How many nights have you experienced poor sleep and thought it was due to hot flashes or the need to pee?
Those things may have played a role, but if you look back to earlier in the day, you could uncover an underlying cause of the hot flashes that wake you up and make you realize you need to pee.
Have you considered the power of what you eat and how you respond to stressors as a contributing factor to hot flashes?
In this episode, I’ll explain how stress and blood sugar impact your hormones and undermine your sleep.
The good news about that is there’s a lot you can do to manage both of those issues and we’ll dig into that too.
Listen in now and maybe you’ll get some more restful sleep soon!
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Read the full transcript:
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You're listening to better than before breast cancer with the breast cancer recovery coach. I'm your host, Laura Lummer. I'm a certified life coach, and I'm a breast cancer thriver. In this podcast, I will give you the skills and the insights and the tools to move past the emotional and physical trauma of a breast cancer diagnosis. If you're looking for a way to create a life, that's even better than before breast cancer, you've come to the right place. Let's get started.
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Hey, there friends, you're listening to Episode 366 have better than before breast cancer. And have I got a show for you today, a show that's going to touch on stuff that's so important to us. And I think it's going to open your brain to a new way of looking at how managing diet, lifestyle stress management can have an incredible value, but a different way of thinking about it. Before I jump into that I have a huge favor to ask of you. If you watch this podcast on YouTube, please subscribe to the channel. You know, I we don't think about that oftentimes, but on the back end of all of the things that are out there on social media, if you subscribe and follow, it really makes a difference in how much the algorithm shows these podcasts to other people. So if you get anything out of listening to the better than before breast cancer podcasts, someone else might too. And if you like follow review and comment on the show, then it makes it easier for more people to find it and potentially helps more people. Especially I think in our cohort. You know, in breast cancer, there's a lot of struggles, right? And breast cancer is not cheap. Healing is not cheap. supporting a healthy diet is not cheap. So a lot of people and we have a lot of thoughts about money, we have some real struggles about money, we have some made up struggles in our mind about money, all kinds of things. So when you can have a podcast with almost 400 episodes, that can give people that much support for free. And in those episodes, I've got free downloads and workbooks and all kinds of good stuff that can help people. And you're taking just a couple of minutes to like follow subscribe, hit the few stars rate it review, it really can make a big difference in someone else's life. All right. So in advance, thank you very much for taking the time because it is an effort. It does take intention, and I do appreciate it. All right. We're gonna talk about something really good here.
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I hear a lot of my clients struggle with sleep. They say to me, how can I get better sleep? When I constantly have hot flashes? How can I get better sleep when I constantly wake up because I have to pee. And we relate hot flashes primarily to estrogen, right hormones. When we think about hot flashes, we've gone through cancer treatment, we're in menopause, or it put us in menopause. And so we correlate that with estrogen. And yet estrogen definitely plays a role. But there's so much more you can do. I think when you think about it being just a function of estrogen is kind of powerless, because we don't have a whole lot of control over estrogen, right? We can't go get HRT hormone replacement therapy, especially if you have hormone positive breast cancer, we're not going to risk our lives by adding in hormones. So it's kind of feels powerless, you know, if we just attribute it to, to estrogen, and the functions of estrogen. But what if I was to tell you that glucose, blood sugar, and insulin and stress play a huge role in your quality of sleep. And they all impact each other sleep, stress, insulin, glucose, it is such a circle.
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I mean, I'm going to tell you about it right now. It's like I'm going to trip over my words, because I'm just so excited to tell you everything. Because you do have so much power when it comes to the regulation of glucose and insulin. And that can change your life. It can change the quality of so many things and reduce the misery of hot flashes and poor sleep. So let's just have a quick refresher on glucose and insulin. Glucose is blood sugar. Our body uses it as a primary source of energy for the most part unless we're in ketosis, and it's using ketones, but it's always going to have some kind of blood sugar, we need blood sugar, and so our body makes it gluconeogenesis we make new blood sugar all the time, just to the extent that we need it to function. Insulin is the hormone responsible for getting that blood sugar that glucose into our cells so that it can be used for energy. When we have something called in
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insulin dysregulation. That means that we have a problem with this process, and our blood sugar can become unstable. Let's talk about what that does. How does that impact hot flashes? We'll have flashes, which are intense waves of heat that feel like they just come from your core and just, I used to joke when I was going through a really good joke. Maybe sometimes I thought it was even true. I'm like, okay, all of those wild phenomenon stories we see on whatever shows they were on TV that showed people who spontaneously combust. I used to say, those were all definitely postmenopausal women. That's the result of a hot flash. I mean, that's how intensive feels sometimes, right? Like, I'm literally going to end up a pile of ash here because I'm burning from the inside out. But did you ever think about the fact that glucose and insulin could make that worse and more intense? When blood sugar levels fluctuate? They trigger a release of adrenaline and adrenaline surges lead to sweating and hot flashes. So unstable blood sugar levels contribute to very uncomfortable, intense hot flashes, insulin resistance, which more often than not accompanies blood sugar dysregulation. Unstable blood sugar levels, is a condition that leads to hormonal imbalances. It does lower levels of estrogen, and we're already many of us dealing with aromatase inhibitors or scrm things that block our body's ability to access estrogen. But if we have a lot of body fat, our body fat is making estrogen, estrogen, adipose tissues do produce estrogen, and its imbalance can really intensify hot flashes. Insulin resistance is also linked to chronic inflammation, and inflammation disrupts our body temperature regulation, and exacerbates hot flashes. So let's dig a little deeper into insulin sensitivity. Studies show that even partial deprivation, sleep deprivation, which is less than six hours a night can reduce insulin sensitivity. And that means that your body is less responsive to insulin, requiring your pancreas, the beta cells of your pancreas to produce more insulin to maintain normal blood sugar levels. Poor sleep disrupts the balance of hormones that regulate hunger and metabolism like leptin and ghrelin. And that imbalance increases appetite, and leads to overeating the next day, which further contributes to insulin resistance. So, lack of sleep poor sleep can impair the body's ability to produce glucose blood sugar efficiently, which leads to high blood higher blood sugar levels. And that's because sleep deprivation and its effect on those hormones that we just mentioned, make it harder for insulin to perform effectively. So when we have poor sleep, we have increased levels of inflammatory markers, we increase that chronic inflammation that interferes with insulin signaling of pathways, worsening our insulin resistance. So whether our blood sugar is high or low, it impacts our sleep. Low blood sugar at night can cause symptoms like sweating, and anxiety, leading to frequently waking up. And high blood sugar can cause frequent urination, which also obviously, disrupts sleep and makes it harder to stay asleep. So like I said, I hear all the time I can't sleep, how can I sleep because I've constantly have hot flushes, they wake me up, and then I gotta get up, and then I gotta pee, and then I can't get back to sleep. So insulin resistance also affects our melatonin levels. And Melatonin is a really important hormone that plays a role in helping to regulate our sleep and wake cycles. And all of this the poor sleep, the blood sugar dysregulation, the insulin dysregulation puts a tremendous amount of stress on our body. And stress and insulin resistance, elevate cortisol levels, cortisol promotes wakefulness, high cortisol levels, especially at night, make it difficult to fall asleep, and stay asleep. So this creates a cycle of poor sleep quality. And we're going to jump into exactly how we can make some changes to impact that in just a minute, but first, I want to point out the incredible impact of stress. I talked about cortisol because we're thinking about stress on the body from the perspective of I'm not getting good sleep, and good sleep creates stress and impacts your cortisol levels, but actual stress
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I really stress the way we're thinking about things. And the way that we cope with stressors in life has a huge impact on our blood sugar levels, and our insulin regulation. First of all, there's always the fact that it can lead to buffering. So we turn to overeating or poor dietary choices when we're stressed, we tend to move less, we don't tend to get up and go to yoga class and exercise and things when we're feeling stressed out. So that can contribute to weight gain, particularly abdominal fat. And abdominal fat is very closely linked to insulin resistance. But I'll share with you have a really fascinating story. I'm working with a client, she's doing a phenomenal job. She is just so committed to her program. She's doing a great job of staying ketosis. She's doing a great job of managing and finding balance, her blood sugar, her HBO and see all of these things are looking beautiful. Her labs are looking beautiful. And her insulin is high. Huh. I'm looking at this. And I'm thinking, well, that is fascinating. She's fit, she exercises. She's doing a great job. Her blood sugar looks great. Why is this insulin high? And so I took it to the community at the metabolic Training Institute of Health. And I asked some of the doctors there, what what input can you give me here? What What should I look at take a deeper look at here with this client, so I can help her with this. And they asked me a couple of things about her fitness, her body fat, her activity, all that and all of those great. And they said
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Is she under a lot of stress that she tend to stress out a lot. Bingo, there we go. Stress, mental anxiety and stress can have such a huge impact on your health, that even when you are eating all the good things, you're doing all the good exercise, if we're not managing our emotions, and our coping mechanisms and our our responses to stressors, that can be having a negative impact that underlies all of this. And then obviously, when you're stressed, that's if she's got elevated insulin levels, it's indicating some insulin resistance, that's going to impact your sleep, that's going to make life more stressful. Do you see this big tangled ball of wax here? It's wild, right? This is why I say like nothing in our body operates in a vacuum. It's all integrated. And we have to think of it as this wonderful approach to our overall health. I think that it's a disservice that for so long, we've looked at food as a weight management strategy. And we've judged food and evaluated food based on what will make us fat and what will make us skinny. But there's so much more to that. So let me give you a few suggestions here in this area. If you are having poor quality sleep, and you feel like that's a result of frequent urination, if you feel like it's a result of lots of hot flashes, here's some things that you can try. One is we want to make sure we get to a healthy body weight and unhealthy body composition. Meaning that we're managing the amount of fat on our body to try to eat at least a minimum stop eating three hours before you go to bed, give your body time to get the food processed and digested and regulate the blood sugar, right we eat a blood sugar increases, we release insulin and our body starts going through the process of emptying the stomach, putting everything through the intestines doing all the things it has to do to digest all this stuff. If you eat up until the time you go to bed, then you have high blood sugar when you're going to bed, and your body has to take that next few hours to process the food that you've put in it. Well, now you've gone to sleep. So you've stimulated this whole new cascade of hormones is supposed to keep you sleeping. And that has a whole different job to do when you're asleep. The rest and recover, right restore clean up metabolic waste, make new cells all of these wonderful things our bodies do when they sleep. But now they can't do that job because they've got to be digesting food. So this puts an extra burden on the body. And it puts a big burden on the liver and all of the things that the liver has to do when you're sleeping. This is a big stressor. And we just talked about what stress does and how it impacts sleep. So at least three hours I recommend even for because it can take three to four hours before the stomach is actually empty after eating. So really moving that last meal of the day farther away from the time you go to bed. And that doesn't mean please don't go to bed at two in the morning because you want to eat up until 10 o'clock at night. Our body needs to start shutting down around 10pm This is a healthy circadian rhythm. This is a time where hormones start to change our body is affected by the world we live in our hormones.
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We are affected by light and dark. And our body goes through these cycles, whether we feel connected to the earth or not, our body is and it's going to continue to have this circadian rhythm. So are you going to support it so that it works with you or not support it, and it doesn't end well. Right. So moving that last meal of the day farther away from the time you go to sleep. And also making sure that that last meal of the day is not high in carbohydrates, meaning flour, and sugar and grains, that if you're going to have grains in your diet, try to have them earlier in the day around lunchtime. So if you get a spike in your blood sugar, you've got the afternoon of activities, errands running around doing all the things we do during the day to use up that glucose so that you're not overburdened with it when you go to bed. Alcohol consumption at night is going to disrupt your sleep is going to disrupt your glucose levels. And it's going to spike your glucose levels, typically about two hours after you consume alcohol, it's really going to have an impact on your sleep. And if you drink wine or cocktails or something at night, I don't have to tell you that because you already know, right? You know, there's a difference between the quality of sleep you get when you drink alcohol before bed versus when you don't. And think about that. It's not just that disruption of that one night, right. But it's the stress and the lack of ability to focus the next day. And a lot of that is driven by these imbalanced glucose levels. So it's all tied together. So we need to think about eating a diet with low glycemic index foods to stabilize the blood sugar. blood sugar regulation is so critical for us as cancer survivors, as people trying to heal our bodies. And as people who want to have good energy throughout the day, a lot of times people come to me and say, you know, I do everything. I'm doing all the things and when I start to ask the questions, are you eating carbohydrates? How many carbohydrates are eating? Most people don't even know. So are we really doing all the things if we don't even know what we're doing? When I asked about sleep, hydration exercise, primarily I get a big no. Right. So there's a lot of ways we can dig into this stuff and be treat ourselves better. Right give ourselves more love. Regular exercise improves insulin sensitivity, and it helps regulate blood sugar, which means it promotes better sleep. Physical activity is a win win, win win exercise as medicine, it improves our body on every conceivable level. So moving your body, flexing your muscles, and getting everything stimulated. And moving is critical to a healthy lifestyle. But stress management and relaxation techniques, mindfulness sitting down at lunch and dinner, doing some yoga, doing some journaling, doing some meditation, I often encourage people to have a sleep routine, where even if your sleep is out of whack, so I'll hear sometimes for me Why stay up till 10 On some nights and 2am On some nights and I scroll social media on Sundays and I don't do anything when other days, you've got to get into a routine body's love routines. So if you can establish a good sleep routine at this time, at night for most nights, you're not going to be perfect. None of us are perfect. But if you can do something like say, at this time each night is when I start my sleep routine, I start to wind down, I turn off the TV, I turn off the electronics, I brush my teeth, I maybe rub lavender oil on my feet, I read a regular book by a book light, I do some stretching, I write three lines in my gratitude journal, whatever speaks to you, whatever feels like it might work for you. I take 10 deep breaths, right or have a brief breathwork routine that you do before you go to sleep. These things are so powerful. And I know a lot of people dismiss them because they just think that's just so silly. What is that going to do that's not going to make a difference, it will make a huge difference. Because vagus nerve stimulation, meditation breathwork these things have a tremendous impact on our ability to lower cortisol levels in our body. And I just told you all of the things that cortisol can do, especially at night. So some of the things if we have a lot of things on our mind, or we're going to bed thinking about all the things you need to do the next day all the things we didn't do today. I suggest getting a journal keeping it by your bed and writing all of that down. getting stuff out of your head and onto paper is it's almost like a Harry Potter thing where there's like, I don't know there was this bowl I don't know what it was called. And it Hogwarts and Dumbledore is office and they could pull memories from it right? When we take stuff when we write in a journal. It's almost like just pulling that out of our head. And it's so helpful and can really help to reduce stress. So when it
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comes to the power we have over improving our sleep, regulating our blood sugar. And insulin is super powerful. And you have so much power, doesn't it feel better to know that I don't just have to sit here wondering about estrogen. But I can actually do lots of things in my life that could regulate cortisol, insulin and glucose. And in doing so, improve the quality of your sleep, and reduce the intensity of your hot flashes. It's so good to know that you have this power. Now you don't have to do everything at once. But out of the things that I suggested, pick something you could start on. If you go to bed at midnight, or one o'clock in the morning, think about going to bed 30 minutes earlier this week, and the next week, 30 minutes earlier than that, and slowly roll it back. Like don't stress yourself out. But think about creating a sleep routine. What would that look like for you? How would you like to have the sleep routine? Think about when you eat and why you eat at the times you eat and snacking and what tools and what cues could you use to help yourself so that you get a bigger break and you give your body a break between the last time you put in food into it, and the time that it has to start its work of supporting you while you're asleep? All right. If you would like more information and help with that come to the breast cancer recovery coach.com where you can work with me in private sessions, where I do metabolic health coaching to help you support creating a lifestyle plan and routine that supports your specific body. And where I have the better than before breast cancer membership where all the things are in there. All the things that help you in all of these areas that we talked about, and can be so super helpful. Just life changing, transformative, really. All right, friends, I hope that helps you. I hope you get a better night's sleep tonight having heard it and implementing some practices, and I'd love to hear from you. I'd love to hear what you try or what questions you have. So come and find me on Facebook or Instagram as Laura Lummer The Breast Cancer recovery coach and ask me your questions. I love to help you. Alright, take care. I'll talk to you soon.
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