HH385-The Role of Sleep In Gut Health

Welcome back to another episode of health hacks as I continue talking about the importance of gut health, and today I'm focusing on the role of sleep in relation to our gut health, because the quality of our sleep affects our gut health, and vice versa, an unhappy gut or a gut that is still digesting food when we go to sleep is going to negatively impact our sleep, versus if we have our meal earlier and we've had finished digesting before we go to bed, then our our gut can get into what it's really supposed to be doing during sleep, which Is detoxing, and we get to have a more restorative sleep. Now, we all, of course, have a circadian rhythm, and that circadian rhythm has our cortisol levels at the highest in the morning to give us the energy as we wake up and start our day, and at the lowest at bedtime, because melatonin, which is a precursor to serotonin made in the gut, is what we need to have high at bedtime. And if our cortisol levels are too high, then our melatonin levels are not optimal for getting good sleep. So it's really important that we are letting our body know that it's time that we're getting ready for bed. And it used to happen naturally, before the advent of electricity, because dusk would inform the brain that it was getting dark, and we would soon be getting ready for bed, and the brain could start producing more melatonin, and we would start to get into that, you know, readiness for bed mode. We no longer have that with electricity. Our brains don't get the signal of when we're getting ready for bed. It doesn't know when to start producing melatonin. And worse than that is the effect of blue light from our phones, our televisions, our laptops, our computers, our tablets, the blue light that comes into our eyes is the light of high noon, and it actually blocks the production of melatonin once you get off your screen for half an hour, for every hour you've Been on your screen at night, after dusk. So if you've been on your devices for three hours, once you get off them, your body can't produce melatonin for another 90 minutes after that, and therefore you can't get into that deep, restorative sleep. And this is all impacting our gut sleep connection, because, as I said, melatonin is a precursor to serotonin that's made in the gut. We need to have a healthy gut in order for these neurotransmitters to be produced, in order for us to have a deep, restorative sleep. And the more restorative our sleep, the better our balance of microbes are healthy microbes in our microbiome, and if we have a poor night's sleep, we are literally killing off our healthy microbes in our gut and creating an imbalance. So just some quick tips of things you can do to improve your sleep. And I have a whole course called Six steps to better sleep, where I dive into this in much more detail, and just some very quick tips are to get off your devices earlier and or where blue light blockers, or have blue light blocking screens software on your devices so that your body isn't being blocked from producing melatonin. Naturally, have a bedtime routine that is 30 to 60 minutes long after you get off your devices where you are doing some breath work, journaling, having a shower, having a bath, a bath, calming the mind in order to just slow down from your busy Go, go, go day to get into a better frame of mind for a more restorative sleep, those are just a few really simple steps that you can take that are very easy to implement in your daily life, as well as what I mentioned Earlier, eating dinner earlier, so that you have a couple of hours between your last meal before going to bed, so that digestion is complete, so that your body isn't trying to digest during the night. It's instead focusing on detoxing over night. If you'd like more support with your sleep your gut health, please reach out Melissa at your guided health journey.com. And have fun implementing some of those little tips in your daily life.