In this episode of the Better Than Before Breast Cancer podcast, we’re talking about how seasonal time changes disrupt our energy and what you can do to restore your body’s natural rhythm.
We’re not just talking about losing an hour of sleep; this change can throw off our internal clocks, impacting energy, focus, and even our mood.
I’ll guide you through understanding why this happens—explaining the fascinating roles of melatonin, cortisol, and other biological signals that shape your sleep-wake cycle.
But it doesn’t stop there. You'll discover simple, practical ways to align your habits with your body’s needs, especially during the transition into the darker, colder months.
From creating an evening routine to choosing foods that support your melatonin levels naturally, this episode offers tools to get your energy back on track. We’ll cover how common habits like eating sugar or drinking alcohol before bed can make things worse, and I’ll share smarter alternatives that still satisfy without disturbing your rest.
Get a clearer understanding of what’s happening in your body when the clocks change and actionable tips that can transform how you feel during these seasonal shifts. Imagine feeling more in sync with your body, able to settle into a restful sleep, and waking up refreshed, even as the days grow shorter.
If you’re dreading feeling the effects of the time change or just want better sleep this fall and winter, this episode is for you. Join me for a deep dive into nurturing your body’s natural rhythms, so you can feel rested, recharged, and truly supported this season.
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You're listening to better than before breast cancer with the breast cancer recovery coach, I'm your host, Laura Lemmer. I'm a certified life coach and I'm a breast cancer thriver. In this podcast, I will give you the skills on the insides 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. Welcome to episode 384
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of better than before breast cancer. I'm your host. Laura lummer, happy to be here today. This is the first podcast of November, and honestly, I cannot believe how fast this year has gone by. It's crazy, but this weekend, something's happening here in the United States, and it's the time change. We fall back an hour, and every time we fall back an hour, we get so tired, right? Why do we get so tired when the time changes for one hour? You think about places that you travel to, even when I go back east to visit my step daughters, three hour time difference, it doesn't knock me out as much as the one hour time change that happens twice a year. And I want to talk about that for a couple of reasons. One, because there are things we can do to support ourselves, so that if you are one of those people like me who gets a lot of impact from the time change, there are things you can do to support yourself so it's less miserable and a smoother transition. And two, because throughout our lives, we tend to have a pattern of pushing ourselves too hard. When our body is saying, I need rest, when your body is saying I'm tired. We I don't know. We have this mentality, push, push, push. Keep going. And I want to continually encourage you, whether it's because of daylight savings time or cancer treatments or busy seasons or anything at all, to be more tuned in with our bodies. It's so important, and it's something that I talk with my clients about all the time, all the time. I ask them, Are you listening? You know, they'll tell me I'm tired or my body felt drained, but I'm committed to this many workouts or this many obligations, and I had to do them. And I ask you to think about that. When you tell yourself that story, do we really have to do all those things? And especially when it comes to exercise, I always find this fascinating, and I'm totally guilty of it. I did it most of my life. I don't do it anymore, but I did do it most of my life. Is that your body is fatigued, and, you know, there's a difference. When you wake up and you're gonna go exercise, let's say you're a morning exerciser. You wake up you're gonna go exercise. You're like, I just want to stay here in bed and be cozy, versus my body's really tired, and in fact, there's something I'm super excited about that I'll be offering all of my clients that I do metabolic health coaching with, is those who have done the 3x four genetics nutrition assessment, or nutrition genomic report, 3x for us come out with an app that's called gene fit, and I'm currently working on an educational Video on that to send out to my clients, because it's so cool, and it actually imports your genetics, and you can record your workouts in it, and it tells you if you're working out too hard. And so I share the story with you, and now I'm going to eat my words. I'm sound hypocritical here, because it recently, in the last couple of weeks, the app was telling me that I was overloading my body, but my body felt fine to me, and so the app, it uses different metrics, and like I said, it imports your snips that your genetic variants that have an impact on your recovery, on your power, on your endurance, on several different things that are part of the whole system of exercise. And it was giving me this warning, and it was saying overload, but it was a mixed message, because my it's kind of color coded. And so the score I was getting from my workouts was green, which meant optimal, but I was getting this red indicator that said you're risking injury. And I thought, Well, how am I risking injury? I'm doing the same stuff. I'm walking, I'm doing yoga, I'm doing my Pilates, and I do spin classes twice a week. But for me, I did not feel fatigued, right? So I was looking at this app, and I was thinking, there's a glitch. And I actually even had a call with one of the woman who actually designs and kind of manages the whole gene Fit app, and we reviewed that my app and the findings, because it just didn't make sense to me, but anyway, long story short is that it was giving me this message that I was overdoing but I didn't think I was overdoing it, and then I woke up this one morning, and I swear my entire body felt inflamed. I did cancel my workout that day. I did relax that day. I did honor what I was feeling, but it. Interesting that the app kind of read my genes mixed with my heart rate and the the load that I was putting on my body, and gave me a red light before my body actually gave me the red light, right? So I thought that was really interesting. And of course, once I felt it, I did honor it, but now I will be more aware of the results the app is showing me, and maybe honor it before I actually am suffering the symptoms from overdoing it. So again, I just want to encourage you, like really listen to your body. We exercise to support our well being. Exercise is Medicine that supports our health in so many ways, but it can also break down a body. You know, when there are people that are out there running marathons and literally just destroying their bodies, is that supporting health and wellness? And it's not only marathon or so if you're a marathon runner, don't take offense to that. We can do that in so many ways, as I just shared with you in my own experience. So learning to listen to our body. When I'm working with my clients, we look at labs, we look at nutrition genome, we look at their train 10, and I try to communicate. This is the language of your body. This is your body telling you what's going on. If it's giving signs of malnourishment, of nutrient deficiencies, of fatigue, of inflammation, if it's giving you signs that there's something going on. This is the way that it talks to you. And now, I think it's wonderful that science is coming up with more and more ways that we can listen to the language of our body. But during this time of year, as we move into the fall and the winter, as the time changes and the days get shorter, will you be open to listening to what your body is telling you, and to honor that with changes in your lifestyle. So let's talk a little bit about why we go through this. What is actually happening when we feel so tired from the time change. So like I said, it's a one hour time change, and yet our body just seems to have this big impact from it, and an hour doesn't seem like that much, but even a small shift in time can throw off your body's internal clock, or what we refer to as the circadian rhythm, so we feel off balance. And the rhythm isn't just about when we sleep or wake, but it influences our circadian rhythm, influences our mood, our energy levels, our digestion, our immune function, and when we disrupt that circadian rhythm, like with a time change, our body needs some time to readjust. Now, most people feel the effects of the time change for a couple of days, but for some it can last up to a week or even longer before they feel normal again. I feel like it lasts for two to three weeks. For me, I was talking with a client the other day who says it takes her out for the entire month, and during that time, I think what we all notice is that we feel more tired than usual. You may find it harder to focus, and you might even feel a little down like depressed. In fact, it reminds me when I went to Iceland with my sister, my niece, my nephew, my granddaughter, my we all went to Iceland in for New Year's Eve, and while we were there, the sun didn't come up until after 1111, 30. I mean, it was dark outside, and I remember looking out the window. It is freezing cold out there. It's covered with snow, and we had this really cool Airbnb, and I would look out my window of this Airbnb, and these little kids are out there and their beanies and their parkas, and they've got their backpacks on, and their parents are walking them to school, and it's pitch dark out there, and I was just having such a hard time adjusting to that. I really did feel down. And I think, you know, I'm a sunshine person, and I have genetic snips, because our genes can also affect some of our hormone a lot of our hormone production. And I have some genetic snips that affect the way I produce melatonin. And so just genetically, it takes me a little longer to burn through that melatonin in the morning. And so that can lend to having groggier Morning times, especially when it's dark outside. So oftentimes we think about melatonin as a sleep hormone, but it's not exactly a sleep hormone. I would say think of melatonin more as a darkness hormone. It's released by the pineal gland in your brain when it gets dark outside, and it helps to start signaling your body that it's time to wind down. But melatonin doesn't work alone. So a lot of people will stay away from melatonin supplements, or think that taking a melatonin supplement is what makes them sleepy, and it's definitely integrated, but it doesn't work alone. Melatonin is part of a bigger cascade of changes that happen in your body in response to the absence of light. So along with melatonin production in our bodies, cortisol levels. Cortisol is the hormone that makes us alert in the morning, the hormone that we make when we're under stress, also but cortisol levels drop your body temper. Starts to decrease, and our body starts to produce calming neurotransmitters like GABA. A lot of people take a supplement called calm, which is GABA, basically, but we make GABA in our brain and in our body, so melatonin sets the stage for this. But it's the combination of lowering cortisol, calming increasing calming hormones, lowering body temperature and the production of melatonin that makes us sleepy, and it is triggered by darkness. So when we mess with our natural light exposure, as we do with daylight saving times, our whole sleep system needs to recalibrate, and this is where a good sleep routine becomes so valuable, so a strong, consistent sleep routine can help keep you grounded, even when you're dealing with a time change or any other kind of disruption. So I want to give you some tips to help to create an evening routine that supports restful, high quality sleep, and one of the most important things is consistency. So consistency is so key when it comes to honoring your circadian rhythm and your energy cycles, going to bed and waking up at the same time every day, even on the weekends, this regularity helps to strengthen your circadian rhythms. And you know, I like to get up around five, 530 every day. It when I do my 545 workouts, I like to get up at 430 and a lot of people hear that like, I don't want to get up that early, but I get up that early because, as I said, it takes me a while to wake up. And so I get up that early, not so I can get up, jump out of bed and start doing things. I get up that early so that I can wake up slowly, right? My morning routine always consists of at least an hour of wake up time. So on the weekends, I still wake up early, but I may not be out of bed early and running around doing things early, right? I may schedule my workouts a little later on the weekends, because I'm not starting with clients so early in the day, but I still try to wake up at the same time, because I know that that regularity of sleep and sleep patterns is really important. So getting morning sunlight can be super helpful. Exposing yourself to natural light with an hour of waking up tells your body to stop producing melatonin, and it boosts alertness. Now, as I just gave the example of Iceland, for instance, the sun didn't come up till 1130 so when I get up early, I didn't even have the opportunity to expose myself to light. And so it was really, it was really challenging for me. I got to tell you that, but sometimes we can use red light. And I know some people who live in areas of the country or areas of the world where you experience that, that the sun doesn't come up until much later, you can use UV lights in the house, or that kind of exposure. It's not natural light. It's not as wonderful, but it might help to wake you up and get you going in the morning. And just as exposing ourselves to light in the morning is important to get us awake and to slow that melatonin production and the rest of the hormone cascade that it's involved with reducing our evening light exposure is also very important. So Dimming the lights, limiting blue lights from screens, using blue light blocking glasses, and that way you don't interrupt your melatonin production as much with artificial light. And I will often deal with clients who you know, getting your circadian rhythm aligned, getting your sleep routine. I've talked about this so many times. It is absolutely vital for a healthy lifestyle, and science is seeing this. More and more we talk about it, more and more you hear more and more about people looking for sleep disruption, sleep apnea, sleep obstructions, things like that, to prevent them from going into deep sleep, because it's so important. And in fact, it definitely influences us as far as cancer survivors, because when we're not getting good sleep, or we have obstructions in the way that we breathe, and so we lower our oxygen levels when we sleep, that creates another chemical cascade in our body that can support the what's called angiogenesis, or the supply of blood to cancer cells. And we want to avoid that all costs. So good, consistent, solid sleep routines are so important. So thinking about and let me before I go on to that, I'll often talk with clients, and they tell me, Well, I scroll my phone until one o'clock in the morning, or I sleep with the TV on. Oh my goodness, please, sleep with the TV on like your brain is still engaged. You may think you're asleep, but your brain is listening to everything that is going on, and so you're not really getting good quality calming sleep. And if you've created a habit out of sleeping with this TV going and these conversations happening around you, then maybe try to slowly wean yourself out of that. Maybe by turning off the TV, but using some white noise that's on a timer on your phone or something, so it shuts off at a certain time after you've fallen asleep, but really retraining your brain so that you are in a quiet, dark, cool room. This is so important. So a pre bed routine, whether it is turning off blue light things at a certain period of time, getting an actual book light, so you're reading an actual book, taking a warm bath, doing some stretching, or even some breath work activities or meditation, whatever you find calming, to tell your brain it's time to unwind, it's time to call to calm down, right? And we can notice the natural circadian rhythm of the earth? Right? The earth is calming down in the darkness. Things are quieter, things are calmer, and we want to align our body with that, even if it's changing, and we still have this routine. And we think, Well, I want to stay up. How many times are we here for the first couple weeks of a time change? We'll look at the clock, and it'll be eight o'clock at night, and we'll say, but it's really nine o'clock, right? And so we have to get used to aligning ourselves with the cycles of light and dark, rather than getting stuck in our heads and looking at the clock and thinking, this is what time it actually is, because we're thinking, where's the light cycle right now? And how is that affecting you? So something else that you can do here is you can really support your health and your adjustment to the time change with food and good habits, some of them I just referred to for sleep habits, but there are foods that actually affect melatonin production. So let's talk about what we eat and more about what we do in the evening and what we put in our bodies, and how it makes a difference in how well melatonin can do its job at night. So let's first talk about some foods that increase melatonin production. There are foods that are naturally high in melatonin or contain nutrients that support melatonin production. Some of those nutrients are tryptophan, magnesium, vitamin b6, and here are some of the foods that contain these Tart Cherries are actually a natural source of melatonin, and so they can help boost melatonin levels in the body. Tomatoes, although they contain less melatonin, they do provide a small natural boost. So maybe think about some tomato sauces or Capri se salads or something like that that include tomatoes for your evening meal. Almonds and walnuts also contain melatonin and magnesium. Magnesium is a mineral that helps to calm the nervous system and support the creation in our bodies the synthesis of melatonin other foods like we hear about Turkey, right? And people say because after Thanksgiving, everybody gets so sleepy. Foods that are rich in tryptophan, like turkeys or bananas, and I don't want you eating bananas before bedtime, way too much sugar. Also, those contribute indirectly to melatonin production, because they provide the body with what it needs to make melatonin. So when you're thinking about an evening dessert, maybe you could consider some lovely, organic dark cherries that are cut in half, sprinkled with cinnamon and drizzled with a little organic cream, or even whipped that cream up and put it on the cherries. Lovely little bit of sweetness and help to boost some melatonin production. And cherries have a lot of antioxidant qualities as well. So let's talk about foods that decrease melatonin production. I'm sure this is not going to be a surprise to you. There are definitely foods and habits that work against melatonin production and make it harder for us to fall asleep, sugar and high carb foods, so eating sugary high carb foods at night causes our blood sugar and insulin levels to spike and then crash, and then this cycle can interfere with melatonin production and leave you feeling more awake, or even wake you up. Sometimes people will use alcohol, and even though alcohol may initially make you feel relaxed and you think I'm gonna have a little alcohol to wind down and go to bed, it actually disrupts melatonin production, and it prevents you from reaching deeper stages of sleep, like REM sleep, which is essential for restoration. I know for myself personally, and I have heard from so many clients about this, that when they cut alcohol out of their evening routine. Or if they notice that they have glasses of wine at night, I will hear 100% of the time I don't sleep as well if I have alcohol at night, and I know that is absolutely true for me as well. So if you do try to have an evening snack, try to keep it simple and balanced. Maybe add some nuts. Or if you're gonna do some cherries, maybe some slivered almonds in there too. So you can appease that craving you may have for something sweet, but you're actually doing yourself a favor. And if you do want to have a glass of wine with your dinner, or you have something like that now and then in the evenings, try to make sure that's three hours at least three hours a. We from when you go to bed? Okay? I know, as I just said this story, that if we notice that we don't get good sleep, if we consume something like alcohol before bed, let's listen to the body, because the body is saying this is not working for me, right? I think we have the tendency to want to live a certain way, want to feel a certain way, and then our body doesn't support that. And so then we blame our body for being broken or not working right, or something like that, rather than embracing and listening to our body and supporting what its needs are by noticing when I do this, when I eat that, when I don't do this, when I don't eat that, this is how my body is affected, right? And so then you can support your body by listening to it, by not pushing it, and by honoring what its needs are. So sometimes there's this pressure that we feel to keep pushing through this fatigue, like I talked about earlier, and we ignore these gentle cues that our body gives us that it's time to rest. So learning to listen to those cues is actually an act of self love. It's truly a gift to yourself. So as you think about how the time change affects you, let's not resist it. Can we entertain the idea of not fighting it, of looking at it and thinking about where your energy is out, how your energy flows during this time so that you don't feel like a whole month of November is just wasted, right? But you're supporting yourself, and you're thinking ahead of it, you're thinking ahead of time, and you're thinking, This isn't how I normally react. So these are some things I can do in my schedule, and things I can do with my nutrition to support that sleep cycle so you just feel better. Okay, so, asking yourself, Am I honoring my body's needs, or am I pushing past fatigue? Because I tell myself the story of all the to do's on the list, right this, I think that the fall and the winter, you know, we use the words cozy and sweater weather, and we want soups, and we want stews. And, you know, it's holiday season, we're connecting. We're we're getting together with family and friends. So let's connect to our body too. Can we think about cozy and nurturing when it comes to the body? Can we commit to earlier bedtimes if that's what your body is feeling, can you embrace this season by just shifting your mindset to this is a season of rest and recovery and grounding, grounding and nurturing and and so just as we talk about the daily circadian rhythm, this is also a seasonal circadian rhythm, and our body aligns with that. So all year long, things are changing. We think about the foods, the pumpkins, the gourds, the squash and all of these things that grow from the ground and have this thick, unctuous grounding energy in the foods. So let's embrace that grounding energy and honor in our bodies to support feeling as good as you can through the fall winter, but definitely getting through this time change in a way that's better than you ever have before, because sleep and self care aren't just about feeling good today. They are a foundation of health, of resilience and longevity, and by listening to your body needs, body's needs with good habits, by creating a lifestyle that serves you and honoring who you are and what you need, you can experience that escalation into that zone of optimal health and whatever it means for you today and for this season, right? So I hope these tips help you kind of navigate this upcoming time. Change, embrace restfulness. Embrace the word restorative. I love the word restorative, restoring yourself. All right, so take care. Don't forget to change your clocks. I don't even think we have to think about that anymore, because most people use their phones and those change automatically. But if you do have to remember, like the stove clock or something, don't forget changes this weekend and I will talk to you again next week, my friends, take good care.
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