Sleep Deprived: One Woman’s Journey to Recovery Through Sleep

Summit Introduction and Guest Background 0:00

Welcome to the reverse autoimmune disease Summit, everybody, I'm Doctor Kiesha. You are joining me for the fourth iteration of the reverse Autoimmune Disease Summit. We're talking about autoimmune detox and this one, and I am just really delighted to introduce you to Missy Williams. If you have not met her yet. She is delightful. She spent years struggling to reclaim for health and vitality after a brain fog and fatigue tailspin from life threatening complications from surgery to remove an ovarian cyst.

Afterward, her doctor told her that she had endometriosis. The only remedies were drugs and surgery, and her labs were normal, and she could Google to learn more about what was happening to her body. Probably some of you have had an experience similar to this. I know that I didn't care if we didn't have Google when I did it. It was asked you. At 35 years old, Missy started fighting for the quality of life and during more challenges on her road to healing, including an unexplained 45 pound weight gain, debilitating brain fog, fatigue, hypothyroidism and premature ovarian failure, she founded Healing rosie.com to provide high performing women with the resources and community to successfully confront the unexpected chronic health issues that women often experience as they age.

Welcome to this. I'm Misty. Thank you. I'm so happy to be here. You know, we're going to be talking about there's there's this really interesting thing that happens when I'm working with my patients and even my students. It's it's really sort of, comical even. And it's there are some pillars to good health and to helping us reverse chronic illness. And one of those, you know, is hydration. Another one is exercise. Another one is eating according to what your body's asking you for. You know, from testing you've done for genetics and food sensitivities, you know, another one is sleep.

And those four things people tend to just kind of zone out. They hear them so often. You know, another one is the relationship to stress. Right. And and people will hear these things and they'll just kind of cross their eyes and go, well, don't you have a supplement? I can take? If they're a little more elevated. If otherwise, it's going to have a prescription. Right. For sleep. And I was kind of zoning out, and I's crossing is because we hear it all the time that there are these kind of five main things that will help us to sustain our health and reverse disease.

But they're kind of hard. They're all ones that you have to take responsibility in yourself for. There's no magic wand, and there's nobody that can actually say, this will 100% change your life. It's all really up to you and how to figure out your lifestyle choices and and implement them according to your individual constitution. So sleep. Let's talk about sleep. And this one, it's one of those that I hear all the time. Yeah, yeah yeah yeah. What I say okay. So do you go to bed by ten and get up at six.

No. You when the kids go to bed or you know, after dinner, I say up until 2 or 3:00 in the morning because that's when it's quiet. That's when I can do my job, you know, I get all the stuff done, and then I have coffee to wake myself up in the morning, and I have alcohol to put myself back to sleep at night. Let's. Not a good roller coaster, is it? Yeah. I mean, I relate to the people that like to stay up until two.

Why Sleep Is Foundational to Healing 3:34

That was my life. I was a chronic night out from 18 until 35, when everything started spinning out of control for me. I never went to bed before 2 a.m. weeknights, weekends. I would get a second wind around 9 p.m. and that was super valuable time. To me, that was like five hours of productivity. You know, I know right now I relate to yeah, I relate, yeah. But you know, I think once once you're confronted with the, the needs of your body and your body breaking down, you have to have a come to Jesus with yourself, you know, like what's really going on here.

And that's what happened for me after I walked out of my, ObGyn office after the surgery and complication and going 144 hours without sleep after the second surgery was like torture. I reached out to a friend of mine who was a chiropractor, and he started doing some work with me, and the first thing he asked me is, how's your sleep? And I didn't know that there was anything wrong with my sleep. I thought my sleep was fine. You know, I he he asked me how I woke up in the morning and I was like, well, I feel like I've been hit by a mack truck because I've been sleeping all night.

And he was like, no, that's not why you feel like you've been hit by that truck when you wake up and know that isn't normal. I mean, I thought it was normal. Yeah. You know, I told my when I was sleeping, I was taught I'm tired when I go sleeping. It makes perfect sense. I had my tonsils out at the age of 22. And and instead of staying in bed like I was told to, I wallpapered my kitchen sink until like 2:00 in the morning. And then was surprised that it took me so long to recover. Right? I had all this time off work, like, why not use it?

We really, we really do look at sleep as like this interruption. Yes. Rather than like this hugely important part of why we function well in the world. And you know, I had to really change my perspective. And it was hard. Lesson whenever I lose four hours of good productivity in my day, that doesn't you can't do that and not have it ripple effect. You know they're everything in my life had to be rethought and reconsidered, but dialing in my sleep was really the foundational thing that allowed me to start experiencing some healing.

And we get stuck in these patterns of, like, we're trying these different protocols, we're getting these diagnoses. Things don't seem to be getting better. The protocols don't seem to work, sleep gets harder. It's harder to fall asleep. So we're getting less sleep. And this just layers and stacks over time. So, you know, I think coming to acceptance that this is a hugely important part of good health. Like I'm 45 years old actually to think about that. How old am I? I'm 45 years old and I love my vitality.

And I want energy like this until the day I die. And so if I want to create that for myself, I know what it takes, you know? And at one time it seemed like a sacrifice. But now it's just a gift. Like I, everyone in my life knows. And it's been like this for years. That sleep to me is the most important thing I do for myself. I love people, I love networking. Before Covid, I went to events all the time. I had a big community here in Austin and I love it. And 930, 10:00 mist is going home and climbing into bed.

It's just the way that I rolled, you know? But you know, we all have to first just kind of having a little meeting with ourselves. And this is not an optional thing. You know, there's not a way to get away with not sleeping. And if you're not sleeping or not healing, and we spend all this money on doctors and protocols and supplements and we want it to work, you know, but if our body doesn't have the opportunity to repair and restore and heal, nothing is going to work. So, yeah, I'm very passionate about this topic.

And you did a summit about it. I was a guest. I did, and I mean, we're doing it again. Yeah. And I love to hear what your gleanings are from the summit. I one of the things I love about Running summits is I learn so much from people that I have on. Yeah, yeah. Well, you know, I think my I foundational thing with sleep, I didn't learn from my summit, but it's really, really important. And we should talk about it. I learned it in the early days, like 2011 and 12 is early days in my journey from Dave Asprey, Ben Greenfield and and probably, I'm sure Rob, with a lot of people in the paleo space, we're talking about circadian biology and this idea that cycles of light really are the foundational control for all of life on our planet, and light cycles have a tremendous effect on our body's ability to sleep.

And, you know, our ancestors, when the sun went down, they didn't have electricity, you know, for a while they didn't even have fire. Light sources were really minimal after dark. And they went to sleep. And then when the sun comes up, they wake up. And it kept them aligned with how our bodies are designed to work. All of our cells are designed to take their signal from our environment and the light in our environment. So when I was studying about this early on, because I knew I had trouble with my sleep, I learned about amber glasses, lowering the lights in your home, putting amber bulbs in your lamps like no devices, you know, late at night, just doing things to help your body actually move into being able to sleep.

And in fact, the amber glasses, which you can get on Amazon for like 10 or 15 bucks, the amber glasses is a really, common thing that I recommend to people who ask me about health, like in my friend circle. And we're at 100%. Over the years, no one has ever tried amber glasses and been like it doesn't work. I always get feedback within days of them getting the glasses because it's fast. You know, it really helps your body to move into sleep. You have receptors in your eye that communicate with the brain when it picks up on blue light that it's daytime.

So that stimulates all your sympathetic nervous system, right? So when those blue light rays are filtered out, your body can move into parasympathetic. And it just makes everything related to sleep happen a lot easier. And all the signaling in the body related to your hormones and neurotransmitters that need to get lined up to help you fall asleep. They're able to do their job, and you're not waiting until it's time to drop into bed to figure out how to get yourself to sleep. So that, to me, is so foundational.

I can share a lot of the other things, and I will be able to. I want to be clear about sleep, but let's start there with the the blue light piece, because one of the things I often think of too is, when is the time when we were truly able to rest and be at ease? Was in the womb? And so, you know, often, sometimes not. If you didn't have a mom that was at rest in ease. But, you know, we felt like really nourished and enclosed, right? And in that beautiful salt water. And so I always tell my patients, instead of rushing, rushing, rushing

Circadian Rhythm, Light, and Nighttime Routine 10:39

all day long and then crashing into bed and expecting your body to get the signal, like, okay, now sleep. Yeah, right. Instead of crashing into sleep instead, like the hour before, start turning off everything, and then at least a half an hour before get into a salt bath, you know, with maybe some lavender in there and soak with candles around it, because it also gives that other light. Right. And then you don't you don't sit and look at a screen while you're in the tub, right. Maybe listen to some music that is really gentle.

I love that, or, you know, things like that. I'll play Maria, like very sacred music. And I love doing that. And what it does is it signals everything. Oh, I'm safe. I'm at ease, and it's time to go to sleep. Because if you don't feel safe, you're also not allowed to sleep. Yeah, right. Like we're being chased by lion. Knows we can go to the bathroom, can't have sex and cannot sleep. Yeah, right. We're we live in the Western world is very performance and productivity oriented. And I think there's something deep inside of us that feels like to be worthy of insert whatever it is you want to be worthy of love, attention, abundance, you know, fill in the blanks to be worthy.

We need to be doing right, need to accomplish, you know, and that fundamental underlying belief that a lot of us don't really tune into until we start getting older and really being forced a lot of times by our bodies to examine the way we're living our lives. That belief keeps us from doing the things that are actually nurture and nourish us. You know, when when I my journey, there's almost kind of a demarcation point in the middle for me of the last ten years or so of my own healing journey, where I realized around two, three, four years in that there was fundamentally a part of the way that I was showing up in the world that wasn't serving me, and it was really tied to this belief that I was unworthy of support.

I was I was unworthy of being nurtured. I was unworthy of receiving like I had been conditioned to be the giver and the doer. And my value came from that. My identity came from that. And so I was always in that mode of depleting myself, basically. And I'm really learning to shift that energy so that I could welcome in what I needed and feel worthy of that support. Understand deeply that, like, this universal law of giver and receiver is crucial to energy being able to flow properly in your life.

And that's been a big, big part of my journey to that has helped me to realize that there's things I have to give myself if I want to be at my best and have something to give the world, you know, so we can talk bio hacks. But you need to pay attention to what's really going on inside. And you know what's really keeping you from doing the thing that you know you need to do to honor who you are and what your body needs. So I agree 100%. Let's talk about the different kinds of, sleep disruption patterns people have, because some people can fall asleep easily, but they don't stay asleep simply falling asleep and can stay asleep.

And then some people can fall asleep, right, etc., etc.. Right, right. And so, I notice in my own journey I'm 55 now. I've always been a really good sleeper. That has never been a problem for me. I do go to bed at ten and I've always said I'm a pumpkin past 12:00, so you know, and that that was after I got diagnosed with rheumatoid arthritis in my 20s. I was not I was a night owl, but once I got diagnosed with an autoimmune disease and I realized the importance of sleep, I was like, okay, you know, bed by ten, by six.

And and then I was productive all day long. And then I would give myself that cushion between, okay, buddy, I love you, I appreciate you. I'm going to give you what you need. Here's your signal for how to go to sleep. But then I entered into perimenopause and menopause, and all bets are off right now in the menopause. And I do what I call the burrito roll. Roll out of the covers. Roll into the covers, covers roll into the covers all night long. And in my sleep is not as like hit the I. Usually I can still hit the pillow and go to sleep, but then I'll wake up warm.

And so hormones are a big, big, big, big, big piece of it. And so, I just want to point that out to people that when we talk about sleep, I am understanding the nuances and the different kinds of sleep patterns that can be disrupted. So I want to kind of start with that understanding. And then, Misty, I want you to take it from there about like where you know, where you want to go with it. But just we have these problems of for people, but I think people that struggle to fall asleep often it's brain that won't turn off.

That's right. Yeah, yeah. If you're having trouble falling asleep, most likely it's a circadian issue and it's a how you're managing your life issue. Now clearly some people end up having deeper issues caused by your HPA axis being really out of whack and lots of gut issues where you're just not making the sleep hormones that you need, you know? But even a lot like to get to that point. You have to have perpetually had a lot of bad habits. Right? So, trouble falling asleep first. You've got to you've got to fix all the circadian stuff and you've got to create that nighttime routine to help you wind down and get ready for bed.

And the tips that I have that I've tried myself and seen lots of success with, and I hear about it from our community, our room darkening curtains, and we talk about this a lot in the summit, two room darkening curtains. That's a newer one for me. I just got room darkening curtains last year, and it's like, astonishing the difference it makes. In your sleep. And I thought my sleep was great before, but it was like another level. So blocking that light completely. So you hold your hand up in front of your face and you don't see it.

That's how you know it's truly dark in your room. That can be really helpful. In both falling asleep and staying asleep, cold is really helpful. I have a chilly pad. And then I'm covered. Like, right now it's winter for us. And so we have a weighted blanket, which is also amazing, for helping with sleep, especially if you do a lot with anxiety. I hear from a lot of women in our community that weighted blankets really help them if they've got anxiety issues. But weighted blanket and a down comforter both.

We cuddle up, but, you know, there's still this coolness. Both of those things help tremendously. But, you know, I've I've dealt with all the hormone issues. I had mercury filling improperly drilled for my teeth in 2013 that, basically triggered a 45 pound weight gain and completely crashed all my hormones. Before that, I lost my ovary, had endometrium. So I've just had lots of hormone challenges. And when I'm not on a really nicely optimized hormone regimen, I don't sleep with cramp, so I have to have progesterone.

But for me, I noticed the biggest difference with estrogen. I actually recently did an experiment with my doctor, raising my estrogen levels, and I went from getting about an hour to an hour and a half of deep sleep a night to four hours of deep sleep. A very, very significant difference just with optimizing my estrogen, pushing it a little bit further, you know, to see how my body responded. The other night on before our time. Yeah. Again, I just lathered mine on before, you know, bioidentical hormone replacement.

Definitely. I mean, I've really needed it therapeutically. I've needed that because I actually had some things crush me, you know? But for a lot of women, as they move into menopause, my little sister just reached out to me and do you get night sweats? She's five years younger than me. Are you getting night sweats at night? Which, fortunately, bioidentical hormone replacement therapy keeps me from having night sweats. But it's the nights where I get warm, and that's the burrito roll. Yeah, totally.

I get miserable when I'm. When I'm, like, putting off a lot of heat. You know? So, I'm a big fan of optimizing, too, but, you know, kiesha, this is a detox summit. And I have to say, doing heavy metal detoxification for me, has been a significant needle mover for all of my markers, including helping me to improve my sleep. So put in a little gray box in our discussion about that. Just for our listeners and viewers to understand is if you have

Sleep Disruptions, Hormones, and Detox 19:38

adrenal fatigue and a hormone imbalance, you don't do a heavy metal operation. So I just want to say this because it's really important heavy metal correlation. I do that with my patients all the time. But I say there's always the right order, right? You do not go after heavy metals or mycotoxins or any of the other big things that we we want to kill off, like yeast and Sibo and things like that. And tell your adrenals and hormones are stable to a point where your body can handle it because it's really hard work for your body.

It is hard to have gas in the tank, otherwise it will take you further below your baseline, which is no fun, right? If if you are detox from heavy metals and you're already empty, then you're going to have all kinds of bad side effects from that. You don't need to have my patients when I'd talk to them, actually skate through it pretty easily, getting rid of metals. And it's because I've gotten them ready for it before we go after them. So that's really important. Detoxification requires excellent sleep, so if you don't have your sleep relatively dialed in, detoxification will be absolutely brutal for you because you need your body needs.

The time that it's going to go pull the metals out is when you're sleeping. And if you're not getting good sleep, especially getting some good deep sleep, then yes, it'll be very taxing for you. It's interesting how I look back over the tapestry of the last ten years and, you know, there's so many layers, even to the sleep conversation of what's helped me to dial my sleep in. So, and I've tried a few different things that have been helpful. A melatonin supplement at times when I've really struggled with sleep has, has help.

But then there's times I've taken melatonin and it's good for the first hour, and then I'm waking up again. You know, with that that I read on, people actually tells us if you have enough melatonin. So it's like Goldilocks, right? You don't want too much and you don't want too little. That's why sometimes it works. And sometimes it doesn't because sometimes you need it and other times you don't. So it's really good to know that level before you start taking things like surgery, because it could be that your cortisol zinging up at night.

And then it's not a melatonin issue, it's hospital theory, but you need to be using, you know, and so it's like you can actually do more harm than good just trying things. Yeah. I the thing that I, I tend to be a fan of for, waking up a lot in the night is CBD. CBD basically glossed that over a couple of years ago when I was switching from one type of hormone replacement therapy to another, which is brutal, and I was dealing with a lot of waking up in the night, you know, my whole body was like, what is happening right now?

A CBD supplement was really helpful to me. You know, I wake up and I can kind of feel the difference in a wake up. You're rolling over and I wake up. Oh, my gosh, I'm going to be awake. You know, and CBD worked really well for me, but I would I did on my recent Dutch test. My melatonin was like so high and all my other hormones are. I'm on every supplement you can imagine for hormones. They're all pretty tanked, you know, without supplements. With my supplements, I'm in a good space. But my melatonin is super high, and we really credit that to all the lifestyle stuff you know, my body at least knows how to get one, right?

You know? And that comes back to the circadian thing. That's why it's really my well, it's in your glands. So if you're wearing amber glasses and you're not doing screens that late at night, right, your pineal gland can do its job. That's right. Yeah. That's right. There's some really interesting research out there too. If anyone like, kind of resonates with that pineal gland. Idea on on what causes your nail gland to calcify as you get older and things that you can do to calcify. For a lot of people who struggle with chronic health issues, I suspect there's probably some calcification of the pineal gland going on.

And there's definitely things that you can do to, is to put your spirit right. So people that are engaged actively in spiritual practices tend not to get calcification as they age, you know, because you're actually engaging it constantly. Right. So, one of the things I want to do is meditation, prayer, like all these things, you know. Yeah. I mean your gland. Yeah. One of the things I want to mention about melatonin kind of tying to the room, darkening curtains, cause I found it fascinating. I was interviewing Doctor in Shippy, and she was talking about how, our red blood cells actually have light receptors in them.

And I always kind of wondered why there were some people that talked about, you know, where the where the masks over your eyes and other people were like, no, the whole room has to be dark. And she explained that, you know, we have blood cells just running through our skin. So you can have an eye mask on, which is really helpful to some people, you know, really darkening that way. But if you're in a room where there's lots of light, and it's funny, the things that will be light sources in a room.

I mean, you got your smoke detector running off the light, you know. Is that the. In the master bathroom? My curling iron, they're plugged in, you know, they're off, but there's little lights on them, so, you know, under the door in the living room because there's so many windows out there. I mean, there's just lots of places that light can be coming into the room, and you have to take care of all of that. But just knowing that your skin has your blood cells have light receptors in them. And so, this is why the room darkening stuff is so important because it regulates melatonin.

Your blood cells actually signal for melatonin release. I think it's why we're so affected as women by the moon cycle to the phase that the moon's in. Yeah. You know, like, I'm. I don't have curtains over my windows because I live in both the places I live. It's in a deep forest. And so there's no there's no there's no light except for what's happening through stars and moon. And so when the moon is shining through, you know, I'm, I'm like, awake. And I go every month, I go, I get some curtains, I.

But we live in the place. And I was, you know, and it's just like light is valuable to us in, you know, and we tend to go into like hibernation during these months because we're so far north. And the amount of light that we get in the daytime is quite short. And so it's just like light is gold, right? And so blocking it seems very irreverent. So I always think that with the moon like, oh yeah, I need to be pulling some curtains. I know it's just like a spotlight in here. Yeah. I, I wake up in the morning feeling really refreshed.

Now, I think that's a really good barometer for all of us, you know? Am I getting enough sleep? How you feel in the morning? And for those that have not gotten to enjoy that experience, it is the best gift you can give to yourself. Everything about my day is so much better because I wake up ready for the day. I wake up in a good mood. I don't wake up feeling frustrated or exhausted and all the emotional stuff that kind of gets tied to that. I'm just so exhausted. Energy, you know? I feel great. And I think it's it's interesting how we're so deconditioned around what it's actually supposed to be like.

Yeah. But I, I never even as a teenager, I woke up tired and exhausted. I mean, it's it's lifelong for me until I really started working on my sleep. And the thing that was the, the catalyst in the beginning took me about six months to get things dialed in so that I wasn't waking up feeling so utterly exhausted in the early days. And now, like, there's no comparison how I feel now even compared to back then. But I started doing cold baths the night before bed. The water would be around 6062 degrees, and I did about a week or two of cold baths, and I had the experience of waking up and not just feeling like I'd been hit by a mack truck, and it was weird, honestly.

You know, for the first time, you know that our our are dependent too on they affect your left in had an impact in which affects your weight and your signaling for appetite. So you know at high altitudes when where it's a lot colder, people tend to sleep a lot deeper and not get their body weight up as much as people that have that live at sea level. And, you know, so, I think this is an interesting point that you're making. And I want to I also want to frame it with the weight piece, you know, because those are two hormones that I'm talking about.

And, and, leptin. And when we have leptin resistance, then we have more weight on our bodies. And the cold actually influences how much an effect and gets released from our fat cells. And, and I and sleep actually affects leptin, resistance to it. So I think this is really important. The, the peace around cold. Yeah. Cold is I mean, I love having a chilly pad on my bed. I interviewed, Doctor Kirk Parsley for the sleep Summit, and I asked him, you know, what is your favorite? What have you noticed?

Has moved the needle because he's very into data, right? And he tracks everything. And he said for him it was the chili pad. I mean that cold on the, on the bed, he said he actually he looked at his deep sleep like a, like a before and after on the chili patty was getting more deep sleep and then he was like this can't, this has to be just a coincidence or whatever. So then he, he went to his guestroom and he slept without it. What was deep sleep went back and slept on the chilly pad. I mean, it can it can really help with deep sleep.

That's the thing you can. In the early days, I was getting more sleep, but I wasn't necessarily getting deep sleep. It's almost like my body forgot how to do it. You know, chronically for a long time. Yeah. That is the thing. So, so cold and dark really helps your body to retune to to going into deep, deep sleep and estrogen to that in my case in progesterone. And so I do want to put a shout out to the impact of alcohol on slate. Because when we look at brain imaging people that are using alcohol, it can get them to sleep.

But then around 2 or 3:00 in the morning, it'll activate everything so that they wake up. So it's not a good, you know, cocktail before bedtime. I noticed the same for me. If I have a glass of wine, my sleep and my the. But I have a Garmin that measures like your body battery and stuff. It's basically your the stress levels in your body and everything, but, my my body battery does not recharge just with a glass of wine. I'm not much of a drinker anyway, but knowing that has made me like I might drink two times a year.

A glass or two. Like, we have champagne for New Year's, right? But I just. I don't like having my sleep negatively impacted.

Deep Sleep, Genetics, and Morning Light 30:48

I want to be recharged. Yeah, the next day. It feels so good. And I also know that I'm in the I mean, we've had to rebuild everything in my body because of what I've been through. And so I deeply, deeply honor my body's need for sleep. You know, I get on a consistent basis, 8 to 10 hours of sleep a night. I do want to say smoking weed also says same thing in the research. So while it can help reduce your anxiety before you go to sleep, calm your brain down. Same as alcohol, it will do the same thing with waking up the receptor inside that says time to wake up. So so those two things I think are some it's have some mythology around it for people and I want to get rid of.

Right. Yeah. I and just pay attention to how you feel. You wake up I mean I think that's a pretty good signal. You know, whenever I have a glass or two, when that's the next day, it's not the same. Your motivation level, I think, is a big one. You know, like your energy, motivation, mood, those things that you mentioned. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Overall hearing the birds chirping in the morning, I mean, it's kind of like this intangible. I mean, obviously I can think of that and think happy. But you know, it's just this refreshed and refreshed.

Yeah. I mean, it's a powerful way to start your day. And I, your Vedic medicine knew this 10,000 years ago. Said all the things we're saying, stuff about the tech stuff around. It's bad. Right? But, or Garmin or what, you know, like. But they knew this stuff. Yeah. And said that the people that have more copper on them, like Pittock copper is what my body type is. Actually need to get out of bed by 6 a.m. otherwise, there's the impulse once copper kicks in, because we have a lot of copper. Time of day on the clock and from from, 6 to 10 in the morning is copper and from 6 to 10 p.m., and then from 10 to 2 in the morning and night at and then from 2 to 6 is better.

And so when you think about that, then you if you have a vata imbalance and you're waking up at 2:00 in the morning and you haven't been drinking and smoking weed, then then you can kind of go, okay, so I have a number of things to look at. I need to check my hormones in each of my adrenals, but then I also need to make sure I don't have a lot of imbalance. A lot of imbalances happen the closer you get to menopause and beyond. You're in the stage of life at menopause and beyond. And so that's why old people struggle with their sleep so much.

And there are other reducing measures that you can take that are actually pretty easy. You know, rub yourself down with some oil before you go to bed. That Vassos talking about and then rubbing yourself down with sesame oil because your pores are open. And I like these things actually help reduce body. Don't be putting ice in your drinks. You know, things that are warming and soothing are good for body, moisturizing. So knowing your essential fatty acid balance and getting into fats, that's really important to keep a lot of person this late.

So or a person and body's stage of life. And then if you have coffee like I do and you're like after 6:00 Am, oh I just need another hour, please leave me alone. Right. If you get out of bed, you'll be refreshed and have a lot of energy. But if you stay in bed until like eight, you're going to wake up like a truck hit you if you're coffee. So that's interesting to have, like the time of day that you get yourself out of bed and then all of them should be going to bed by ten. Yeah, yeah, yeah. I was really fascinated by, a talk I had with Doctor Michelle Sands about sleep in your genetics.

And I'm sure kind of ties into some of the stuff you're sharing here. But some people are genetically predisposed to getting in bed by 8 p.m., which for me would be just like, torture. And Doctor Michelle is genetically disposed to go to bed at, like, 1:00 Am. And there's these gradients. You basically have this 80% in the middle where most of us are going to be the 10 p.m. people, you know, but you have these outliers on either side. I mean, some people are wired to only need like five hours of sleep, which would just be a dream for me.

But I'm clearly not like I can. I can barely get away with doing less than seven. You know? I just don't function the next day. So there's an interesting genetic component to this conversation, too. You know, when you think about how you're wired to sleep, some people are wired to not produce as much melatonin. So that can obviously have an impact on your sleep. So sometimes just diving into your genetics and working with someone who can help you make sense of what you're seeing can give you some insight into how you're wired.

Best to go to sleep. You know, obviously, matching up to how we're naturally wired sleepers is ideal, and we're going to we're going to feel the best once we figure out what works for us. I have personally never looked into my genetics because I think I know, like I do neurotransmitter testing too, because if you're low on five HTP, serotonin is sleep, right? It's a sleeper. Melatonin. Yeah, right. You're supposed to have an increase in serotonin to be able to sleep. And so you know that's really an important pathway and a bit interrupted in some way because maybe you have more dopamine and serotonin off of the synaptic surface.

Then you're going to be like, you know, and so that's another one that's really important. And neurotransmitter kind of things easiest. Just a little urine test. We can see where things are at and then give you the precursors, you know taking a little five HTP before bed. But don't take it if you don't need it because then it impacts your dopamine. They share the same surface. And so if you start taking five HTP because you read or you're here, it's good for sleep, then during the day you may have low dopamine, which actually lowers your motivation and your libido and your mood and your memory.

So it's important that you do what your body's asking. Test. Don't guess. Yes. No. Yes. That's my. I was thinking as you were talking. I was thinking of a of another dimension to this conversation. It's really important that we've kind of touched on, but it might be nice to draw an arrow here is waking up in the morning and getting a light on your face when you wake up? Because when you're talking about circadian, you know, the amber glasses are are great for the evening. But how you wake up really matters because you're telling your body that it's daytime.

Daytime starts now, and your body has a sense of how long that light cycle is supposed to last. So you want to not only set night with the amber glasses, but in the morning you want to also set that it's daytime. So make sure when you wake up we throw open the windows. You know, we let the dog out. We do things in my house to get outside. And I actually have, a red light that I do every morning to, just to really impress upon my body that, hey, it's I don't have that comes the light comes in and wakes me up.

And in the summertime it's at 5:00 in the morning and I'm leaping out of bed with tons of energy, pulling on my hiking clothes and telling my dogs, let's go. You know, so much energy. So it's really wonderful when. And there we have those sunlight lamps, you know, where you're actually waking up to, that light that makes it naturally instigates that circadian rhythms like that. It's like a flower blooming to the sun. Oh, yeah. It's interesting. I have a sense of what time it is when I wake up now, and I'm I'm in a pretty dark room.

But I'm still really tuned in. I can see if I look over at the amber glasses, there's just a little faint. I mean, Amber, not Amber. Room darkening curtains. There's a little faint light. Yeah, barely there, but I can just feel it in my body now. When I wake up, I can. I can wake up with my eyes closed and know it's about 530 or 6 a.m.. You know, I can just feel it. And some of it is, a lot of this is we have to get back in tune with our bodies, what our bodies actually need. I was so disconnected for so many years, and now I feel I'm so much more in my body, and I.

I feel a lot of this stuff more, and my intuition is more refined. I think that's why in the early days, for people that have health challenges, they're looking for someone like, tell me what I need to do or who's the person? Because we're so disconnected, we don't even know what to make of these signals we're getting, you know? But after a while of really reintegrating with our being, we start to get a better sense. And, you know, my my intuition around where I need to go is pretty refined. I mean, I, I pretty much know what my doctor and I need to talk about just by what I've been feeling and then looking at my own labs before we even have a conversation.

And then, you know, she'll be like, yeah, this is kind of what I was saying to you. But it was not like that in the beginning at all. That's no, that's the sign, you know, like that. It's a team rather than a patriarchal right now. It's totally is a part of the team. Instead of somebody saying, well, this is what's wrong, do this. It's it's really important that you know yourself. So yeah, I've really empowered myself a lot around learning about my own body. But I could not navigate without my doctor and without the practitioners that,

Trauma, Nervous System, and Closing Thoughts 39:58

you know, kind of have kind of had their own specialization as I've gone along, and have helped me, a big part of all of us healing is learning to approach our health in partnership and, finding that we resonate with, that we align with and and really partnering with them. I this idea that especially as a layperson, which that's really what I am, even though I'm fairly educated but I'm totally a layperson, there's no way I could have hacked and healed on my own without the great doctors I work with, especially because I need bioidentical hormone replacement therapy.

But at the same time, having a great doctor and me not doing all the things that I've done to take a lot of initiative, also would not have given me the results that I've gotten. You know? So being the responsibility and having someone awesome is really how you. Right, you know, over the hump. There's one thing before we sign off that I do want to mention that often when people are, sleeping, but but that shows that their cortisol is zinging up at night on their cortisol testing. I usually see that as you're not dealing with an emotional trauma.

It's happening at night because you're not doing it during the daytime. So that's another piece is making sure that you're healing your trauma. Like, again, if the zebra is being chased by a lion, right. It's not going to sleep. So, you know, you might be asleep at $4 of still rising. You're not going to wake up rested, and you're not going to have the rest in your body that you need, and it's going to disrupt your hormonal balance. So that's another huge piece of it is making sure that that's being done to, so fascinated by your, by your awesome female doctor and your witch doctor side.

I really feel like this is a beautiful part of the way you practice, where you you're so Western and you're so eastern at the same time. You know, I love the emphasis that you put on testing. For example, I tend to lean into that a little bit. I'm a little more analytical, and I want to see some data to match my emotional experience, you know, and make sense of it that way. But there has been such a significant part of my healing journey that has nothing to do with the the lab test and the protocols.

It's just been deep, introspective, like, who am I and how am I showing up in the world? And why do I show up this way? And why do I feel so unworthy? And why is this reciprocity being such a challenge for me? I mean, we if we want to heal, we have to we have to heal our our soul to that's residing in this body. There is a vibrational frequency that's affecting our nervous system that we have to take into account if we really want to heal and get better. So we're going to stop right there. Perfect.

Thank you so much, Missy. And we will put Missy's, information and healing. Rosie is her Facebook group. And we'll make sure that you also have information on her sleep summit, as we roll into this. So thank you so much for sharing your wisdom with that. Thank you, honey. Thank you so much. All right, everybody, until next time, be well.