How your Brain Health Affects your Sleep

If you can't sleep, your brain isn’t healthy.

For a healthy brain, sleep is effortless. A healthy brain remembers things, thinks clearly and is excited about life.

When there’s inflammation in your brain, it doesn’t function as it should. You know your brain is decaying if you have:

• Trouble learning

• Brain fog

• Poor memory

• No passion or motivation

• Poor balance

• Bad digestion

• Depression or anxiety

• Poor performance and concentration

• Sleep issues

Your diet is the number one factor that determines your brain health. If you eat processed foods with unhealthy oil, refined sugar and flour, fried foods, GMO’s, and food you’re sensitive to, then you aren’t supporting your brain with the nutrients it needs. If your blood sugar is too high or low, that affects your brain, too. A poor diet is going to keep you from sleeping normally.

Other lifestyle factors affect your brain health, too. Chronic stress, not exercising, a head injury, poor circulation, and brain autoimmunity will prevent your brain from functioning like it should.

The part of your brain that controls your sleep is the temporal lobe. It’s responsible for your hearing, speech, memory, and emotional response as well as your circadian rhythm. When your circadian rhythm is messed up, you have insomnia, a hard time getting out of bed in the morning, and afternoon energy crashes.

Symptoms of temporal lobe dysfunction are:

• Poor memory

• Difficult hearing with background noise

• Tinnitus

• Fatigue throughout the day

• insomnia

What you may not know is that other imbalances in the body affect your brain. An unhealthy gut, hormone imbalance, nutrient deficiencies, and food sensitivities cause inflammation in your brain. For example, serotonin, the “happy and joyful” neurotransmitter, helps us sleep. Signs of serotonin deficiency are depression and lack of enjoyment, PMS, inner rage, paranoia, and poor sleep. 90% of serotonin is made in your gut. So if your gut isn’t healthy (you have a pathogen like a parasite, leaky gut, or poor digestion), your gut won’t make the serotonin it needs to be happy and sleep well.

The only way to improve your brain health so you can sleep normally is to find everything that is keeping it unhealthy and fix it. The lab tests I do look at all the factors that affect your brain, including gut health, hormones, minerals, liver function, food sensitivities, and more. These tests show exactly what’s going on in your body that’s keeping you awake. Then I give a simple plan to restore brain health looking at diet, exercise, and stress and recommending supplements for the short-term to support your body’s functions so it can “heal.”

When inflammation goes down and your gut is healthy enough to make serotonin, you’ll start sleeping normally and you’ll feel much better! This is possible for you even if you’ve been struggling to sleep for years, even if you’ve tried all kinds of other supplements, meds, and modalities and nothing has worked, even if you’ve worked with a doctor, psychiatrist, or naturopath. I know because it’s helped me personally and dozens of my clients.

If you're ready to get over your sleep problems for good, I can help. The first step is to book a call with me. We’ll talk about what your sleep is like now and how you’d like to be sleeping and I’ll tell you the steps you can take to get there.