Want to know one of the most popular SIBO treatment recommendations on this podcast? Stress management and sleep. Yes, low FODMAP foods and anti-microbials are only one part of the picture. In reality, our on-going gut health has everything to do with the simplest, most common sense lifestyle choices. And today’s episode is all about how to change your everyday habits to foster better rest and more of it.
Jennifer Hanway is a holistic nutritionist with practices in Boston and New York. More importantly, she’s a fellow gut warrior, who’s seen first-hand how sleep can impact daily stress levels and digestive health. If you’re looking for tangible ways to drastically improve your sleep, or just want to understand how our time under the covers effects intestinal motlity, today’s episode is for you!
A Quick Taste of What We’ll Cover:
- Why sleep is so important for gut healing and why a damaged gut might hurt our ability to sleep
- How hormones play a part in our circadian rhythm, preparing us for or precluding us from sleep
- How melatonin works as a sleep aid and as part of our hormonal system
- The best practices from morning to night for hacking our sleep cycles
- How temperature and light can affect our ability to sleep
- Tips if your main problem isn’t falling asleep but staying asleep
- What your chronotype means about your sleep profile
- What people dealing with SIBO should keep in mind about sleep
- The best gut-friendly supplements to promote better sleep
- How to navigate a partner’s sleep schedule if it’s much different than yours
Resources, mentions and notes:
- Jennifer Hanway’s website
- Jennifer’s 24 Hours to Less Stress, More Sleep e-book
- Jennifer’s sleep kit:
- Phoebe’s post on the Best Natural Sleep Aids
- How to find out your chronotype quiz
- Himalayan pink salt
- The best magnesium supplements for sleep
- Liquid vitamin D
- Join the SIBO Made Simple Facebook Community Page
- Subscribe to receive a free download of the episode transcript
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WHAT DO SLEEP AND GUT HEALTH HAVE IN COMMON?
PHEOBE: Tell everyone a little bit about your story. I have listened to past interviews with you, obviously, and I feel like you said something to the effect of that you’ve made every mistake in the book when it comes to gut health.
JENNIFER: Yeah, I mean, I am the poster child for poor gut health. I was born in the 80s. That was the revolution for convenience food and TV dinners, and actually, having been married to my husband, I realized that in the UK we actually got away with it way more lightly than you guys did here in the US. I was a terribly unhealthy vegetarian from the age of 12 to the age of about 21, 22. I was on every antibiotic you could possibly imagine. I was on the contraceptive pill. I actually lived in Mexico for a while and got typhoid. Everything that you could possibly put in a box for gut health, I had that tick in a box.
I remember suffering with poor digestion and bloating and gas and everything as a child, and actually, the first time I got taken into hospital, I was 6 years old. I remember I’d been out for the day, and I had a McDonald’s. Later that evening, I got rushed into a hospital with a suspected appendicitis, and they couldn’t find anything wrong with me. It was just all of that through my childhood and my teens and my early 20s to the point where, in my 30s, I got to the point where my digestion was so bad. My system just stopped working. I got put on a morphine drip in hospital, and that was the point where I said enough is enough. Conventional medicine is not helping me.
I tried all of the testing. Nothing had come back conclusive. No one had ever mentioned anything about diet to me. Then as the universe does this wonderful thing of your two worlds colliding, it was at this point that I started working with my mentor who was a BioSignature Modulation practitioner. That is, of course, a certification that doesn’t exist anymore, but basically, it means that we look at the body a little bit on the side of stress and sleep and gut health and hormonal health and how your hormones relate to what’s going on in your blood, and all of that wonderful stuff, which is what put me on this path. As a mentee to her, she was my practitioner, and I think the two things that we put in were – I think it wasn’t even a probiotic at the time. It was take out gluten, and take some L-glutamine.
I was like I am willing to try anything at this point. The differences that that made just – it turned my life around, and it was just these – it was these two super simple things. It made me realize how great I could feel, and I was like I want to be able to do this for other people.
PHOEBE: What do you think your root causes were? Did you ever come across or ever get tested for celiac or anything like that?
JENNIFER: I come back as a – what they say is a false positive celiac. I get celiac type reactions, but I’m not a full-blown celiac. Really, it’s I’ve had the SIBO testing. Thankfully, I’m not SIBO. Put that out there. The doctor’s diagnosis was IBS, which, as we know, is really a blanket term for we don’t know what’s wrong with you. I really think it is a combination of poor diet and medication and stress and possibly genetics and epigenetics and, as I say, all of those ticks in the boxes of processed food, poor diet, stress, medication, a ton of antibiotics as a kid. I used to have really back ear and throat infections, so every other month, I was on antibiotics. I don’t think it was one of those things. I think it was a combination of all of those things.
PHOEBE: Just like macro damaged gut.
JENNIFER: Mm-hmm, I’m like tick, tick, tick all of the boxes.
PHOEBE: Oh, my goodness. It’s so funny about the appendicitis because you just helped me remember one of my own health memories and connect a dot that I haven’t thought about in years. There was a time I was at a dude ranch with my family in the middle of nowhere Arizona. I woke up in the night. My abdomen hurt so much, stabbing pain. I was hysterically crying. My parents had to go wake up the head of the ranch, and they called an ambulance.
JENNIFER: Oh, my goodness.
PHOEBE: It turned out it was gas.
JENNIFER: Yeah, that pain is like nothing else.
PHOEBE: Yeah, I’m like, oh, my gosh, I guess I was having acute issues even back then to the point where ambulances were being called. Oh, my God, I was so embarrassed.
JENNIFER: At least they didn’t throw you on the back of a cowboy, and you rode off on a horse.
PHOEBE: Yes.
JENNIFER: That would be an awesome story.
PHOEBE: I know. I mean, I wish that it had happened. I didn’t really need to be in a hospital, so that would’ve just been a fun ride. It might’ve taken my mind off of it. Okay, so today is a conversation. We are talking about the gut and sleep and why sleep is so important for gut healing but then also why a damaged gut might hurt our ability to sleep. Just give us the 411 on that.
JENNIFER: Yeah, so I started looking at the sleep research when I was really working with athletes and bodybuilders, and it was how to get the best rest and recovery for these athletes. I looked at it, and I was like this should be knowledge that everybody needs. Everybody needs to improve their sleep. Again, at the time, I was doing crazy early mornings and crazy late nights, so I wasn’t managing to get a lot of sleep. The sleep that I needed – it was a time when I was working in London and crazy schedule, doing the long distance relationship. It was a time when, if I only had six hours of sleep that night, that sleep needed to be a really great quality.
I started to look at the research and started to understand not just the link of why we need great sleep but how we get that great sleep. I think a lot of the times we think about getting great sleep is, oh, it’s what we do before we go to bed. We know the basics. We know we shouldn’t be scrolling on Instagram and Snapchat at 10 o’clock at night. We know we probably shouldn’t be watching Game of Thrones just before we go to bed, guilty.
PHOEBE: Guilty.
JENNIFER: Right, how can you not? We kind of know that screens are not a great idea. We know we should be going to bed earlier, but it’s really flipping the script on that and going, actually, it’s not what we do in those two hours or even that hour before we go to bed. What do we do from the minute that we wake up actually has such a knock-on effect on our stress levels during the day, and that in turn affects our sleep at night. I’ll scooch back a little bit, and we’ll tie it in with gut health. Really, our sleep is regulated by our circadian rhythm.
HOW THE CIRCADIAN RHYTHM AFFECTS DIGESTION
JENNIFER: I promise you, circadian rhythms are going to be the new celery juice, and you heard it here first. One of the most recent Nobel Prizes for science and health has gone to work in circadian rhythms, and what we used to think was that the body had one circadian rhythm. There’s 24-hour circadian rhythm. What the research has actually shown is that it’s not just our body that has a circadian rhythm, and it’s not just our organs that have a circadian rhythm. Every cell in the body has its own circadian rhythm. I’ll tell you how that was found out, and it’s quite gross but quite interesting.
PHOEBE: Every organ does have its own circadian rhythm in addition.
JENNIFER: Yes, every organ does, but then even on an even more micro level, every cell in the body has its own circadian rhythm.
PHOEBE: So interesting. This is something just for all of you out there that we discuss briefly in Episode 5, which is all about intermittent fasting. Dr. Amy Shah discussed how the idea behind it really has to do with the circadian rhythm of various organs in our digestive system and not actually meaning skip breakfast, basically. It really has a little bit more to do with our natural rhythms and eating according to that, but that was just a digression. Go back to how the gut plays into all of this.
JENNIFER: Exactly as you said, that every single organ has its own circadian rhythm, and we can think of it like multitasking. We know these days that multitasking doesn’t work, so if our bodies were trying to rest and repair and detoxify all at the same time, it wouldn’t happen. It’s like when we’re – let’s say we’re driving, and we’re trying to drive and eat our breakfast and drink our smoothie and drink our coffee and put our makeup on and check our Instagram and check Google maps all at the same time. We can’t do it. It’s a mess. That’s the reason why our bodies have different functions at different time, so they can prioritize that healing and that detoxification.
We know that when we’re sleeping, that’s our prime time for repair and detoxification. Whilst we’re sleeping should not be a time for digestion, so we want to have digestion finished way before we go to sleep. We don’t want our bodies to be digesting. There’s a million reasons why it’s very, very hard for us to digest whilst we’re asleep, and those two systems battle each other. We can’t digest while we’re sleeping, and we also can’t sleep while we’re digesting. Also, we want all of those nutrients from our food to be well into our bloodstream to be able to do the repair and the detoxification processes whilst we’re asleep.
PHOEBE: Very interesting. What happens when someone eats dinner at 9 o’clock and then goes straight to bed? Maybe in parenthesis, (what happens if someone with SIBO does that)?
JENNIFER: Don’t know who we could be talking about in this instance. What happens is that you’re going to have a few things. Our digestion actually slows down really between about 10 and 2 a.m. If you’re going to bed at 9, you’re still going to be in that process of digesting by 10 o’clock. What’s happening is that you’re doing that mechanical digestion, and you’re doing the chemical digestion. Then there’s also the electrical and the nervous system digestion as well, and that’s that motor complex. That’s what we have to be really, really careful with with SIBO.
What we’re thinking about is when food gets digested through the GI tract. Obviously, it’s going through that small intestine first. Now, we need to get that cleared out as quickly as we can so it doesn’t sit in the small intestine, and then encourage that bacteria to grow. For everybody, I would say we really want to stop eating at least two hours before we go to bed, but with SIBO, it’s especially important because we want that food to clear out of the small intestine so it doesn’t promote that growth of bacteria.
PHOEBE: That’s great. Then what are the downstream consequences of that? Obviously, eating too close to bedtime can cause SIBO, but then how can perhaps the impaired sleep compound everything?
JENNIFER: Our body has this wonderful system of feedback loops, and in this case, it’s more of a – we want to think of it more as a negative system of feedback loops. We have this wonderful symbiosis of, if our sleep is off, our gut health is going to be off and vice versa. If we have poor sleep, we’re going to be producing too many inflammatory compounds, which is then going to affect our gut health, which then in turn is going to loop back and affect our sleep. We have to think that these two things play hand in hand.
PHOEBE: Are the inflammatory compounds because our livers set – our liver’s work session is also in the middle of the night, so if that’s not working properly, then we’re sending things back out into circulation?
JENNIFER: Yeah, it’s one of the reasons, but we have to think of these inflammatory signals throughout the whole of the GI system. They’re coming from the GI tract, from the large intestine through the small intestine. Obviously, we want our liver to work. Our liver’s prime time is around that 1 o’clock and night. Since our liver’s having to work extra hard, that’s going to cause inflammation. All of these things are causing the inflammatory response in the body, which in turn then stops us from sleeping.
PHOEBE: Everything’s a viscous cycle. That’s what I’ve learned from my SIBO journey.
JENNIFER: It is.
PHOEBE: It’s just all one big feedback loop.
JENNIFER: I think that can really – if any of us have had any kind of gut health issues, I think that can be really – or any kind of health issues, that can be really challenging. I also think that we have to flip it and look at it as something that can empower us, and think that, well, if I improve one thing, it’s going to improve the rest of it. That’s how I look at holistic health. If I improve my gut health, it’s going to improve my sleep. If I improve my sleep, it’s going to improve my energy levels. If I improve my energy levels, I can work out more. If I can work out more, I can recover from stress better. On a positive day, I try and look at it from the positive side.
PHOEBE: Where do you start? I know that you think of health in terms of these pillars, which is one of the reasons why I like you so much and your philosophy. That’s essentially what I was doing with my year of health is really trying to focus in on what the pillars were, and obviously, I had a whole month dedicated to sleep. I’m curious and I guess it was one of my ongoing issues when I was designing my curriculum of where do you start? Is sleep your number one pillar?
JENNIFER: Sleep is my number one pillar, and I think that, if you can get sleep down, it really helps you look at those other pillars such as a great diet and exercise. If we’re not sleeping well, we’re not going to have the energy to work out. If we’re not sleeping well, our hunger hormones are going to be all over the place, and we cannot stick to a healthy diet. For me, if a client comes in to see me and they really are starting from scratch, number one is getting that sleep dialed in because it’s going to empower them to be able to do everything else.
VITAMIN D, MELATONIN & FIXING YOUR HORMONE IMBALANCES TO FIX YOUR SLEEP
PHOEBE: Absolutely, so I want to get into some of your really practical tips on this in a second, but you just brought up hormones. Before I did all my sleep research when I was a real layman layman, I didn’t really realize how much hormones play into the entire circadian rhythm and how all the fluctuations throughout the day prime us for sleep or preclude us from sleep. Can you just explain that pattern to people?
JENNIFER: You are speaking my language. I think one of the biggest things about hormones is people don’t actually realize what hormones are. We think of hormones.
PHOEBE: Yes, that too.
JENNIFER: We think of hormones. Especially as women, we think of estrogen and testosterone. We don’t think of hormones as in cortisol, our stress hormone, or insulin, our hormone that regulates blood sugar, or even melatonin, which is the hormone that regulates our circadian rhythm.
PHOEBE: Vitamin D.
JENNIFER: Vitamin D.
PHOEBE: We think of that as a vitamin, but really, it’s kind of a hormone.
JENNIFER: It is a hormone.
PHOEBE: It is a hormone.
JENNIFER: Our neurotransmitters that work as regulators for mood in the body, those are hormones too. I think, when we think of the endocrine system, we tend to just think in terms of our reproductive system, but actually, the endocrine system is – it really governs everything that we’re doing. Then when we talk about that governor, what we really want to think about is our circadian rhythm. Our circadian rhythm is – you can think of it as the conductor of your orchestra. Your circadian rhythm will design everything for you from when you’re energized, to when you wake up, to when you want to sleep, to when you want to eat, to when you want to socialize, to when you want to have sex, everything. That’s what our circadian rhythm governs when we secrete hormones. Now, one of the main regulators of that is melatonin. One of the issues of just flipping back to SIBO, the majority of our melatonin production happens in the small intestine.
PHOEBE: Oh, man.
JENNIFER: You’re like hell yes, so when we’re not producing enough melatonin, that’s really going to affect our sleep-wake cycle. That’s something that you really have to think about with SIBO, and it can be something where melatonin supplementation can come in useful. We can talk about that a little bit as we go along. We talk about the circadian rhythm, and it really drives everything that we do throughout the day, but just like any kind of rhythm, we have to think about – I almost think of it as a watch, an old fashion watch that you have to wind up. By winding your circadian rhythm, what you’re doing is regulating it by regulators of what we call zeitgebers or zeitgebers. These are things like light, heat, food, temperature, mental stimulation, social interaction, exercise, and all of these things help us keep our circadian rhythm on track.
PHOEBE: Yes, I thought it was one of the most interesting aspects of my sleep research, the temperature and the light. Actually, since it ties into the melatonin-Vitamin D relationship, can you explain how light affects our sleep routines, sorry, our sleep cycles?
JENNIFER: It’s the light and temperature are the main regulators of our circadian rhythm, which makes a lot of sense because we didn’t used to have iPhones to help us wake up in the morning. When we’re exposed to light, what that does is that suppresses our melatonin production, which then sets off this wonderful cascade of hormones that tells our body, okay, it’s time to upregulate body temperature. It’s time to upregulate digestion. It’s time to upregulate our metabolism. Basically, it’s time to wake up and get up and go. Then the other way is that when we stop getting this light stimulation. That increases our melatonin production, which makes us feel sleepy and puts us into that cascade of going to sleep. If we’re not getting that light, we’re not regulating that melatonin production.
PHOEBE: How much is the light – I know, obviously, there’s a whole conversation about blue light giving our brain false signals. How much of it is the Vitamin D we’re getting from the light, and how much of it is the blue light itself? I assume we’re not getting Vitamin D deposits from our iPhones.
JENNIFER: We’re not getting Vitamin D deposits from our iPhones, and actually, we’re not getting that much Vitamin D from sunlight these days, especially not – we’re on the East Coast, most of my clients from the East Coast or London. The Vitamin D that they’re getting from the sunlight isn’t really out there. What it really is is that we don’t just want to think about banishing blue light or limiting blue light in the evening. We want to be thinking about that exposure to daylight during the day. That, actually, in my opinion, has more of an effect on our sleep-wake cycle than limiting the light. Actually getting outside and getting out into daylight is probably more important than banishing that blue light in the evenings.
We’ve seen people go to – we know this in the wellness world. If something is good, then more must be better. I’m not just going to have one green juice a day. I’m going to have a bucket of green juice a day. Now what we’re seeing with people stopping the blue light coming in is that they’re wearing these blue blocking glasses throughout the day.
PHOEBE: Because they look cool?
JENNIFER: They look cool, and they like #biohacking. What they want to do, what we really need to do is get as much blue light during the day as we can. Then stop it coming in from sunset. We need that blue light exposure to tell our bodies it’s daytime. We have to be energized. We have to think. We have to move. We have to eat. Then only after sunset do we need to think about putting our blue light blockers on because that’s the time that we should be winding down.
PHOEBE: Oh, my gosh, I didn’t know that people were just wearing them around, just like less blue light, less blue light. That’s so funny. I feel like the flipside of that is people supplementing with Vitamin D, and I know people who will just take it at any which time of the day. One of the things that I always tell people because I do actually weirdly get asked about this a lot is to take it in the morning to facilitate the wakeup process. A lot of people who will just – maybe they take their supplements at night and not first thing in the morning, or take them several times a day. If you’re taking Vitamin D right before bed, that’s going to affect your sleep.
JENNIFER: Right, and number one, we don’t want to be – unless it’s a specific sleep supplement, we don’t want to be taking our supplements before bed because they’re not going to digest and absorb. The other thing about Vitamin D is we can be taking all of this Vitamin D. Number one, are we absorbing it? We know with most people with gut health issues malabsorption is a huge part of that. My clients come to see me, and they’ve got gut health issues and malabsorption. I’m not going to throw a million and one horse pill size supplements at them. At best, they’re not going to just not absorb them, and at worse, it’s going to affect their digestive system. I think number one is making sure you are actually – you’re optimizing your gut health. You are actually digesting things.
Number two is maybe getting your Vitamin D tested and finding out actually where your levels are. Although, as I say, most people from the East Coast or – we know that they’re going to be in the tank. Number two is maybe thinking about can I do my Vitamin D as a liquid supplement rather than as a capsule?
PHOEBE: Okay, so we’re starting in the morning. We’re getting outside. We’re getting some sunlight. I know you have lots of tips for what to do throughout the day. Where do we go from there?
JENNIFER: Okay, so let’s go back even further to that, and let’s talk about how we actually wake up. Most of us probably wake up with our alarms on our phones, okay? That’s a number one no-no, so we really want to prioritize how we’re waking up. When we wake up, we wake up because we naturally have a spike in a hormone called cortisol, which is – it gets a bad rap because it’s a hormone that we produce when we’re stressed out, but we also need cortisol to live. We need it for energy. What we want to do is we want to naturally wake up rather than being jerked out of a deep sleep by some awful screeching noise. Then the first thing that we do is check our emails or our Instagram because our phone is there, and that is now becoming human nature. I really am a huge advocate for daylight alarm clock, which let’s say you have to get up at 7 a.m. You set the alarm for 7, and around 6:30, it starts to emit this bright light, which stimulates your pineal gland, which tells it to suppress melatonin, so you don’t feel sleepy. The suppression of melatonin upregulates the other hormones, which makes you wake up, and you have this wonderful feeling when you wake up of, oh, I’m awake rather than, shit, I’m awake.
Flipping back, so we’ve woken up with our daylight alarm clock. We’re going to get up, and we’re going to expose ourselves to as much natural light as possible. I know, being on the East Coast in the winter, sometimes that’s a little bit challenging, so we can flip on all of our lights as well. If you’re someone who’s low energy in the morning, the last thing you want to do is crawl out of bed with one eye closed and keep the lights down. You want to wake up, and you want to open all of the curtains. You never want to hit snooze. That’s just going to mess up sleep cycle. If you set an alarm, you set the alarm. You wake up. You turn the lights on. You open the curtains, and you expose yourself to as much light as possible.
It’s going to suppress melatonin. It’s going to start to wake you up, and you’re going to feel ready for your day. Then what’s going to happen 12 to 14 to 16 hours afterwards, it already sets off the circadian rhythm telling you when you’re going to start getting sleepy.
PHOEBE: Yeah, I think that’s something that becomes a really tricky part of the cycle of insomnia.
JENNIFER: Exactly, and then there’s that whole part of anxiety around sleep is that let’s say you go to sleep. You’ve had a bad night of sleep before, or you are going through a bout of insomnia, or you have to get up early the next day. You lie in bed, and you start to get stressed out, and you start to count the hours. In that case, what you really want to do is not associate your bedroom with not being able to get to sleep. You try to get to sleep. It’s not happening. Maybe after 20, 30 minutes, get out of bed. Go to a dimly lit room, read, meditate, hang out with your animals. Don’t put the internet back on again, and then go back to bed. You don’t want to associate your bed and your bedroom with the place that you cannot get to sleep.
PHOEBE: Yes, no, that’s a very important point. Okay, so where are we, mid-morning?
JENNIFER: We just got out of bed.
PHOEBE: We still just got out, okay.
JENNIFER: We still just got out of bed. It’s a long morning. We’ve got out of bed. We’ve exposed ourselves to daylight. Let’s say that we’re maybe going to have some coffee. I’m okay with coffee for about 95% of my clients. If you’re having real adrenal issues or real thyroid issues, that’s when we really want to say, okay, let’s give the coffee a break, but for most people, one or two cups of low-acid organic coffee if it doesn’t give you too much stomach upset, and especially if you’re going low acid, it’s not going to be the end of the world.
CORTISOL, ADRENAL FATIGUE AND SLEEP ISSUES
PHOEBE: Just to explain the cortisol again, when does it hit the peak again?
JENNIFER: Everyone’s going to have a slight outline, and then we can also talk about something really fun, which is chronotypes as well. Going back to our cortisol, cortisol should raise naturally in the morning. It’s around its peak about 12 o’clock. You will have a natural dip about 3 o’clock. That mid-afternoon slump is normal, but it shouldn’t lay you out. Then around 6 o’clock in the evening, then it will start to taper off to around about 9 o’clock in the evening when it really starts to come down for sleep.
PHOEBE: People with “adrenal fatigue” have just basically used up too much of their cortisol resources. Their graph will look just like flatlined throughout the day, right?
JENNIFER: Yeah, so there’s a lot of – so adrenal fatigue is this blanket term that we use for something that I prefer to call HPA axis dysfunction, which basically is telling us that we are either – usually before we get to that flatline, we see dysregulated cortisol, so we’ll see cortisol spikes and dips at times during the day where it shouldn’t be. Let’s say, for example, I know when I struggle with my thyroid issues, I would get this real surge of energy about 1 o’clock at lunchtime and then a real big dip in the afternoon. Then I would try to go to sleep about 9, 10 o’clock, and I’d have this huge surge of energy. We call it a cortisol curve. That’s my cortisol curve being dysregulated, so my body is pumping out cortisol at the wrong times. Before we get to that flatline, we’ll find that we pump out too much cortisol because it’s our stress response. We’ll pump out cortisol at too – after, not too much.
Then we get to the point which makes people consider as adrenal fatigue or what we also know as burnout where we’re not producing – and it’s usually a combination of the two. We’re not producing any cortisol, or the cortisol receptors on our cells have been desensitized. This is the same thing that happens with insulin resistance is that we’ve just been pumping out cortisol all of the time, but the receptors in the cell just say hang on. There’s always cortisol around. I’m not going to recognize this. That’s where you start to see people really flatline and really have no energy because cortisol is also our energy hormone as well as our stress hormone.
PHOEBE: Right, okay, cool, I’m so glad you clarified that. Okay, so where are we in the morning again?
JENNIFER: In the morning, if we have great thyroid and adrenal health, we’re going to have a cup of coffee. Yes, coffee, caffeine raises cortisol, but in the morning, that’s okay. What I would say is that, if you are someone like me who’s a real morning person, you don’t need your coffee first thing in the morning. Leave it for a few hours so when you might need that little bit of an energy boost. The other thing that we can do in the morning to really support our adrenals is Himalayan salt and lime in some warm water.
PHOEBE: Yes, love it.
JENNIFER: It’s taking that lemon and warm water that we’ve all been doing for years, adding in the lime, which is slightly more alkalizing, and then adding in some Himalayan salt, which is really, really supportive for our adrenals. I think we all worry about our vitamin status. What we really should be worried about is our mineral status. If we’re eating a generally healthy diet with some fruit and vegetables, some great protein sources, we’re not going to be super low on some of our vitamins. However, most of my clients that I see are super low in really, really important minerals, and that’s because the minerals have been farmed out of our diet. It’s because we’re not eating mineral rich foods, so we’re not eating those kind of foods that we would consider gross like liver and, I don’t know, oysters and mussels, the foods that are really, really mineral rich. Then, also, when we’re super stressed out, our stress hormones steal those minerals from our body to make them. For example, cortisol, when we make cortisol, it will steal magnesium from other bodily processes to make cortisol, so we’re really, really mineral deficient.
PHOEBE: Interesting, I thought it had more to do with the fact that there’s a dance with cortisol and our kidneys. I feel like it’s the old adage, the nervous person who has to pee all the time, and in the process of flushing the pee, we’re flushing a lot of minerals as well.
JENNIFER: Exactly, one, it’s getting the minerals to stay in our body, and sometimes that has to do with an electrolyte balance. Getting in this Himalayan salt could really help balance out our electrolytes, which obviously has to do with our minerals as well, and it can help support our adrenals. We’re mineral deprived, and also, most of us don’t put salt on our food these days because we’ve been told that white table salt is bad. We’re not getting sodium and potassium, which help that electrolyte balance, which actually help the minerals stay in our body.
PHOEBE: How does that affect sleep?
JENNIFER: What’s that going to do is that’s going to help support your adrenals, so you’re not going to be pumping out too much cortisol when you don’t need to. We know that if we have that dysregulated cortisol, that’s going to affect our sleep patterns.
PHOEBE: Okay, awesome.
JENNIFER: Yeah, either the pink salt or the gray salt, they’re going to be the ones that are most rich in minerals. We’ve had that. We may have had a little bit of coffee. We’re going to have our breakfast. Breakfast, really, it’s dependent on – for me, if my clients are insulin sensitive, then I say go ahead and have some carbs at breakfast because that’s when most people are insulin sensitive. If they’re dealing with any kind of blood sugar swings or insulin resistance, that’s where I say we have our smoothie. We have our eggs. We have whatever we’re having, that protein-based breakfast.
WHAT IS THE BEST TIME TO EXERCISE FOR SLEEP?
JENNIFER: In an ideal world, we’re going to do our cardio workouts in the morning because cardio releases more cortisol than strength training. Now, I say that with, excuse the pun, a pinch of salt. A lot of people, you will say, ideally, you do your cardio in the morning and your strength training in the evening. They’ll take that as, oh, if I can only do my training in the morning, then I’ll only do it in the morning, and I shouldn’t train if I can’t train in the evening. Number one is move your body, and we know that for so many reasons, for gut health and motility, for stress levels. Number two is, if you can choose, ideally you’re doing your cardio, your running, your boxing, your spinning, your barres, whatever that is in the morning, and you’re doing your strength training in the evening, in an ideal world.
PHOEBE: I mean, I always wonder this. Most yoga, I suspect it’ll fall into the evening, but CorePower yoga, does that go in the morning?
JENNIFER: Exactly, it’s that type of yoga. If you’re doing your Ashtanga, or your CorePower yoga, or your super sweaty Bikram yoga, anything that’s really going to get your heartrate up, that’s going to come in the morning. Anything that’s your Hatha, your more relaxing, your more balanced yoga, that’s perfect for the evenings. I always want to just put that with a caveat of it’s really important to move your body, so do the best that you can.
PHOEBE: Great caveat.
JENNIFER: It’s with all of these things. It’s like I’m going to give you the ideal, and if you can meet me somewhere 70 to 80% of that, we’re all good.
PHOEBE: Awesome, okay, so are we at lunchtime yet?
JENNIFER: We’re at lunchtime. We are at lunchtime, so for most people, if you have a desk job, this is the time that we don’t do that side desk lunch. That is the time that we have to get up, and we have to move around. We have to get outside, and we have to make sure that we’re eating something that’s nourishing to our body. We have to get away from that computer screen. We have to get out. We have to get moving. We have to remind our body that it’s still time to be awake.
If you’re working in an office with no access to fresh air, or to daylight, or to social interaction, your body’s going to start to feel sleepy because it thinks it has no reason to stay awake. This is the time that really, really, really get away from your desk and go out. Walk around for 20 minutes. You might not be getting your Vitamin D, but you’re exposing yourself to daylight, which tells your body, okay I’ve still got a few more hours to keep going.
PHOEBE: Yes, love that. Okay, so progressing into the evening.
STRESS MANAGEMENT AS A NATURAL SLEEP AID
JENNIFER: Yeah, so I think really looking at – the other thing that we really want to be thinking about during the day is managing and mitigating our cortisol response. As we know, when we’re faced with a stressful event, we produce cortisol, and cortisol is catabolic to the body. When we say something is catabolic, it means breaking down, so in terms of gut health, we so often see stress and gut health in the same person because stress breaks down our tissues, which increases our intestinal permeability, which then increases leaky gut, which then increases inflammation, etc., etc., etc. What we want to be thinking about is how do we manage that stress throughout the day rather than waiting ‘til 8 o’clock when we get home, and we sit in front of the couch with a glass of wine? By that time, it’s too – and there’s nothing wrong with that. That time, it’s too late to lower your cortisol levels before we go to bed, so we have to be thinking about managing that cortisol throughout the day.
What I ask my clients to do is to come up with a toolbox of things that help them de-stress. That could be anything from a simple breathing exercise to help get us into rest and digest mode rather than in fight or flight. It could be listening to their favorite piece of music. It could be eating two squares of dark chocolate, which is my personal favorite.
PHOEBE: Me too. (and you can take out the laughing)
JENNIFER: Right, I say two [0:41:13]. It could be just lying – it could be lying with your legs up against a wall. It could be anything that just takes you out of fight and flight and puts you into rest or digest, so you’re calming down your central nervous system. You’re activating your parasympathetic nervous system, and we need to think about doing this at certain points during the day rather than just waiting and letting it all build up until we get home. If we’re thinking about managing our cortisol levels at 8 o’clock at night, it’s too late. Our hormonal balance is all off. Really, it’s just finding those little simple things during the day that can help us manage our stress.
PHOEBE: I love that. I started a meditation practice. Vedic meditation, they say, ideally, you do 20 minutes in the morning and then 20 minutes around 4 p.m. For me, it’s like I have trouble fitting everything in the morning. I have trouble if I want to work out. It’s like an either or for me. You’ve actually just freed me to think about, well, maybe the afternoon session is the more important session for me, and it’s usually the one that I skip.
JENNIFER: Right, probably, in the morning, you’re still energized. The day hasn’t got a –the day hasn’t got to you. You’re not too stressed out, but also, it’s just knowing that even any breath where your exhale is longer than your inhale is going to calm down your central nervous system. I work with a lot of corporate clients, and they’re running in between meetings. They don’t have that time to sit and meditate for 20 minutes, but they do have time to take a deep breath before they go into that meeting. They do have time just to take a second and maybe do a box breathing exercise, or run to the restroom and just take a few breaths. Just knowing that it seems so simple but it really can help balance those cortisol levels and help them dampen down.
PHOEBE: Yes, I love box breathing. For those who don’t know, you’re basically just doing a count. Let’s say it’s four, four breaths in. Hold it for four, four breaths out. Hold it for four, right?
JENNIFER: Yeah, so it’s inhale for four. Hold for four. Exhale for four. Hold for four. It takes 16 seconds, and if we can’t find 16 seconds in our day, we’re in trouble. No one knows you’re doing it. You don’t have to be sat cross-legged at your desk holding a mudra and Oming. You can just breathe deeply, and I think that’s really important for people to understand is that we can make this look like everyday life.
PHOEBE: Yes, so I feel like we’re now in the evening, and this is where a lot of people make their mistakes. It’s also where there’s room to hack our cycles and prepare ourselves for sleep. What can we do to set the stage?
JENNIFER: You want to think about your evening routine as it’s really the opposite from your morning routine, and what I ask a lot of my clients to do is to find a transition sequence between work and home. We all know that we may leave the office. We may leave work. We know that we’re probably going to be working on a project or at least checking our emails, or we’re going to have some interaction with work during the evening. Whilst we try our hardest not to, real life is real life, and I always want to meet people where they’re at. What I suggest to them is to – even if they know that they’re going to be working from home, is to create a transition sequence. This could be something like listening to your favorite podcast on the way home. It could be changing your clothes the minute you get in. It could be taking your dog for a walk. It could be having your favorite cup of herbal tea.
Whatever it is that signifies to the body that just tells you, okay, now we’re in a safe space. Now we can calm down. Now we don’t’ have to be in that fight of flight mode. Then we’re just in a much better space to be able to relax in the evening. Then if we have to check an email or we have to work a little bit on a project, we don’t feel that we’re fully in work mode. It really doesn’t matter what that transition sequence is. It’s more doing it every day, so it tells your body, okay, it’s time to relax now. I don’t have to be so stressed out. That’s how I would start my evening.
If we’re going to work out in the evening, strength training or yoga is a great thing to do in the evening. The absolute worst thing that you can do in the evening is go to your 8:30 p.m. SoulCycle class, and have your instructor shouting at you, and the lights are flashing. You’ve got your music on, and your body is like, all right, let’s go. I’ll take a SoulCycle class maybe once every few months when I’m traveling. I really have to be in the mood. I put my earplugs in because I’m an old lady. If you think of everything that you shouldn’t do at 8:30 at night, you shouldn’t be going to a SoulCycle class.
PHOEBE: I want to talk about travel, actually, in a second, but just to close the loop on the nighttime stuff– so light is, obviously, you want to wear your blue light glasses. You want to avoid really close face-to-face contact with devices like an iPhone.
JENNIFER: Yeah, you can hack those things as well. Everything that you do in the morning, you do the opposite at night, so when the sun starts to set, that’s when you turn off your big electric lights. That’s when you put your lamps or your candles on. You put your blue blockers on. You make sure that you have your phone set to night mode, and that’s a really easy thing to do. I’m someone who’s super stimulated by blue light. When I put my phone on to – I usually do it about 6 o’clock at night. It takes out any blue light in the device, so the device has a really warm color. You can do the same things to your laptop. There’s a program called f.lux or flux, which means that we do have to work on our devices in the evenings. It just makes it a little less stressful for us so blue blockers, dimming that light, and then really thinking about what and when we’re eating in the evenings, which is super important for everyone. It’s super important for people with the issues of gut health but even more important for those with SIBO.
WHAT IS THE IDEAL TEMPERATURE FOR SLEEP?
PHOEBE: Yes, absolutely, I’ll just add a temperature thing. It’s been really helpful for me is I’ve never been a nighttime showerer because I don’t like to go to sleep with wet hair, but I am now a nighttime bather. It really helps my relationship to sleep. I’m lucky to live in a state where there’s not a water shortage yet but even just running that bath and hopping in there for ten minutes. To me, there’s always time for a bath. Even just that ten minutes of relaxation is just such a game changer and then adding some Epsom salts in there. I love it.
(you can cut out her laughing if it’s weird)
JENNIFER: What you’re doing with that is, yes, you’re giving yourself time to relax, which is wonderful, but you’re actually doing what your circadian rhythm naturally does. This taking a hot bath and letting yourself cool naturally actually mimics what happens with our temperature regulating with our circadian rhythm. In an ideal world, what happens is just before we go to sleep our body temperature rises, and then it drops. By taking a hot bath, you’re telling your circadian rhythm, okay, my temperature’s going up, and now it’s dropping. You’re doing that exactly right, and then leading on from that, we should be sleeping at temperature around about 65 degrees at night, which is a lot cooler than most people sleep.
PHOEBE: Yes, that’s cold.
JENNIFER: A little tip for that is I have a husband who I swear is part werewolf, and even in the dead of winter when there’s six foot of snow on ground here in Boston, he’ll sleep with no covers. I have learned to sleep in the cold, and actually, it’s the most restorative – we sleep in the cold because it’s very restorative for our bodies to sleep in that cold temperature. It can take a little getting used to. What I’d say is make sure you’re wearing socks. The best way for us actually to sleep is to sleep naked with a pair of socks on. It isn’t the cutest, but we can make it work.
PHOEBE: Wait, naked but with the socks. Why naked?
JENNIFER: Aha, naked but with the socks. Naked with the socks is naturally going to lower your body temperature, but if you’re cold like a lot of us are, then wearing the socks helps regulate your body temperature a little bit so you don’t feel freezing. That’s one way of doing it. Then the other way is that we have something called a chilly pad because my husband likes to be freezing when he’s sleeping, and that’s just almost the opposite of an electric blanket. He has that on his side. I don’t have it on my side. Really, we want to be – between 65 and 67 is really where we want to be sleeping for restorative sleep.
PHOEBE: Oh, my God, a chilly pad, my other nightmare. I’m always cold.
JENNIFER: Yeah, I couldn’t do it. I can sleep in the 65 degrees. I actually sleep so much better. I understand why it’s important for me to do it, but yeah, I can’t do the chilly pad. That’s his thing. If you do have problem sleeping, have that hot bath. Bring your body temperature down. It’s also great for women that are going through menopause. If you’re having the night seats or the hot flashes, that’s a really good thing to do as well. Yeah, just number one thing is you want to be sleeping in a cool room.
PHOEBE: Love it. Okay, I wanted to talk about travel and napping. You got a lot of listener questions, so I want to jump to those really quick so that we get through them. One person said help. I have no trouble falling asleep, but waking up at 4 a.m. is my biggest issue. What can I do?
JENNIFER: This would be to do with – if you’re waking up at 4 a.m., it could be one that she is naturally – so let’s talk about chronotype. This could be two things. This could be that she naturally wakes up at 4 a.m., and that’s her genetic type or her chronotype. Now, chronotypes are the times that we naturally wake up, go to sleep. It’ how our circadian rhythm works a little bit more on a genetic and personal level. That’s four chronotypes, lion, wolf, bear, and dolphin, and you can find those out by – it’s thepowerofwhenquiz.com. I’m a lion, which means that I naturally wake up around 5 a.m., and I am good to go. Now, what that means on the flipside, it means I have to be in bed by about 8:30, 9 o’clock in order for me to get good restful sleep. It could be that she’s naturally wired that way. If so, she needs to make sure that she’s getting to sleep nice and early, or it could be a spike in cortisol that’s coming a little bit too early, so she’s the type of person that really needs to take care to regulate that circadian rhythm. What’s probably happening is that it’s – what’s waking her up is that her cortisol is spiking at 4 o’clock, and that’s a little early for most people.
PHOEBE: What besides just generally balancing your blood sugar – what else can she do in order to help the cortisol spiking issue?
JENNIFER: Number one, it’s finding consistency in our routine. We should be going to bed at the same time every night and waking up at the same time ever morning seven days a week. Our bodies and our sleep and our circadian rhythms love consistency. The other thing is really thinking about managing our stress during the day so really thinking about keeping our blood sugar balanced during the day, as you said. When we have blood sugar swings, we have cortisol swings as well. If she’s experiencing a stressful moment at work, it’s time just to take a step back and breathe, and not just try and get over it and think about – worrying about it later. It’s creating a regular exercise routine. It’s really thinking about what can I do to get my cortisol curve regulated throughout the day so it’s not going to spike at weird times during the night? It’s not something that we can change in a couple of days, but being really, really consistent with managing stress throughout the day can make a change in a couple of weeks times.
PHOEBE: Could it also be – I know our organs all have their own circadian clock. Let’s say the time is super consistent every night. Would that point you to maybe a specific organ that’s off, or is it usually the cortisol spike?
JENNIFER: It’s usually a mixture of both. With something about 4 o’clock in the morning, that’s really – by that time, our bodies really have done all of their repair and detoxification. Usually we see things like – usually, if my clients are awake between 1 and 2 in the morning, I usually know that’s related to liver function, but 4 o’clock in the morning to me sounds like a little bit more like a cortisol spike than an organ function.
HOW TO WORK AROUND YOUR PARTNER’S SLEEP SCHEDULE
PHOEBE: Got it, okay, second question, how do you get better sleep when your partner’s late work hours interrupt your schedule nightly?
JENNIFER: Okay, so I have a partner who – he’s my husband. Sometimes I call him my boyfriend. We’ve been married for years. My husband has a very opposite schedule to me, and so he comes to bed around 11, 11:30. I’m usually in bed asleep by 9:30, so I have to make sure I am fast asleep and in a deep sleep. Bless him, he’s twice the size of me, and he’s like Shamu the whale when he gets into bed. He will get into bed, and he will toss and turn.
I have to make sure I’m in a really deep sleep, and to do this, I have to wear what I call my face bra. It’s my eye mask. I’m not sponsored by them. I think they’re the best eye mask in the world. They’re called Bucky. You get it form Amazon. You can get it form Bed Bath & Beyond. They literally look like a face bra. What they do is that they give your eyes space. They really are a little bit more stuck to the face around your whole eye socket, and they really, really work as an eye mask.
Then the other thing you need to think about is silicone earplugs. These are the ones that swimmers use, and you don’t want to jam them in your ears because that’s really dangerous. You want to create a seal with it, so you seal off your ears. Then make sure you’re going to bed at least 90 minutes before he is.
PHOEBE: Hmm, good tip. Yeah, I struggle with that too, and I’m always tired before my husband. He usually has nighttime events that maybe will keep him in late, and it’s so disruptive for me because I have trouble falling asleep. It’s always that wiggle room between – oh, so we actually – we set a rule. If you’re home later than 11 p.m. on a weeknight, you’ve broken the law. It’s like I text my husband. I’m like are you going to break the law tonight? At that point, it’s already 10:30, and I’m trying to decide. Do I even try and go to bed because I know I’m going to be disturbed, or do I just wake up because that’s just, honestly, the more productive thing to do?
Then I’ll be really tired when I go to bed.
JENNIFER: I mean, for us, really, we’ve had to understand that – it’s hard. I want to see my husband at the end of the day. Literally, 9:30 is my cutoff. If I don’t start going to sleep by 9:30, then I’m a wreck in the morning. Actually, we know it’s better for our relationship and for the health of our marriage for me to get a good sleep than for me to see him for five minutes in the evening. I’m even an advocate of, if you’re not going to get to sleep, you guys can sleep in separate rooms.
PHOEBE: I know.
JENNIFER: I honestly think that is more important for a good marriage than for seeing your partner when you’re tired and cranky. You’re always pissed at them because they’ve come in late, and you want to get to sleep.
PHOEBE: Oh, I’m pissed. You’ve broken the law.Okay, that’s great advice, the 90 minutes before. Okay, one more, any supplements besides magnesium that are gut safe and promote better sleep? Maybe this is one we can talk about, melatonin supplementing for SIBO peeps.
HOW TO USE MAGNESIUM FOR SLEEP AND STRESS + THE BEST GUT FRIENDLY NATURAL SLEEP SUPPLEMENTS
JENNIFER: Yeah, so I like to supplement with melatonin on a short-term basis. It’s interesting. In the UK, you can’t get melatonin over the counter, which is crazy because it’s…
PHOEBE: Wow!
JENNIFER: Yeah, so if I go back, I have to sneak in my melatonin. I don’t think melatonin is something that we should be – we shouldn’t depend on it, so we can use it as a short-term fix. Quite often sometimes, it’s about retraining the circadian rhythm. Especially with SIBO, it’s about making sure that we have enough melatonin in the system, but it’s also about taking that anxiety away from sleep as well. I do find that I think 5 mgs of melatonin is quite a lot for people, so 2 to 3 is a good amount. Then we can soften that out with some herbs and some adaptogens as well. This is your things like – something like some reishi or something. Maybe doing a smaller amount of a melatonin supplement and putting in some calming reishi, some CBD oil, if that works for you. Whatever those things are that help soften and take the edge off it as well.
It’s interesting that you mentioned magnesium. Magnesium actually isn’t a sleep supplement. Magnesium we should think of as a stress supplement.
PHOEBE: Is it better to take magnesium earlier in the day?
JENNIFER: Magnesium you can take throughout the day. What’s important about magnesium is that you’re, A, digesting it, and B, that you’re making sure that you’re taking all different four types of – so there’s four different chelates of magnesium, and we want to be finding a supplement that has all of those chelates. Quite often, I’ll have clients come to me, and they’re like, well, I have to take my magnesium because it makes me poop. I’m like, A, you shouldn’t have to take a magnesium supplement to make your poop, and B, if that’s all it’s doing, it’s not doing anything other than making you poop. It’s finding a great magnesium supplement that has the different types of magnesium in it, and also, I really love to do a topical magnesium. For my clients that have gut health issues, I know that anything that I can do transdermal, so on the skin, can make a really big difference. They’re actually getting it straight into their bloodstream rather than it going through their massive digestive system. Magnesium lotion behind the – you put it behind your elbows and behind your knees can be a really great way of upping your magnesium. We are all deficient in magnesium.
PHOEBE: Oh, I didn’t know that about the elbows and knees. I actually started using the – I think it’s Dead Sea company, the oil spray. I just spray it on myself right before I get in the bath.
JENNIFER: Do it after you’ve had the bath.
PHOEBE: Oh, after, okay. {Just omit this}
JENNIFER: Yeah, that’s when your pores are most open. Then the skin behind elbows and our knees, that’s the thinnest, so it’s the most absorbent.
PHOEBE: Okay, one more reader question. One is how do I start taking Ambien and actually sleep through the night? We’ve answered the second half. Do you have any tips on weaning off of Ambien?
JENNIFER: As a nutritionist and not a medical practitioner, I cannot comment on medications. What I will say, though, is something I do love to do is help to empower my clients, talk to their physicians and their PCPs. A lot of the times, especially gut health and especially my young women, I’ll ask them if they’re on any medication, and they’ll say no. Then I’ll have to ask them, well, are you on any antianxiety or birth control? They’re like, oh, yeah, I’m on this. I’m on that. You’re not the only one is number one, and number two is having a conversation with your PCP about it. Is this the lowest effective dose for me? Is this the right brand for me? Is this the best one considering my health history?
When we’re on a medication and we want to come off it, it needs to be a conversation with your healthcare practitioner, and if you can’t have that conversation with your healthcare practitioner, you need to change your PCP. We spend more time shopping for shoes than we do for our healthcare team, so that should be a conversation that you should be able to have with your healthcare practitioner. It may not be something that you go off straightaway, but it may be, okay, what’s still going to be an effective but lower dose for me, or is this the right brand for me? Really, I think it’s more about empowering people to be able to talk to their practitioners about the best option for them. Sorry, I got really passionate about that.
PHOEBE: No, that’s great advice. Okay, then the next question, do benzos damage the gut and sleep cycle in any way?
JENNIFER: Yes, blatantly yes. Again, it’s that conversation of speaking with your healthcare practitioner, finding those different options that work for you. For me, it’s always – if I’m working with someone on medication, it’s how can I support what you’re going through with nutrition and supplements, but how can I partner with your doctor? If you are on medications – I’m going to say this a million times. If you are taking medications and you want to start a supplement regime, you have to check those with your doctors first.
PHOEBE: What do the benzos exactly do to the gut?
JENNIFER: Again, they’re going to have that destructive effect. Anything that we’re doing that we are knocking off any of the cell signaling. A lot of the time when we take any kind of medication, what we’re doing is stopping any parts of our systems signaling to each other and communicating with each other. When we’re looking at anything like that, we’re stopping signaling which is affecting our HPA axis, which is affecting our cortisol production, which is affecting our circadian rhythms.
PHOEBE: Yeah, that’s a good explanation. Oh, my gosh, I don’t know where the time went. I just love sleep conversation so much. We need to do a Part 2. Just to end for today back on the subject of SIBO and for those gut people like ourselves, what should they keep in mind about sleep besides the fact that it’s essential for recovery? Is there anything else you want to add in terms of SIBO specific things?
JENNIFER: Yeah, with the SIBO specific thing, I think, number one, it’s that making sure you have that gastric clearance before you go to bed. Sometimes we look at this, and I flip intermittent fasting on its head. I call it time restricted eating because it feels a little bit more manageable for people. If we can do a 12-hour window between finishing our dinner and starting our breakfast, that is – it’s going to get great results, but it’s also really manageable. If you finish eating at 7 o’clock at night, you start eating at 7 o’clock in the morning. Don’t try and jump into that straightaway. If you’re someone that finishes – usually finishes eating at 10 o’clock and has your breakfast at 7 o’clock, bring it back half an hour and half an hour and half an hour. I really think in terms of if there was a number on tip is to finish eating earlier if you can and then thinking about managing your stress response. If you can manage your stress response during the day, you can’t help but get great sleep.
PHOEBE: Improve your gut at the same time.
JENNIFER: Improve your gut because those things go absolutely hand in hand. If we’re not sleeping, we’re not repairing any of our bodily systems, especially not the gut.
PHOEBE: This has just been such a delight on the subject of the time restricted eating. A reminder for you guys, if you’re curious about how to go about that, we have a whole Episode 5 that gives even more tips on the subject. I will put in the show notes also where you can find Miss Jenny. She has an entire course dedicated to stress and sleep, and I hope that you will continue your relationship with her on the Interweb, or if you’re in Boston or New York, maybe in person.
JENNIFER: Come and see me.
Disclaimer: The information in this podcast does not provide medical advice, professional diagnosis, opinion, or treatment. The information discussed is for educational purposes only and is not a substitute for medical or professional care.
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