Hello!
Most people I know wouldn't mind feeling a little better, or having more energy throughout the day. Most people also at least partially recognize that getting good sleep is an important piece of that puzzle.
What most people don’t recognize is that sleep is only half of the story.
As humans, we have a “day mode” where we activate and energize, digest our food, and live our lives. Cortisol is the hormone that this most directly relates to.
We then have a “night mode” where we rest, restore, and heal. Melatonin is the boss hormone in this arena.
The Problem is…99% are very “day mode” dominant. Our technology, artificial lights, stress, eating timing and more all play into this equation.
The result? “Night mode” and melatonin get pushed to the side. So even people who do feel like they get enough sleep often wake up feeling unrested and often have chronic, nagging health issues that come along for the ride.
If you want some more info about how this works and what to do about it, check out my newest episode of the Quantum Chiropractor podcast.
To your tremendous health,
Dr. Jake
P.S. Want a FREE professional opinion? Book a free 10 min phone consultation.
I’ve spent over a decade helping people feel better so they can live more. Talk to you soon!
Episode 7 Transcript:
Hello and welcome to episode number seven of the Quantum Chiropractor's Podcast. My name is Dr. Jake Dodds and today we're getting into a very important topic, even though it is largely misunderstood, which is circadian rhythm. Now, just like we've been talking about, we really see that there's two major facets to your health.
Your structure, your body needs to be able to get to a good position and move well. And then also your energy, you need to be able to make energy well, you need to be able to keep energy well, you need to be able to use energy well. If your body is going to be able to be healthy, heal and feel like you want to.
So circadian rhythm is really directly relating to the energy side of the equation. Now. The reason I say it's largely misunderstood is because when I say circadian rhythm, the large majority of people, their brain immediately goes to sleep. And this is exactly what my brain did too, because it's how everybody talks about it.
It's like circadian rhythm is kind of the same thing as your sleep. Um, and people are all over the place when it comes to their sleep. So some people are like, yeah, I... I have a hard time going to sleep, but then I'm good, or I fall asleep fine, but then I wake up throughout the night, or yeah, I know I don't sleep enough hours, or some people are even like, yeah, I go to sleep, I stay asleep, I sleep enough time, and I still wake up feeling tired, or I still feel like my energy is all over the place during the day, or I still don't feel like my body is healing efficiently, and then that kind of gets thrown out the window because it's like, well, I'm sleeping, so that must not be one of the things.
So, What I want to get into is circadian rhythm. There's two sides to that coin. So of course there's the sleep and the night, the nighttime, which we're going to talk about in a second. But this flip side of that coin is day mode. So as human beings, the sun starts coming up, our brains and our bodies automatically start kicking into day mode.
And this is largely controlled by the hormone cortisol. But this is what wakes us up. It activates us. It kicks on our metabolic systems. It energizes us, we digest food, and we do all the things that our bodies want to do during the day. So we have day mode, and again, cortisol is kind of the king of day mode.
The flip side is, we do have a night mode. So night mode is largely governed by melatonin. So during night mode, our bodies are designed to start winding down, to start resting, and once we enter good deep sleep, we start to heal really efficiently and effectively. So it's the balance between these two things that allows us to operate as human beings.
So what most people also don't realize is they are super Super dominant on day mode. There's a bunch of reasons for this, and a lot of it's built in inherently to the way that we live our lives these days. But a lot of things push us in that direction. So, even the technology that we use. So, the bright blue screens from our phones, from TVs, from our computers.
Really, really stimulating to cortisol. Uh, artificial lights, same thing. We're getting this burst of intense light. And a lot of this conversation happens from the standpoint of Our bodies need to know what time of day it is and what season it is to know what kind of metabolic process to kick on and what to do hormonally.
So I always just thought of my body as kind of like a machine and kind of an isolated container and it was going to do what it's going to do. And what I've learned and what has become a really hot area of research in the past five years is the human body is very, very dependent on sensing what's happening around it.
So it can respond internally correctly now in terms of circadian rhythm. There's two major ways that we do this. The first is our eyes. So obviously super important, but we get a ton of information from our eyes and the sun and the different lights that are hitting our eyeballs and our retina then kicks off a full cascade of events.
So usually, and we'll talk more about this in a different episode. So quick side note. Blue light from artificial devices mimics the sun's frequency at the middle of the day. So when our eyes see these intense blue frequencies, our brains and our bodies think it's the middle of the day and we start pumping out cortisol is the short end of that story.
Um, but even eating timing. So if we're eating Uh, as our bodies are trying to wind down, it kind of kicks us back into day mode and a lot of us are waiting until the end of the day or, um, when we have our meals made, obviously, and we're eating later when our body is actually trying to make melatonin and it pushes that melatonin to the side.
And then there's just the simple fact of a lot of us are not getting outside a whole lot. Or not nearly as much as we used to, so we're not getting a lot of those natural cues that we normally would. Um, so our eyeballs bring us a lot of information, and our skin has a lot of photoreceptors on it as well that's telling our body and our brains.
What kind of programs it should be running. So again, the big takeaway here is 99 percent of people are really high on the day mode. They're pumping out too much cortisol. So not only is their cortisol mechanism getting fatigued, which makes it hard to, harder to energize on any given day, but all that cortisol also pushes melatonin to the side.
And it makes it really hard to kick into a good night mode. So bringing balance back to day mode and night mode, recognizing the two. So for the large majority of people, what that means is recognizing the cues of what is kicking us into day mode too much, and then also getting more cues that are going to help us get into night mode.
So we'll do a full breakdown of this in a future episode, but understanding this really important concept of we need to calm down day mode and we need to get more into night mode, hugely, hugely important. So if you have been dealing with anything for longer than three to six months, or you know someone who has, or if your energy feels like it's all over the place, or if you're going to sleep and you're waking up tired on a consistent basis, this is really something that we need to tune in and talk about more, because until you get your circadian rhythm right, your energy is not going to be right, And your healing isn't going to be right.
So no matter what you do, no matter if you have the best supplement or treatment or whatever, your body is the only thing that can heal your body and making sure you have the basic building blocks to do that hugely important. So stay tuned for future episodes. We're going to keep talking about and getting into the nitty gritty about how to keep healing these layers back and move forward.
Thanks guys.
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