t sleeping well, which can include many different issues:

• Difficulty falling asleep
• Waking in the night and being awake for extended periods (or not falling asleep again at all)
• Waking hungry in the night
• Waking in the night to urinate (often multiple times)
• Spending the night tossing and turning and being restless
• Having night sweats or alternating between throwing the covers off and then feeling cold
• Having nightmares or intense dreams
• Feeling like they slept fine but waking exhausted

I’m not going to address all of these issues as part of this post but I want you to know that the above are all fairly common with the clients I work with.

What I would like to do is talk about two of the most common reasons why I see these various sleep issues occurring in my practice.

Energy Deficit

While it might sound surprising, sleep requires energy. As I detailed earlier on, there are many functions going on while you sleep and these all need energy to make this happen.

When your body runs out of energy, it increases stress hormones like adrenaline and cortisol. These hormones are all about bringing energy to your cells and levels rise when your energy tank is nearing empty.

Ideally, these hormones should be lowest in the evening to allow the repair functions to take place. But if the body is running low on energy, they increase, disrupting sleep.

This energy deficient could be because someone is under eating throughout the day.

Or because they are restricting particular macronutrients, like carbohydrates, which are particularly important for sleep.

Maybe their food intake would be fine, but they are doing high amounts of exercise and need to increase this to adjust for the extra demands.

For others, it’s how they are structuring their eating. Maybe enough calories are coming in overall, but this is only because they are eating huge quantities at night after restricting all day. Unfortunately, the big evening meal hasn’t been fully converted into energy by bedtime and so it’s still as if the body hasn’t got enough.

Or the issue could be the opposite. They are eating dinner too early and so by the time they are sleeping, it’s been so many hours that they are unable to make it through the night.

So if a client is having issues with their sleep, energy deficit will typically be the first thing I check. This includes looking at meals timing and making sure they are covering their bases for each of the macros.

Night time routine

The night time can be another source of sleep interference.

Historically, the evening was about downtime. Once the sun set, there wasn’t much we could do, except maybe sitting around a fire.

These days we have electricity and the availability for 24-hour light. Add to this wireless internet, email, mobile phones, Netflix, and social media, and you have the ability to be working or engaging with a screen every second of the day.

As I talk about in this episode of the podcast, light affects how our cells and body function. The kind of light frequency that is put out by screens is what our body historically has only experienced during the daylight hours. In a sense, your eyes see this light and tell your body “it’s day time”.

This keeps you awake longer than you’d ideally stay up. If you have a fixed wake-up time, this means a reduction in the total sleep you get.

In addition, when you do go to bed, it takes longer for the repair functions associated with sleep to come online because of this light.

So if clients are having issues with their sleep, looking at how they are spending their evenings is crucial

(Connected to this is looking at what is happening during the day time. Because we are meant to be getting sunshine and being outdoors during the waking hours and this is just as important for sleep and circadian rhythm. So the day time and the night time impact on sleep).

Removing The Bottleneck

As I mentioned earlier, lack of sleep or poor quality sleep is correlated with many diseases.

So when clients finally start sleeping better, it’s incredible the downstream changes that happen.

There are the obvious changes, like better energy or reduced anxiety.

But then there are the things people don’t expect: digestion improves; they no longer get dizzy spells; their periods become less painful or they actually return after months or years of being absent; they get less pain; their hair becomes thicker again.

How well do you sleep?

Is good-quality sleep a regular occurrence for you? If not, how long has this been going on? Are there symptoms that have started or become worse during this time?

Sleep is one of the big areas I work on with clients. I’ve had clients who said that they have never slept properly their whole life, dating to back to when they were a kid. Now, sleep is completely normal and they consistently get a solid night’s rest.