Optimize Your Wellness Through Your Cycle

Kashif Khan

Welcome back, everyone. We have a really cool presentation for you here today. It’s funny because just earlier today I was speaking to a patient who said she was going to see her doctor, her MD, because she wanted to get into hormones. And a lot of her friends were telling her it’s time for hormones. She’s menopausal. The doctor said, here’s your prescription. And it was one number for one thing, for the whole month that she said, but isn’t my hormone cycle different every week? Don’t my hormones go up and down is like, Yes, but this is what we do. And he said, Well, can we not do that? Can we do something that’s more allied to my cycle? And she just got silent because that answer was in there. And this is why this is really cool, because Katrine’s here to share with us today how to think about your sleep in the context of the female hormone cycle, which is a circadian rhythm that changes through the month, and how many women are struggling, trying to take one size fits all answers and plug them in and every week feels different. Some weeks it works and some weeks it doesn’t work. And nobody’s speaking in the context of the people about. We have an amazing female here today to tell you how females think about sleep. Welcome. Thank you for joining us.

Katrine Volynsky

Thank you so much for inviting us.

Kashif Khan

Yes, it’s going to be awesome. You do work with a lot of health, wellness, biohacking type companies, and you do work with a company called Bio Optimizes, whose product we love. You collaborated with them on putting this president’s presentation together because of the research that’s required on sleep support. Imagine a company like Bio Optimizer that’s going out there saying we make the best supplements, but it also has to work for women and it has to work every day and women change. This is the research you’ve been working on, and it’s really cool how the findings on sleep are really highly variable, unique. I’m going to pass it to you. You have a presentation you’re going to share, right?

Katrine Volynsky

Yes. For once. I do have a presentation to share.

Kashif Khan

Let’s open that up.

Katrine Volynsky

Make sure we can see it and slide show. There we are. Okay. You all have, as you mentioned, we are talking today about sleep, but we also just talk about the cycle. And I know in the context of the summit, you probably have heard a lot on the subject of different hormones and how they affect you, how you might want to change everything from your eating to your fasting techniques to even sleep support depending on which phase of your cycle you’re in.  Excited to share some of the things we’ve learned over time that were not available. When I started learning about my health, this was not information that was around at all. Like you just said, a doctor could not give this type of guidance to a patient because they’d simply not thought in that way. And one of the reasons why we had such an issue is because for, what is it, 60, 70 years, we were excluded from research. Females of bare childbearing age because we vary so much, but we’re just basically thrown out of research because it’s like, hey, this is not going to work for us. We need menopausal women and men, right? We can have some stability in data. 

Recently it’s been such a pleasure to see how much more information came out on cycle management, on specific strategies. More women are talking, more people in the industry are talking about more studies are done. There are books on Arabian Rhythm now. There are great books on fasting for women specifically. I’m really happy to see that because as I was dealing with my health issues and as I was knowing about my body, there was nothing to learn from. 20 years ago literally nothing was even five years ago. There’s definitely been a boom. Some of it is because we just have so much more information, exchange and ability to reach each other and have these Zoom meetings like you were in a one part of the world and I’m in that part of the world and people are learning and taking control of their health, which is important to have the ability to not just outsource your decision making to a doctor like the patient that you just talked about. But ask the right questions, ask the right for the right guidance and be hyper individualized. 

This makes it more specific to you and the women. As we know from Venus. We are difficult creatures and we go through all sorts of precautions right in our life, everything from puberty to, going through your childbearing years to perimenopause, which could be very tricky to menopausal, then to a post menopause. And there’s literally many sizes and factors to us. And in Freudian rhythm, which is basically a rhythm that is referring to different parts of months, having different hormones and having different factors that are rising and falling became a such a stage for on center in the last few years was like a work of, let’s say Alissa Beatty and other people that are speaking out and bringing this to attention, that we are not men and we need to take care of ourselves in a different way. Everything from our sleep to maybe even our work cycles, maybe even specific support emotionally or psychological in different parts of the cycle. I’m super happy to speak about this. It’s been a passion of mine to teach other women and to help them learn how to make this. I go from hindrance to a superpower which can be done if you leverage those hormones because they are fantastic, they literally can leverage to make you smarter, more emotional, whatnot, not emotional like as and not not being able to regulate yourself the other way around, knowing why are you feeling things? Why are you tired? In parts of a month or why you can finish projects. Sleep is going to be one of the things that we’re going to focus on today. But I’m sure in the summit you’ve heard about all sorts of other parts of why you should be paying attention to your hormones and variations in your hormones if you are a female of childbearing age. With that, let’s start going through. We’re going to be discussing today information on different parts of our psycho hormones, on sleep, on different things that will make your sleep better or worse, depending on which part of your cycle you connection with your hormones, and also some of the strategies that you can be using in your daily life to help you sleep better or sounder recover and help you have a healthier, happier life. 

I will start with just giving you a little bit of background information on myself and feel free to interject because I will just start talking, I’m like that. The way I got into the health industry is I had my own healing journey. Unfortunately, when I was a child, or maybe fortunately I was exposed to radiation and Chernobyl. My grandparents were in the energy sector, engineers and we happened to be there during the time that it exploded. By the time I was 17, I was really sick. I actually had a near-death experience and part of it was relating to hormonal variations. I didn’t actually get sick until I was in my teens and that’s when my hormones started kicking in. That was a turning point where I started to experience all sorts of issues. A lot of problems were internal, external bleeding. I always say that I had a cycle trauma. I literally bled for like a couple of years when I just started my cycles, who was very, very heart for a young girl who didn’t know what was going on. I didn’t have this information. One of the reasons why I like to share about it, I think that’s one of the things that we need to really share with our daughters. We need to share with our young females and give them those tools earlier. They have clients that are 30 and I can give I’m just finding out about this right now. 

Going back to my story in my teens, late teens, I got really sick. I got put on a bunch of drugs and actually hormones after I had a near-death experience, I bled out basically to death and had a clinical death for several minutes. And after that, we had to take strong measures. Before that, we were really trying to have other ways to heal my body, like vitamins and herbal therapies. In Russia, there was way more sensitivity to not put young females on hormones right away. They were trying to find other ways to help somebody who was having issues just because they didn’t know what effects it would have later on. I’m grateful for that. But at that point, we had to pivot and get me on something much stronger. That, of course, didn’t fix my issues. I moved to Canada and became a young adult that was living outside of my health parameters. As I said, by the time I was 22, I started getting really sick and unwell. That’s actually when I met Wade and Matt. Years back, and they were both training at that time. I was there at the beginning of the bio optimizers being born and my name’s Bottle first, my sample being shipped. It’s been a pleasure to see that company grow. But basically at that point when I started getting on well in my twenties, I had to choose what I was going to do, whether I’m going to go with the medical system, which was not giving me a positive verdict that was very negative, which I didn’t want to take in and take it as my own journey. I decided to stop everything that I was doing and really concentrate on healing my body. And basically for the next three years, I detox. I learned as much as I could. I travel to all places and study with all sorts of people just to try to figure out how to heal my body. I got to a place where I not just healed my body, but also experienced levels of health that I did not experience before. And that became a passion. And it became something that I wanted to do because my previous life was in finance. I had nothing to do with biology or health, I didn’t have anything in that department. It wasn’t going into medicine, that’s for sure. But by the time I healed my body, I wanted to understand more why certain things worked and why certain things didn’t work. I wanted to understand the mechanics behind it. 

I went back to school, did my pre-med, to learn more about nutrition and wellness and how I started doing a lot of different things in the field, from researching to writing my own clinic to writing to practices, to facilitating work with medical teams. It’s been really fun and a great way to pivot in my life. I always say it was a blessing in disguise to be sick because it brought me to a life of purpose and something I really love doing. I’ll share one little thing about this, because I know you were in the water. Genomics, genomics actually played a huge part in my life in 2012, right after Fukushima. I worked actually in Fukushima and afterwards in Japan trying to understand what was going on there. So even though I’ve been exposed before and had to deal with my health, I was really interested in learning what’s going on over there because you just don’t get the information. You get fragments of what’s really happening. 

I went to Japan and I was invited by the Williamson Group that brought some solutions to Japan for radiation cleanup and was collecting data. I’ve learned a lot during that time about what was going on there, but that’s not sorry, this is not a topic on radiation. But when it came back, I really got into a lot of genomics. It was the time when a lot of information was coming out from academia, school and Kendall Stewart and the group from Australia. It really opened up a whole new understanding of how to detox responsibly and healthily and how to understand your body better. And they can apply it to myself and learn how to work with micronutrients in my specific genetic regions. And in that short period of time, I again gained another level of health just doing that and did such a good job detoxing that I ended up having a child which was not supposed to happen before. Oh, I do attribute it to being able to fix my own genetics and my own problems in how I was detoxing. And that was a huge step forward. I’m a huge fan, fan of your work and what are you guys providing? And I encourage everybody to get to know their DNA and use it for them in their specific way they can get by individualized approach basically to their health.

Kashif Khan

Your story is, if we were to summarize it, it’s nothing short of a miracle, but it sounds like it’s a miracle if you limit your thinking to the medical tools we have. But it was your work that I was meaning that what you did in the regular medical context seems impossible. Just paints a picture of how much is actually possible. What you can do because you didn’t. You didn’t. But there was no magic potion that just made things go away. You did. You figured it out. You did the work. And now thank you for that. And now we’re going to dive deep into one of the things you learn, which is how all of what you learned applies to sleep through. Yes.

Katrine Volynsky

Sleep in hormones. Right. I figured, well, we’ll start talking about how complicated we are. This is a nice little graph of all the things that go up and down. Where we are, we’re going through our cycle. On the bottom here, you see our estrogen rising, right? We see our hormones rising and falling throughout the 24 hour cycle. I’m sorry to involve a 28 hour, 28 day cycle or longer and all the things I can be going up and down. I mean, like we are complicated beings, there is no wonder that nobody taught us this because this information had to get compiled and now shared. And with the new age, being information sharing, that’s just much easier to get off this data. We’re going to use some of the stuff from this little graph here in our presentation, but that just gives you an idea of just how many things are going up and down, right, and how different it is from each part of our cycle. To understand how hormones impact sleep, of course you need to talk about the cycle and I don’t know how much you guys dove into that. You feel free to make it shorter or faster?

Kashif Khan

No, go for it. And we talk about sleep, but not in the context of the cycle.

Katrine Volynsky

Okay. We’ll just talk about just this much about the menstrual cycle in general for women. We are talking about women who are experiencing the menstrual cycle right now. We are not talking about women who lost their cycle because it’s menopause. It’s a slightly different topic and we could be doing a slightly different presentation. You could still use some information we are going to be discussing to optimize your sleep, even if you are a woman who’s already done cycling basically, but there’s definitely techniques that apply to all of us. But there is specific radiation depending on what’s going on with our hormonal cycle for women who are still cycling. There are obviously several distinct phases and there’s actually medically in medical terms, those through this particular luteal phase. Right. But for the purpose of understanding more how we change week by week will separate into four. And that’s being the common theme. And a lot of education lately for women on cycle thinking is that cycle specific classing, cycle specific training. We’re looking at four phases of, your menstruation, follicular ovulation and your luteal phase. And in all of these parts of the cycle, we have different hormones that are rising and falling, which will affect everything from your energy to your ability to be social or absorb information or work on different projects. It’s super important to understand women in general. We have a lot of communication between the brain or when you. That’s happily happening. It’s part of our cycle. Everything has to be sync then and that’s why we want to look at how this actually happened in real time. The Michelle phase is pretty easy to identify. That’s when the woman is actually experiencing her cycle. Usually they are 1 to 5. This is the time when all the hormones are low. The low hormones will definitely have an effect on a lot of things and we’ll get into details on that. But it’s also the time when a lot of women will experience inflammation. They’ll experience feelings of, low self-esteem, or they can be more irritable or they can be a little bit introverted. And there are reasons for it because there’s literally not enough hormones in the system to run some of the things in our brain because they’re hormonal estrogen and progesterone. They can also be viewed as neurotransmitters, but they do affect our brain and ability to complete different tasks or being able to regulate different emotions. During this phase, we also have a common theme of digestion being disturbed. Higher pain levels, your basal metabolic rate can really go down. You also have sleep disturbances usually during this time, but we’ll dove into it in the future. The next stage is the follicular stage and that technically lasts from day one to just about the ovulation. But for this specific biphasic four basic approach, we’re going to call it day six to about 12. Right? And this is the time when you start actually producing more hormones, you start getting a signaling from the brain to prepare for ovulation. You start seeing rises in estrogen, slow rises in testosterone, and eventually you’ll have a signal from the society hormones that you need to release the egg. 

And this surge of age is actually what causes tabulation during this time. We have women usually feeling better, digestion improves, they have better energy levels, the metabolism is still slower and there is still some inflammation that they’re dealing with. But generally cortisol levels are better and women tend to feel better and start taking on more projects and be a little bit more now, social as well, doing that this time, sleep is generally a little bit better, but we’ll get into that in a minute as well. For ovulation, that’s usually dependent on women. Any way between day, 10 to 16, depending on how long the cycle is. And specific for a woman cycle, the ovulation issue only lasts a couple of days but we have a little bigger period for that just to account for the differences from each woman to woman and this is halfway usually through an average cycle. This is when at least one mature egg gets released. And during this time we have high levels of estrogen, we have high levels of testosterone. Progesterone is also rising, which makes women feel more energetic, more social, more outgoing. Libido is up. They want to be going out and connecting with people. 

They have better verbal fluency during this time. And during this time you would think you will have better sleep, but not always, because your temperature is up. And again, we’ll get into that in detail. But basically that’s one of the things that happens. Luteal phases like I would say are the most complicated. You can see how much I have on here. Because there’s like two phases to the luteal phase. You have the early luteal phase where you have a rise in progesterone and this where the projection of speaking the estrogen is still pretty high and testosterone is still, fairly high. But as far as estrogen is declining, estrogen starts declining. This is like a time when, for example, I and a lot of women that I know that are perimenopausal in their thirties feel really good about romantic gestures. It makes them feel calmer. Progesterone is the hormone of calm and the hormone of which is, anti-anxiety, basically. And they still have that estrogen spike that makes them wild going, Usually they’ll start, finishing up projects. They’ll have more energy. They’re still arguing, but things are shifting slightly. Usually during the first phase of luteal, there’s quite a bit of positive changes for women emotionally and physiologically. Of course, the neutral phases when they’re in their eggs, they’ll fertilize. Right at that point, the body’s going to need to change resources and start going towards shedding their uterine lining and getting back into the bleeding stage. In the second half of luteal, this is why I always say to people, you have to protect the second half of your luteal phase, especially if you are about 35 years old as much as you can, because this is a time when you most vulnerable as to two effects of stress, specifically because this is when cortisol goes up the hormones and declining progesterone is declining and this is where anxiety goes up. Now, you can experience a lot of unpleasant symptoms such as hot flashes, a lot of sleep disturbances, a lot of days where women are feeling very sensitive and almost crying or like they just don’t have enough resources. To avoid that, I usually tell my women, protect that pace, do not schedule or schedule or self, do not always train, really work on arrest and restoration, right? You want to get as much practice and I have to roll back to all one of the ways that I learned about this two years ago, there’s a brilliant comedian that’s actually a teacher right now. 

She’s a Ph.D. in sexual work and psychology. Say that this alert, if you’ve never heard her speak, and she’s incredible knowledge base on Eastern philosophies and work with practices from there coming from Taoist background like Jade Egg and Teagan and then she taught thousands of workshops for women across the globe, had lots of solutions but did not have the credentials. She went and got a Ph.D. in psychology and used her work and knowledge. We’re working one on one with women and Eastern philosophies and put it into work in psychology.  Why I’m bringing it up years ago before all of this information was available, she was the first one to show me the yin yang cycle because she was using a different practice, saying, Hey, we are going up, why not take us towards the peak? This is the ambulation. And then you’re going yin, right? Like if you imagine yin yang and white and black, right towards the bottom, this is at the bottom. This way you do a lot of what we call yin practices. 

You don’t do all the breath work, you don’t do all the workouts. You just rest, restore you and your government, your needs, yoga, things like that. That was my first introduction to understanding that we are really changing a lot of things. But it was coming from Eastern philosophy and as I was learning more about physiology and about hormones and how we cycling and how it hasn’t on our brain, I was like, Oh, I mean, the Eastern philosophies already knew that, the Eastern traditions already knew this. They just didn’t have the same language in right. That was connected to it. Not doing the same science part. It was science in a different way from more of my energy work, right? That was really neat for me to see. I always see that yin yang and I’m watching that big black at the end, right? Is like, this is where you really want to focus on all the things that are yin based, right? Anything that’s restoring and nourishing to us. That is our typical cycle. Of course we also have disturbances in the late little face. In digestion, you need more calories. Usually that’s the time when you shouldn’t be fasting as much because it’s too much. Sending the wrong signals to the body that you are not safe, that it’s not going to be safe to have an offspring. Offspring the next time you luteal phase really predicts your next cycle. You really want to be focusing on that luteal phase and really working through the second half and making sure that you’re sending signals of safety to the body because a lot of what we experience as women is the bodies. To me, it’s like constantly trying to figure out, is it safe to have an offspring, right? It’s like I’m unconscious. We don’t even know about this, but it’s happening all the time. It’s like checking out the resources. We have enough resources in a safe environment, right? It’s always happening. Whether you’re conscious of whether or not it’s diluted hormones up and down based on information that is received, including information on sleep, including information on the on, energy that comes from your diet and also your stress levels. Yes. Any questions?

Kashif Khan

No, no. All clear.

Katrine Volynsky

I know I tend to speak fast, but is this exciting? That is so much to share. We try to get as much as possible. That’s also the time when you might see a higher resting heartbeat at night. And if you have some of these trackers, you might see your heart rate variability going down. It’s not unusual to see that happen because the body’s working a little harder during that time. And it’s depending on how much it’s perceived stress, you’ll see more or less variation basically in your physiology during that time. And that’s also obviously the time when women will experience PMS. Some women obviously go through much harder than others, depending on their varying reserve, their stress levels and all the things we just talked about of how the body perceives stress levels. 

What are the factors that influence us to feel safe, right? What is influencing hormonal functions? Sleep, heart, percent? I mean, I always say sleep is the new meditation. We really are focusing more on sleep because it is disturbed. Is so disturbed nowadays, like everything from blue lights to being constantly available, having our phones are on, having been a final flight a lot more than we wore a hundred years ago, are having environments that are not conducive to a good sleep, like having, let’s say, toxic mattresses and high EMF loss or like too much light. All of these things basically really affect our sleep as compared, let’s say, to 100 years ago. Also just a lot of more light in general, pollution with light and sound as well. There’s a lot of things that are creating these conditions where our bodies constantly try to figure out if an animal is going to crawl up at night and try to eat you, right? You don’t get into stages of sleep. It’s really important for us to talk about and that’s why we are focusing on this. Sleep obviously affects everything from your cravings, your ability to put on muscle or keep muscle, CBD signals, your recovery, your ability to retain information and have better brain function, your insulin resistance, your weight. It’s really much connected to sleep. The biggest one of the biggest nutrients that I like to talk about with my clients? And was anybody really willing to listen because it’s just important nowadays. Nutrition, of course, has a huge effect on our hormones and physiology, everything from blood glucose to micro macronutrients, caloric intake, fasting, fiber. Of course, this is not a conversation specifically about nutrition. I’m sure you have in the seminar people that are discussing this, but it’s definitely a huge aspect of us feeling that we have enough resources to be able to have a successful ovulation and successful cycle. Stress management women are much more affected by stress. I mean, we are not to actually, not to differentiate women again. They are constantly looking around like we have very different ways. We view our environments because we have to watch over multiple kids. If we were talking like ten in 100, 200 years ago, right, there were like villages where you would raise kids together. We have more multitasking ability to track different things and we are more prone to seeing signals of stress. Right. And nowadays specifically, we have this change in our social structures where we used to have families that were helping us with child rearing. We used to have at least one parent at home, usually a mother raising their kids. If we’re talking about a family unit, this doesn’t happen anymore. Usually we have my mom and a dad working. We’re moved away from our families. We don’t have the support in our villages. Right. And we still don’t have support from the government. I mean, it’s really crazy to see how little support new mothers get and that all has an effect on how we perceive stress and how our body perceives stress and then makes different hormones based on what it sees coming in from the environment. There’s a great book called The Russian Woman Syndrome. Russian, not as Russian. The Russian is running, I highly recommend it to anybody. 

That book was really important for me to communicate to a lot of the women that I work with who are very successful in their forties, let’s say, or like late thirties, who just had a couple of kids and they are trying to balance their ability to run companies and be a mother. Right, and take care of themselves. A lot of the things that we see nowadays are coming from the fact that we are very stressed and we’re in fight or flight. It’s an important aspect to address because it is a communication between your brain, your ovaries brain and and then doing this too. Oxes get affected obviously by different levels of stress perceived by the body. We really need to talk and teach women more about stress management and how to rewire ourselves. If anything you can take away from the session is as anytime you feel yourself rash. Take a moment. Take a breather. A couple of deep breaths and just look at the things that are on your plate. And is it worth losing your cycle over? Is it worth you not sleeping overnight? Usually time. 

Usually it’s not. We’re just doing things on autopilot. It’s a really important aspect that affects our hormonal health and affects our sleep as well. It’s like a vicious cycle, right? If you’re too stressed and anxious and you are thinking about the events that went on, the day is really hard sometimes for women to go to bed, especially combined with hormonal dysfunction or even things such as watching a Netflix show, let’s say at night. Sometimes women think that that’s a good way to relax, feel like, oh, I’m just going to take a glass of wine, relax and watch the Netflix show about murder, and our brain can’t perceive the difference between what seems right and what is real. A lot of times it can actually perceive this as real and stressful and keep you in that fight or flight just because you’re watching content that is very violent and very disturbing to the nervous system. And of course, having alcohol before bed is one of the things that we’ll talk about with sleep as well. Right. It’s not a solution. This is how we check out, right. Or have been taught to check out by the system. Right. And propagated by a lot of things that we see in social media and movies and things like that. That’s not a way to de-stress, taking the bath as a way to de-stress, reading a book, shutting down your activities and your work and turning your phone off a couple of hours before bed and spending time with loved ones. That’s a way to relax. That’s not me not watching Netflix at nine, ten, 11:00 at night, you just check out basically. Other things that basically affect us hormonally is overtraining or a sedentary lifestyle or training out of sync with your cycle, especially if you already have problems with your cycle. If you have hormonal deficiencies, it’s a little bit more noticeable. A lot of times when you’re younger, you have more growth or growth hormone and you have more growth factors. It’s not as noticeable if you’re really overdoing it and you lose your face. But if you’re 35 or 40 and you’re already having symptoms of perimenopause, you will definitely feel it if you’re overtraining and you lose your face and you have a negative effect usually on your cycle forwarding. That’s why a lot of athletes lose their cycle, right? If they’re overtraining.

Kashif Khan

What is the right amount of training room?

Katrine Volynsky

I think it depends on the person, honestly. There is no such thing as a right amount of training. You have to look at the person, whether they’re an athlete and what goals they have and what they are doing. And take that into perspective. You have to take a look into perspective of like what is their hormone function to start with? Are they inflamed? Right. And they are already dealing with things like mold and chronic fatigue and things like that. And they’re not causal. They definitely shouldn’t be training too much in the luteal phase. But movement is life. We definitely need to move and that doesn’t mean just completely sit down and not do anything. You lose your face. It means just take it or not, you down. Don’t do something like a hit or, going crazy and running a marathon, let’s say. Definitely don’t schedule a marathon during that time, right? Yes, I think it’s personal. Usually will teach women that you want to push when you have testosterone, which is usually later follicular and early luteal. That’s when a user will lift heavier. You’ll have more energy to do a little bit harder workouts. 

You can push yourself to do high intensity training, and later on, you want to back off and do things like yoga and pilates and walking, things like that. But again, if you are an athlete and you’re training in a specific way, it’s a different conversation. You can’t stop your program halfway through and do something else. Right? It all depends on goals. Your genetics as well will play a big part in this as well. And your lifestyle and overall hormonal levels and whether you have the hormones to spend on training. When we speak with some of the clients, when they work on fertility, they work with some really amazing fertility docs. When we help clients to work towards fertility and their, let’s say, training a lot or they travel a lot and they have problems with fertility. I was like, well, you can do two of the same time. You’ll have to choose, especially when you’re later in your ages. How are you going to spend that hormonal bank account? Are you going to run a marathon or give those resources to make a baby? Just the bodies of resources. You need to put things into context. It’s not just what’s good, it’s what, what and how we want to look at all those factors to figure out what is the individual journey for each woman. Other things that affect us, of course, toxins, we could do a whole other podcast on toxins. 

One of the things that are basically talked about, especially, for women and how we are detoxing our estrogen right in phase one, two and three, three is in the God phase one and two is in the liver. That’s where knowing your genetics is important, that’s why you want to go get a DNA test and understand how this could be played into how your body gets rid of estrogen once it’s used. Right. It’s and how it’s different toxins in your ability to detoxify based on your lifestyle and your previous history and your genetics will affect that as well, especially in phase two. I always say, like that phase two is such an important and complicated phase and the guest missed a lot of times. And it’s like you’re putting everything into phase one. And I give that analogy, it’s like a garbage coming into the body and it goes through a phase while it gets put into a garbage bag and gets set on the side of the road. And then phase two is when that garbage gets picked up right by the garbage truck. A lot of times the garbage truck doesn’t get doesn’t come around. We push phase one. 

There’s things like coffee or milk thistle or green tea or like new different things that will push it. But then there’s nothing happily in phase two, and that’s when you will get sicker and then wild and have these things that are circulating back into the system and be actually more toxic and more damaging than what they came in. And as our phase one and phase three is all happening in the gut. That’s why we talk about the meaning of the bacteria that lives in your body and helps you detox, etc. and is important. But again, we’re going to go back to our sleep topic because it’s a huge topic to talk about. Other things that that fluids, our hormones are, Things like toxic relationships and trauma. Trauma is huge. There’s a lot of trauma. Talk about this. At the end of the day, no amount of supplements and cold baths will get you out of trauma. You still need to do the trauma work. And a lot of us, unfortunately, have it. And women are more likely to have sexual trauma specifically. I don’t know if you interviewed Dr. Molly Maloof. I know she’s really big on talking about it. Yes, just just how, how, how predominant it is and how many women are experiencing that. And just it gets washed under the carpet and can definitely affect your health and your relational health and your hormones. It’s important, really, to address, assess and work with mitochondrial dysfunction. 

We start making hormones in mitochondria. That’s another thing that we want to look at: heat infection, mold exposure that’s big nowadays as well. It can also affect our ability to make hormones. We can shoot some of the Nickelodeon oysters and depending on how many of these toxins and issues we have into a pathway, let’s say a cortisol pathway that we don’t want, we don’t make enough progesterone. And then we are wondering why we are all anxious and can’t sleep with the luteal phase. Right. It’s important to look at all of this and understand and this is like a big picture. It’s not just one thing that you’re looking at that all of these things are playing together. Of course, microbiome issues, as I said, a lot of assimilation and even estrogen detox happens in the gut and oral health, women’s oral health is also affecting our hormones, especially like if you’re having going through a pregnancy, changes in hormones a lot of times will create conditions for you’ll have more cavities in. And the other problem you want to keep an eye on as well and assess that with hopefully a holistic bioidentical dentist because they tend to view the body as a whole versus just taking bits and pieces. They can be more helpful in getting you the results you want. Think of your whole person rather than just a mouse, right? We’re going to go back to sleep because that’s where we started. Feel free to interject and talk about anything we just talked about, because I know I just run through a bunch of things.

Kashif Khan

I definitely think that some of the things you mentioned can be personalized to genetics. Talk about the training and you talked about nutrition and detox and those are areas where people get stuck and the things where you have to listen and respond to your body. Right. Or already understand your body’s blueprint. Just something to point out where if you do, anybody feels like they’re stuck or everybody feels like, well, I want to do this, but I don’t know when I try, it doesn’t work. That’s where there may be some anomaly, some biological process, maybe failing. And Jill looks good, unveiled that gut microbiome testing unveiled that some control lab testing. That’s where you may dove deeper beyond just how my body feels, right?

Katrine Volynsky

Absolutely. And you combine how the body feels with those. It was your health history, those labs and genetics to understand better what’s good for you, specifically what training cycles and diet and detox practices are going to be most effective that way? You don’t have to do what I did, which is stop everything that was doing and try everything literally right. Something like five steps forward, one step back, one step forward, ten steps back. That’s literally been my journey for a long time. I always say it’s much easier to be healthy right now? In some aspects it’s harder because who do you trust and who do you believe? Because there’s much information. But then at the same time, once you understand that it is like these pillars that you could really be you in your health through and you can take control of it. 

You can definitely make quicker changes. And there’s more people that are trained in this and there’s more people that understand it. I remember in 2012, how few people understood genetics, right? And there were literally a handful of people that were doing this work until more and more people started coming and making it easier and the like costs twice as well. It’s much easier to get a kit from you guys and get some guidance and coaching resources like what it was before you had to find one that was number one, then we would have to go through way more time and energy to analyze your genome and work through it. I think there’s better opportunities for women to feel healthier and men nowadays if you’re, with the right guidance. Sleep like I said, it’s just important for us and affects everything from your mood. 

It can worsen depression if you don’t have enough sleep. If you’re already depressed, we can create a cycle of depression, anxiety. You can have insulin resistance that can contribute to existing conditions or start conditions. That’s why a lot of women, one of the reasons women also get pushed into insulin resistance together with hormonal loss in menopause is because a lot of women have problems with sleep during that time. It can have an effect on fertility. That whole conversation about safety and your PMS and all sorts of things can go sideways if you don’t have enough rest and restoration. It really affects your brain function. If you don’t have enough REM or deep sleep, it’s much harder to retain information and be able to have better memory and performance.It’s one of those things that we really focus on for anybody who wants to keep their brain as they get older, right, and they don’t want to get dementia and things like that. Sleep is crucial in this. Sleep can also affect libido negatively. It’s like a vicious cycle. Poor sleep will cause no effect on the hormones and other ways around. Bad hormones, low not because low levels of hormones will have an effect on sleep as well. It goes in the circle, basically a vicious circle. Having problems with your sexual arousal and your levels of energy just even available for sex or interest can also create modulation relationship stress. Right? And now there’s women that really when they go through perimenopause and there is a big change, they really suffer because it’s like it’s a huge shift and all of a sudden they’re not enjoying themselves. They can’t connect and having good relationships, whether it is with your partner or with others, is just such an important aspect of longevity. 

As if all longevity studies can be distilled to one main factor, the biggest factor that dictates how long somebody will leave is their relationships with, the intimate relation that close relationships and just friendships. The more connections they have with age, the better they are, the longer they live, then the more brain function they have as well. It’s super important for us to pay attention to our relationships and part of better sleep as being a better person and being able to be more resourceful, in different times, different ways in our life. Even if you’re a mother, I know there’s a huge difference when I feel under-resourced and how I speak to my child and I’m more able to hold space if they’re going through something hard versus when I don’t have resources, I can snap. I cannot like I would want you and hold them and help them go through their emotional space. And that could be with anything else that could be your employees. You could be your mother. Usually the people that are in your close circle are well prepared, right? It’s important for our health in that aspect as well. Estrogen and progesterone have a lot of activity on that, like subtle activity in your electrical activity in the brain as well. 

It will trigger a different stage of sleep. And that’s why we want to get into a little bit more information about how each one is affecting your sleep. Okay. Sleep stages, we have four sleep stages. Usually we have non-REM stage one, two and three that have different distinct aspects to them, like changes in body temperature. Your ability to relax and muscles, specifically deep sleep is something that really suffers lately, and that’s when we do a lot of our recovery and growth hormone secretion. It’s really important for us to track our sleep cycles. And that’s why I love Aura and I like all sorts of other sleep tracking devices that help us understand how things change and how we can affect them. And REM sleep is when we basically dream and when we also have a lot of aspects that are connected to creativity, processing, and brain development. That’s the time where your eyes are moving back and forth. And of course, sleep is very complicated. I mean, we’re just learning about it now. I think we’re going to learn more and more. There’s just many aspects of sleep we don’t understand and we still don’t understand why we dream right? We have an idea why we dream, what we don’t exactly the way we dream. There’s, I think, a little way more information is going to be coming in the next years on sleep and different stages and how to influence them, because it’s just such a fascinating subject. And these stages don’t happen. One, two, three. And then REM, they’re actually more complex. You can go to stage one, too, then you go to deep sleep, then repeat stage two, and then only you will get into REM. If you have one of these sleep trackers, you will see how interesting your sleep cycle is, right? And how different strategies can affect different parts of your sleep depending on whether you want to increase your REM or you want to increase your deep sleep. With that being said, some specific issues associated with problems in sleep and hormonal changes, that usually happens for perimenopausal and menopausal women, although I’m seeing that earlier, too, especially in women who were exposed to mold. Right. Or who have a highly inflammatory condition that is stealing from now on to deal with inflammation, but knows how much a hormone, the hormones are being made from it and it can be used for information or making sex hormones. When being taken over into an inflammation pathway, you can see these sleep disturbances even if you’re not perimenopausal, even if you’re just like 31 or 20 and have seen that with women who have been specifically exposed to mold. It tends to be a big one nowadays and there’s a lot of conversation on why that is. 

I have my own theories, but it’s definitely something worth checking out. If you are young and you have these problems, definitely want to get checked for mold or maybe other infections that are hidden infections. Hot flushes, night sweats, a pretty common insomnia and anxiety inducing insomnia, a sleep disorder and breathing is also connected to hormones and hormone changes and joint pain, pain that can wake you up and rest like syndrome. That’s just very common. Things that are connected directly to hormonal changes and sleep and the issues with sleep. Hormones and sleep will look at each hormone and how it affects our sleep, usually estrogen, that’s our hormone that really helps us be more social is like the outgoing one I always say. Right. And I think Mimsy says the same thing, too. And that one, when it peaks, that’s usually when you’ll have better sleep in. You will tend to improve in your sleep when the estrogen is higher unless it’s ovulation during a relationship. We also have luteal hormone spiking which will change your temperature and you can have a rise shift in the temperature that could wake you up. Fortunately, there’s really easy solutions for that. 

There are amazing companies like Chill Pad, or sleep aid that can cool your body temperature. And we’ll speak more on lifestyle strategies, how to make your sleep hygiene prevalent and help you with some of these cooling issues. When estrogen rises, we usually have better sleep. Estrogen is low. That’s when we have more sleep, right. That’s why in a late luteal phase, we’ll have more sleep disturbances. That’s why during the beginning of minces, we might have sleep problems. And when women start dropping in the estrogen during menopause, that’s really common for women to have sleep issues. That can really be addressed with spirituality, of course, but by identical hormones or natural solutions that can help you bring your estrogen up. Such things like Esther Barer or other supplements that your practitioner can maybe help you cycle in and out, specifically to support your estrogen. Next one, of course, is progesterone. Those two are the biggest ones that usually affect sleep, lowest in the first part your cycle during the men says again contributes to some of the sleep issues and includes your face. When you start dropping your progesterone, that’s when you can really have a lot of effect on GABA. Progesterone is neuroprotective and regulates your GABA, which is your neurotransmitter that helps you relax right and has a big part in our sleep cycle. The specifically can get affected by not having enough progesterone rates. That’s one of the times when if you are experiencing problems with your sleep, you highly recommend getting a panel like a known panel, right. Because that helps you understand whether some of the issues with sleep are coming from progesterone. The specific metabolites of progesterone that will be higher or lower, depending on you specifically, will be connected to your sleep. A lot of times you can affect your body positively and change that insomnia by just adding a little bit of progesterone or working from an herbal perspective. Such a vortex or berry it just depends on the woman where she’s at and the practitioner she’s working with. But basically low progesterone also can increase in site anxiety. If you are really, really anxious, in the end you’re not seeing this in the second part of your cycle. It’s very likely that it is connected to progesterone. You might want to speak to your practitioner, hopefully a functional practitioner that uses tests like that stress the urine test, not just a blood test. It can give a little bit more information about what your body’s doing with hormones once it’s made it. That could be very useful here. As GABA goes down, insomnia levels go up. 

We really want to make sure that your professional levels are optimal. And the earlier you start supplementing with progesterone when, when it’s convenient. A lot of women have fear of bio regulating, which are to you biological hormone replacements. There is a reason why you should be concerned about it but with a skilled practitioner. And if you start early enough, there is very little risk of developing cancer and other problems that have been propagated by women initiative years back when they did a study on estrogen mostly. Right. Progesterone doesn’t go through the liver when you take it sublingual as it is water soluble. It’s a fairly safe one. Really speak with your practitioner, see if they can get you and compound it. If it was right for you. Sometimes even small doses of just 25 micrograms can really show somebody’s health and really help them with sleep. And there’s also creams and there’s also herbal ways to help you with your progesterone. The other thing that progesterone also regulates is your sleep apnea. 

Actually, you can be more prone to sleep apnea when your progesterone is low because progesterone can prevent you from liking your airways too much in your airways. When there is not enough progesterone, you will have too much relaxation and the tongue will fall and they’ll block the airway. Right. You will have more instances of sleep apnea, basically. Projection can help with that as well. If you’re being tested for sleep apnea and you’re high on that and progesterone is low, you might not even need that CPAP. Right. One of the machines that help with sleep apnea, if you get your progesterone levels dialed in. And I’ve seen that. I’ve seen that some of the doctors I work with have taken people off of CPAP just by balancing hormones right from POPS can be very destructive. And the distracting, distracting right is like it’s a bit convenient and it’s harder to travel with and things like that. But they’re also incredible. It’s really important for women to have good manners to have good oxygenation levels at night. Testosterone deciding hormones and follicle stimulating hormones are not as prominent on the effects of sleep. It’s more specifically, as I said, businessinsider hormone. It’s more when we have a big spike right before ovulation that can create a change in temperature that could wake you up. Otherwise, it’s not affecting your system as much. It doesn’t contribute too much to the sleep disturbances of follicles and is a stimulating hormone. You can also have a very, very minor effect. It can have an effect rate right at the and the neutral phase of what’s really going down. It’s possible it can contribute to all PMS and premenstrual factors. Mostly it’s usually estrogen and progesterone, but it’s possible that FSA can have an effect on that. Testosterone is more indirect, again, as it’s not been directly linked to changes in that sleep, but because testosterone is also really important for women and that is often overlooked, it can affect our mood, our ability to handle stress, our resonance, and our ability to keep muscle and train and move. It helps us be more alert. When it is down and we’re feeling more depressed and we might start eating things out of sync that can affect the sleep in a negative way from that way, right? It creates a vicious cycle too. Sometimes I have women reporting when they go on testosterone that they feel better and then get better sleep just because they’re more active and in the day. Right. And they’re just more energized than they’re able to work out and they feel better about themselves. And all of a sudden it changes their sleep pattern as well. 

And going back to charity, I wanted to mention that it’s important to start that, not to wait too long. Right.Once we finish through menopause, from what I understand, our receptors get used to the fact that there are no hormones. And if you introduce that biological hormone too late, you could cause problems if you use it earlier and extend our cycle or help us deal with some of the issues that come as perimenopause. It can be a very useful tool, especially in the hands of a practitioner that also watches your detoxification. Using genetics to figure out specific things that are going to work for you and how to detox them out of the system once you actually use them. How about one, putting it all together? Again, menstruation is a likely time when you might have some sleep disturbances, mostly because there’s inflammation or the hormones low, there could be pain. Prostaglandins are really high. Usually during that time there is no progesterone. You might feel some anxiety and like feelings of low self-esteem. A lot of women just feel super tired during that time anyway, just because everything is low and they, they are losing to you. They sleep, but it’s not going to be restorative sleep. 

A lot of times. We could help women feel better by really working on that part of the cycle, just by lowering inflammation and using lifestyle practices to for them to have sleep, that is recovery, like help you recover and regenerate versus just like you just get tired and you out right? Follicular stage is like an improvement in sleep. And usually this is when all the hormones are building and we have better serotonin levels., You’re more sensitive to those you or you just have an easier time sleeping, falling asleep, staying asleep or less likely to have mood disturbances. During this time, if you are having problems with your sleep, you really want to take a look at your hormone levels. You also want to take a look at other factors, as we talked about, that could drive hormonal dysfunction and see what’s keeping you up at night. But usually in a normal life cycle, that’s when we all will see the list of sleep issues in the particular place, right up to ovulation. For many women, ovulation is not a problem. But sometimes your temperature peaks so high that you will wake up being hot. Right. And that’s where we can really have, those tools such as chili pad to help you keep your body temperature cool. You’ll stay asleep during the night. Estrogen dominance during this time and ovulation can really make things worse. It’s funny you wake up in the middle of the night as well just because your liver had started time and processing and seizure, you wanted to do a lot of cleaning out. That’s why it’s really important to know your genetics, to know how your account is running, how how your swipe enzymes are functioning right, and how you can help facilitate better estrogen detox during this time and take a lot of liver you don’t wake up in the middle of the night by just the fact that you are overburdened with too much estrogen. Right. Luteal phase. That’s the phase as I was talking about where we have the most likely time when you’ll have problems with sleep and especially in a like few days, 3 to 5 days sometimes. In the week before the cycle as well as progesterone going low, all the other hormones are low. Estrogen is below. As we said, when the estrogen is low, we don’t sleep well. That’s the time when we really need to work hard on protecting our safety. Right. Helping us feel less stressed and malnourished and work with a different sleep. Solutions to help us have a better sleep during that time. 

It’s most likely that we’ll have problems then. I’m going to the solutions, right, that we’ve talked a lot about the problems and how the whole thing works. But there’s very simple lifestyle strategies, I guess. But it might be simple. Sometimes people look at angles like, do you have to be in the car? And on a couple of days in the cold to do this, I’m like, well, not really. But you can create a routine where you can leverage your lifestyle to have better sleep and better emotions and hormones in general. This is not just affecting sleep directly, but it’s also going to affect your hormones and going to affect your weight, your emotions, your ability to process information, your ability to function well and be resilient. All of these strategies really help us on a whole level, not just to sleep, but specifically to sleep. Circadian living is something that I’m a huge fan of: maintaining a good schedule, going to sleep at the same time, waking up at the same time again. There’s obligations to genetics and you can speak more in that subject. There’s people who have different genetics pertaining to sleep. There’s the night owls, right? There’s the larks, who wake up early. But as you age, it’s more important to really maintain a good sleep schedule and if possible, sync it with sunrise and sunlight. 

The specifically the sun at sunrise one, we receive a lot of information through our eyes of what time it is, and it starts the appropriate cascade for our bodies to know what time it is and starting melatonin production, you actually start in the morning right you it’s important to note importance of you sun first thing in the morning as much as possible. You don’t have to stare at it you don’t have to like, do the sun gazing, but just go outside and, without sunglasses and glasses and just getting your eyes used to a natural light, maybe even going for a walk in natural light can really help reset some kid in rhythm again, as like we could do like a whole podcast on that one and just because it’s just such a complicated, interesting subject, but majority of people that starts thinking that life is sunrise, sunrise, sunlight can really get better sleeping habits in general because it will force you to do that. If you want, wake up at sunrise. You’re going to wake up a lot earlier and not watch Netflix till 12:00 at night. Right. There’s a built-in benefit there. I always say it’s my mom’s hack tool. 

Like everybody said, it was all the things you’re doing, like when do you find time for yourself? And at 4:00 in the morning or five, right? I wake up between four and five and not a joke and I go to bed early in the sun. Right. Because I know that I’m not a productive leader. I usually go to bed early and have a couple of hours to myself before everybody wakes up and the day starts going. I can do some of these practices that are rejuvenating for me or spent the way time, the way I needed me time. Right. Circadian eating is just again leveraging the power of a 24 hour cycle. And getting this 24 for me, the biggest one is finishing eating early, earlier, especially big meals, 2 to 3 hours before you go to bed is beneficial for us to have better sleep. And of course, it’s very easy. Some women who have hyperglycemia and problems in their blood sugar drop too low. We need to account for that and help them with specific strategies for doing that. But the majority of times, once you get your blood sugar under control, finishing eating 2 to 3 hours before bed is usually a really good idea in general. Light management, blue light exposure, computers, tablets, TVs, all those types of things. 

I mean, the blue light, you probably you’ve heard a lot about it already.It is a real thing. It does affect your circadian rhythm and your brain. It tells our brain that it’s daylight, it’s the wrong time to view blue light that usually needs to be done in the middle of the daytime. There are easy ways to correct that. You could finish doing all of your work a couple of hours before you sleep. You don’t have to be completely offline. The whole night, if it’s dark, let’s say at 7:00 or 6:00, depending on the time on your end. But managing light exposure by not exposing yourself or using blockers like the blue light blocker is such a glasses or screensavers or anything like that that can help you with this. Having different lives at home, not having the high LEDs producing blue light, changing them from on, softer lighting and there are lots of different lighting systems for that. Also, obviously working with your caffeine intake is very important, especially for women. The luteal phase, I always say, lasts five days before you cycle, just skip that coffee, find a different way to give to yourself. To be awake, right? Because that can really affect even if you do it before 2 p.m., it can really affect your ability to manage your cortisol levels. Because cortisol is already high in the luteal phase, you really want to be working on that more disturbing that cycle as much as possible. Sleep hygiene, it’s a big key that we teach to all of our clients. It’s just having a cold, dark environment, blackout curtains, nontoxic bedding and mattresses. 

Chilly pad is my favorite. I was joking with Heads Up Health CEO David Korsunsky. We weren’t burning in and he was sleeping in a truck and he brought chili powder with him. At Burning Man, he’s living on drugs, but he’s on to that. Literally comes everywhere with was asked because it does improve your sleep quite a bit and a woman in their thirties and forties once they got it they’re like holy.This is the best thing ever. It really helped me personally and a lot of the clients, I highly recommend checking it out. There’s other systems out there. Chiapas is the one that I use, it’s just a really great system. When lighter closing, especially if you’re perimenopause and menopause, you get those hot flashes, silk and light chemo. Cotton can be really easy to keep your body cool. Having those also made out of the same material keeps a healthy body. Keep it cool. Those are inexpensive ways to get in. Nowadays, there’s great companies where you can buy direct weeding, all the middlemen markup you can get silk and things like this for really inexpensive. There is one company called one. Quinn’s one of my most favorite companies. You literally get silk for like nothing. Their night. It’s one of those things that are like, oh, it could be a luxury, but it’s not. It actually really helps keep your body cool. Regulating your blood sugar as I mentioned earlier, it’s a big part. If your blood sugar is high at night, you will not be sleeping or you will be up. Or if it’s going up and down because you ate a bunch of sugar, this is something that you really need to pay attention to. I mean, this is like a girl summit. I’m sure you have discussed different facet techniques on this. They are continuous glucose monitors that have been my amazing hack for many years before they became available to the public in Canada. As we’ve had access to them as our prescription for a long time. I started using them about eight years ago and it’s been such a fascinating tool to use. I highly recommend any woman and the woman should literally be doing, like usually they come with one sensor, but you really should be doing two sensors. You have that data for the full cycle because you’ll have much more information specific to you, what different things affect you. 

For example, I’ve learned that I can’t eat sweet potatoes, especially the roots of a celebrity that jacks up my blood sugar. And the reason being I didn’t grow up somewhere where I had sweet potatoes. My microbiome is not linked to us. It’s actually really not negative for me, but completely different for somebody else. It can really help you personalize that information. And there’s companies like Level, what is it? Levels, right. And what you sense are a couple of other ones that do direct to consumer stuff, continuous glucose monitors and specifically for at night we’re looking for any drops in blood sugar that are correlating with you waking up because that’s not enough glucose for the brain to run. The body wakes you up. That’s one of the ways you can use CGM to help you sleep better and it will aid in your cycle, especially in detail. You will definitely see a lot of changes in your blood sugar. And that’s where it’s important to work with your nutrition to have high caloric intake, have good, foundational, healthy carbs that can keep your blood sugar stable during the night. 

You’re not waking up from that stress management, as I mentioned, as I mentioned, everything from breathwork to meditation is called whole therapy. Now, not having news before bed or watching TV all fall into that compartment. Right. Working within the vagus nerve, important as well. Taking care of your frame. How I say, working with your passion and structural issues like working out was working on with working as a chiropractor or manufacturer or deal to see if you may have some problems that are not allow you to sleep well just because your neck is out or, something is going on with the shoulder or your pelvis or, like lots of different things that can be happening there. A lot of times females that I work with, when we teach them to do fashion work at home with such techniques as tune up, yoga is a great system that uses balls that you can need, you don’t even need. It’s great when you have a therapist, but you can roll your body out and work on problems and fascia that can really help you sleep. I mean, like women experience much better sleep once they roll on these balls and work with their fashion faucets, it releases a lot of endorphins and creates more spaciousness. You sleep better, breathing better at night, addressing sleep apnea issues, using muscle mass tape. Those are surprisingly not surprising and they’re really important. It’s not sexy the most, but it helps much, actually. We always joke about that at home, but, can definitely see a huge change in my resting heartbeat when I’m using male staple when I’m not. You can track that all by getting your own data so working out your trauma because that can also keep you up at night and doing somatic work. Systems like down the rest of neurofeedback, not doing alcohol, really increasing your oxytocin levels, oxytocin that your muscles are most of, a hormone is like on top of everything, right? It can really affect your progesterone, your estrogen. You can affect cortisol on all of these hormones. Right. Hugs, having good sex, having, like having your pet spending time with your kids and using that can give you that yummy feeling where you can make more oxytocin can really help you with your sleep as well. And that that is a massive hormones that precedes all the other hormones and very easy hack to regulate your hormones and get better better hormonal cascade really tracking your information, starting it’s tracking your diet of diet, your cycle, testing your hormones like that, your genetics, sleep trackers, even using a regression to understand how your body is making hormones, even if you’re not trying to get pregnant. 

There are a bunch of new companies and I can send you some links that I like using for that, or even just simply charting your temperature and seeing when you have those spikes, when you have the luteal hormone releasing. Addressing, of course, your hormone imbalances, whether it is, working through the vaccination pathway metabolic issues or, get in, be charity, super important to get better sleep, especially becoming closer to perimenopause and menopause. You want to be using those strategies for you. Working with dental health and detoxing, oops, detoxing things out of your system, whether it’s a mattress have an air purifier, water, plastics, all of those things can really help you overall to have better energy levels and less work at night for your body to detox. Right. Putting things together, here’s some of the things that I added just more from a supplemental strategies point of use. I think that’s a lot of times people just want to know what to take. Right. 

This is very broad. And again, I highly recommend understanding your blueprint and understanding your genetics and hormones and putting into that there’s some of the things that can really help you sleep better from our company, from bio optimizers, of course, we have several solutions. We have our magnesium breakthrough, which is a high, medium formula. We have seven different types of magnesium that can help you sleep. As anxiety was even better digestion. And we also have the sleep breakthrough, which is a formula that we created for Better Sleep that has GABA in it. It has different acids and it’s a really nice way to support the body and sleep cycles. And I’m going to be releasing more women’s products as well. But basically focusing on anti-inflammatory foods and supplements, things like curcumin, omegas, ginger and Quercetin and CBD can really be helpful during this time to lower inflammation. And if we lower inflammation, that’s more likely that we’ll have a better restorative sleep that is contributing for you to recovery versus just being out just because it’s super tight and you’ve been bleeding all day. Things can help with cramping such as cramping bars. Come back. That herb nettles and red raspberry leaf are very nourishing as well and help with this as well for digestion because a lot of times women can be helped by their depression as well because they’re bloated or they have diarrhea during this time. We like to use I like to use with my clients out of our line called antibiotics roast of some of the other probiotics that we have because it helps with neurotransmitters since we have really low hormones, we can a new little extra boost for the for the brain and has a nice spectrum of of probiotics that can be really helpful in regulating your digestion. I like using CapEx versus our other formulations such as Matzah that are more on that ketone range. And it also has l-carnitine and I do this this time because mostly I usually encourage women in doing this to find more than a kilo site. Right and use that as a tool to help manage inflammation. And that’s why I opt for CapEx versus, things like mass items or veggies items that we have in our line in the follicular phase. That’s when we are still focusing on low inflammation support, but we really work in mitochondrial support and we start our PMS formula. We have a PMS formula that’s coming out soon. It’s based on Chinese medicine. It’s performing really well. But you want to start a little early, you don’t want to be starting it when you actually have PMS. Helps you regulate your cycle. That’s when I’ll usually start, dating the PMS formula that we have. We also recommend women to check with their practitioner, see if they need some progesterone, maybe they even need to deal with progesterone throughout that whole cycle, not just starting in the halfway house. It’s usually done. This is also when I commend man for not doing organ supplements to nourish your follicle. 

Basically. Right. We eat nose to tail more. It’s super important to get some of those nutrients. Of course, if you’re vegan, I was going to for 12 years, that might not be an option. Or like a lot of my clients who are just disgusted by eating organs, they’ll do organ supplements, but they won’t do the organs themselves. That’s a good way to support your health. There’s B vitamins in there, there’s lots of cofactors that can help you get better ovulation during this time. For gut health, we usually use P three on probiotics will help you with ambulation and gut health muscle mass because this is a time when you have testosterone rising and usually women will train a little bit more and have more energy. We’ll up their protein intake rate and help them build more muscle. Massage items are specifically made for muscle building. This body is called mass arms and for optimal protein digestion. This is one that I usually will introduce to them. Of course, if a woman is on the keto diet will keep x because that’s a little bit more specific to that. 

But the majority of times we’ll do Mass M’s at night through all the phases. I really like magnesium. Magnesium breakthrough and our sleep breakthrough. The only difference in using a magnesium breakthrough is during the first read We create your day 1 to 5. I usually dallied back because you could already have loose stools, we want to dial it back and not cause more because magnesium can relax us. Also we do have citrate. I didn’t know the formula didn’t have it, but this formula does so it can create more muscles. This is what I would usually dial back or just use glass eight with clients if they’re super sensitive instead of doing our formula. But once we go into the follicular phase, that’s when we start doing higher doses of magnesium. Usually there’s no problem doing that. Time is diarrhea or any source. During this time you will also support your estrogen if you are low. I like Allergan energetics or HRT. If you’re using maturity and sometimes low doses of pregnancy which if that’s really client specific, you want to be talking with your practitioner and not just those in yourself up specifically on hormones super important because Bricknell and specifically can go anywhere, right. It can be made. And estrogen is the cause of it but it could be making into things that you don’t want to be made until. You want to work with a practitioner and know your genetics and test to make sure that that’s actually a useful tool for you instead of creating more chaos. During ambulation, that’s when women will get a little bit more constipation too. So we will up the magnesium breakthrough, right? And we’ll keep that sleep breakthrough sometimes. I will also increase it slightly if they’re waking up with heat, it tends to give them a cup of sleep a little more. And we’ll also focus on things that will help them detox estrogen, whether it’s in phase two, three or one. These products like, high end and precursors to growth. I love glycine. I think everybody is low in glycine and everybody should be using it. Honestly, it’s very rare when we see things like oil max or any metabolomic tests where people have enough glycine and of course need it for everything for making proteins. You’re a transmitter, right? It is super or going into making collagen supporting collagen production. I will usually have clients get glycine during this time too and will use my aims for digestion because usually they’ll be a little bit higher. 

Protein uptake will go a little lower in the fat and more on the, like vegetables just to help them lower the amount of stress the liver might be getting from too much estrogen just depending on the person. The gain and we’ll use, depending on genetics, different help for phase one, two and three, specifically for them in the luteal phase. Again, as I said, I cannot stress enough, it’s important to just focus on rest and restoration. More rest, more restoration, not schedule crazy stuff. Doing this stuff will focus more on cortisol breakdown and supporting the nervous system and biopsies. I really like product 100th, which is serene and that one usually it really helps a lot of my clients. I love Magnolia Bark Extracts. There is specifically one called DHEA to be from this nutrient needs. I think the company manager chose the product and that is really helpful with anxiety. If you have a lot of anxiety and I want to get on benzos, that could be very helpful if you want to handle your progesterone again, this is when we will focus a lot on progesterone support. If you’re low, it could be a combination of anything from, using biotech such as Berry that’s been shown to help make more progesterone or you going straight up until progesterone supplementation, we’ll focus lot on adaptogenic herbs that can really be helpful with better sleep such as lemon bomb or the basil, camomile anything lavender. 

You and just everything soothing, helping them to relax and regenerate and definitely work with our PMS. And, we have the PMC formula. Like I said, there are other formulas for that and I would usually use the here it seems to be there’s, there’s more fiber in consumption fiber doing this that will help stabilize blood sugar. Our product called which dairy enzymes are focusing on that helping you digest the fiber during this time I’ll cycle into using batch times because it just provides better digestion and less bloating and less issues in that department will also use with clients things like resistant starch objects, which is different probiotics just to help against stabilizing blood sugar, preparing the microbiome, helping women feel fuller as well they don’t go crazy with cravings and eating things. Right, because we have those cravings usually during this time. And of course, we’ll bring up magnesium breakthroughs because that helps with energy and also we need more magnesium usually doing luteal phase and anxiety and sleep. Those are usually our things to help women have more balanced hormones and in turn have better sleep. And we’ll definitely focus a lot on stress reduction, more meditation, more yoga. Again, if you remember that yin yang sign and the lot of that black at the end that’s where you want to focus on a lot of the practices and avoid things that are stressing the body out, such as fasting or hard core training. Unless you are an athlete, you’re working with a professional that’s helping you with your goals specifically. That’s a lot. I know I’ve thrown a lot at you, but there’s this there is a PowerPoint you can take a look at maybe take some of these pieces of information down. It has been helpful to a lot of people, women, women in my life. And I’m hoping that you might get some information from here that will help you on getting better.

Kashif Khan

It’s really amazing because you really got deep into everything and just so everybody knows, we’re going to share this PowerPoint after the fact. You’ve offered to let me because I understand it’s one thing to listen to you and I think to, reference back to it. But definitely amazing.

Katrine Volynsky

Yes. And advanced sleep tools always tell people that I am a big foundation person. I do work with a lot of advanced tools, the biohacking tools. I love them. I think they have a place in my life. They help me. I’ve been a big peptide user and bio regular user since I was born in the former Soviet Union where it’s pretty normal to use. There’s other ways to help you once you’ve got the foundation down. But I always caution people, these are incredible tools, but you have to get the lifestyle techniques down and you have to get your diet down and work with stress, before you get these. Sometimes you can do these first to get you in the right direction, feel a little bit better, but you really want to address the foundations of why you’re in the place you are in and really shift your lifestyle around to support your hormonal and, your, emotional and physiological needs versus just throwing these expensive, cool things at it. Right. But there is other stuff that can be, use this some of the things that I like you can get with a, practitioner that knows how to use it and talk to them specifically like, by regulating called day three, it comes from Russia it has multiple peptides by regulators in there that can really help regulate your cycle for sleep. A real battle on this is massive peptide works in your pineal gland and helps with the deep sleep specifically and pinion and something called deep sleep peptide basically. 

This is things that we use a lot of times with women against in specific parts of the cycle or visiting the program and using things like autophagy, which could be from fasting or using things like supermini and also in the lyrics to help clean up the damage in the mitochondria and improve your DNA methylation. You also have mitochondrial support. You have energy therapy that can be really life changing. I know it changed my life, and I love it. And they use it in lots of different ways. It’s something to talk about to your practitioner about or seek out somebody who knows how to do this properly and who can help you guide your cell phone on that journey. And having a lot of cool biohacking tools is fun, too, red lights, grateful sleep of you exposing yourself to a red light first thing in the morning. If you don’t have access to sunlight or wake up super early or you’re somewhere, I lived inside of a circle when I was a kid. I know what it’s like, dark 24 seven, basically, and just a little bit of twilight mid-afternoon. Using also things like PMF can really help you sleep with the magnetic frequency devices. There are lots in the market. I have seen many different changes in the sleep for women when they started using these not just for men too, but the crew and devices. Again, there’s a lot of things to play with, but the other stuff that I was talking about is more important is definitely what will create day in and day out, cycle in and cycle out. A better foundation for health and better variations in your hormones. For you to be able to live your most vibrant self and best life. You can, you can in the female body, basically. With that, I know we’ve been talking for a while, probably over time, I tend to do that even when I teach yoga classes. And over time all the time. But the routine is everything. Find the routine that works for you. You work with somebody that can help you, whether your problem is a DNA company or having a practitioner to help you figure it out. What’s the optimal routine for you from each, part the psychologist daily in general. Just remember that each woman is unique. Whenever somebody says, Oh, this helped me and that helped me, it might not apply to you. 

You want to know your data, you want to know and understand how you can plug it in relative to you, and will it affect your health positively or negatively, or you’re doing nothing. We really want you to find those pieces and by individualizing our journey to leverage our changes in hormones, right? Because we can be extremely creative once we understand. And that can also be less hard on ourselves when we know. Let’s say we are in the luteal phase and super low energy. This is not the time to start a big project, right? I want to take a rest. Same as, time when you’re breathing. You want to take that as contemplation time. You’ll not start new things or if you have a creative project, you want to use that rise in hormones like that. Young Right. Energy that’s coming up to start something new and create something new. Going with that cycle, I think there are several apps nowadays and also there are books. I think Kristina Rhodes’ daughter, I forget her name. I’ll find that for you. And she has a little diary where you can use the power of the cycle to help you plan things out. I’ve even worked with all women companies to help them sync their cycles to her project manager. It’s been really fun to actually do.

Kashif Khan

I thought, well.

Katrine Volynsky

Yes, it was, it was, it was a fun project. It was fun to speak with them. It was fun to lay it out, maybe a really cool calendar and get the conversation going. The women really learned a lot and it improved company culture and improved their bottom line. At the end of the day, just because they were more effective, because women are not men. We don’t work on a 24 hour cycle. We don’t work from 9 to 5. We have different ways our bodies work. We need to honor it and we need to honor the fact that we will create differently and we have different resources available to us in different parts of our months basically. At the closing, I usually say there’s a really cool Tibetan proverb: the secret to living well and longer is to work double love, triple and measure love results. That’s where our oxytocin comes in and it’s all of the other hormones.

Kashif Khan

That’s all you just have in the beginning with that one leg.

Katrine Volynsky

Yes.

Kashif Khan

This is all amazing. Thank you. Because, we’ve had a lot of discussions then. We haven’t gone in this depth and we knew that you had this presentation ready to go and this topic needed to go in this level of depth because there’s many gray areas and many questions and it hasn’t been presented in the context of the women who need it presented and used to that course. I want to thank you. And yes, we’re over time and somebody else is waiting a long time. It’s good that this is the time well spent. Thank you so much for joining us. And in terms of bio optimizers, you mentioned some of the products there, we’ll try and share that with people because I’m sure people are saying, well, okay, how do I start accessing these and mapping them to the PowerPoint does map where they’re into what phase they’re relevant to. We’ll share that and we’ll also share things on how people can connect about whether they knew. Yes. Thank you so much. This is really you’re a powerhouse. This is an amazing presentation, and I’ll be seeing you soon at the biohacking conference for sure. Yes. Okay, great. Thank you so much.