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Originally Posted On: https://thesleepdetective.com/post/what-you-need-to-know-about-blood-sugar-and-sleep-1
Keeping your blood sugar steady is critical to sleeping well!
If you wake up in the middle of the night, there’s a good chance it’s because your blood sugar levels aren’t healthy.
You can have issues with blood sugar even if you don’t have a weight problem, you eat healthy and you avoid sugar and carbs. Sometimes we are genetically more predisposed to having blood sugar issues.
Also, not sleeping well affects your body’s ability to regulate glucose or blood sugar because that happens while you’re sleeping. So a lot of times those of us with sleep issues need extra support because our body isn’t able to do it naturally, even if we are eating really well.
The blood sugar roller coaster
If you start your day with pastry and a cup of coffee, your blood sugar is going to spike really high. Also, not getting enough protein and fat with breakfast can cause a spike in blood sugar. Your body will release insulin to lower your blood sugar, and it will also release the stress hormones cortisol, epinephrine (adrenaline) and norepinephrine. Cortisol releases glucose into the cells for energy which raises your blood sugar again.
When your blood sugar gets too low, your body is going to crave quick energy to raise it to normal levels again so you’ll get cravings for sweet treats and more sugar. If you eat more refined sugar or carbohydrate food or drinks, your blood sugar will spike again and you are on the extreme blood sugar roller coaster.
If you’re on the roller coaster during the day, that wild ride continues into the night. When your blood sugar levels drop too low during the night, your body releases those stimulating stress hormones, causing you to feel wired and awake. This is a common reason why many of my clients wake up in the night and have a hard time falling back asleep.
My client Peter
The main cause of my client Peter’s insomnia was low blood sugar at night. I could tell from the intake questionnaire he filled out that he had many signs of blood sugar instability and insulin resistance. His doctor didn’t catch any of these signs! I recommended that he get a continuous glucose monitor to track his blood sugar. Fortunately his doctor agreed to prescribe him one. With this monitor, he was able to see how that what he ate immediately affected his blood sugar levels. And he could tell that the higher his blood sugar rose during the day, the lower it would drop at night and affect his sleep.
At age 78, Peter was concerned about dementia. It turns out that the blood sugar roller coaster is one of the main reasons why your brain degenerates. His memory and word recall (and his sleep!) have improved since he got a handle on his blood sugar.
Stabilizing his blood sugar was a game changer, and it’s something that his doctor had totally missed.
My client Susan also wrote when I asked her why she thought that her sleep was getting so much better,”One major thing is getting my blood sugar under control and not having me wake up at 03:00 A.M. every night because I’m hungry.” So, waking up at night hungry is a definite sign that your blood sugar is out of balance.
Signs of low blood sugar:
- Getting “hangry” (hungry and angry) if you go too long without eating
- Getting spacey, light-headed, dull or have shaking hands between meals
- Having energy after eating meals (means that your blood sugar was too low beforehand)
- Not being hungry in the morning
- Feeling nauseous first thing in the morning
- Having a drastic energy dip in the afternoon
- Waking up at 3 or 4 a.m. full of energy
- Difficulty concentrating between meals
If you wake up in the night, eating a small snack before bed, about 100 to 200 calories, with complex carbs, healthy fat and protein can help. If the snack helps, then blood sugar is definitely an issue for you.
What can you learn about your blood sugar from your bloodwork from your doctor?
Lab tests and your doctor will say that less than 100 for fasting glucose is “normal.” There’s a big difference between normal, which is really just the average of the people taking the test in most cases, and optimal, which is what people’s levels are when they are in good health without any symptoms.
Beyond “normal,” I’m looking for more optimal levels. That’s in everything I do as a functional medicine practitioner; that’s what I’ve been trained to look for.
I’ve learned that fasting glucose should be between 75 and 90 and that anything above 90 isn’t actually ideal. Even though your lab work might say if you’re at 93, that that’s fine, I like to see it under 90 as much as possible.
Other clues for blood sugar to look for on your blood work:
- Insulin should ideally be between 1 and 5.
- HbA1c should be between 4.5 and 5.2%.
- Testing your blood sugar levels
If you think that blood sugar is an issue for you, you might want to start testing it. And you can do this in a few different ways. You can buy an inexpensive glucometer from the drugstore or online, they’re about $25. You buy testing strips and you prick your finger and measure your blood sugar that way.There’s also something that I’ve found called the Keto Mojo, and this is a little more expensive, around $100. You can use it to measure blood sugar and ketones if that’s something you’re interested in doing. And this also involves pricking your finger.
If you don’t want to prick your finger all the time to figure this out, you can use a continuous glucose monitor or CGM.
Now, supposedly the less expensive glucometers where you prick your finger are actually more accurate, but the continuous glucose monitor is great for seeing the trends that are happening.
You have this kind of patch on your arm all the time and it continually tests your blood sugar levels. If you tell your doctor that you think you have blood sugar issues, or if you know you already do, then you can likely get this as a prescription for free.
So ideally, you want to start with your fasting blood sugar levels. I actually recommend about an hour after waking up to test because there is an actual spike in our blood sugar when we wake up but before eating. You want that to be between 75 and 90.
Then you want to measure it again 2 hours after you eat. Ideally, you don’t want to see glucose levels rise more than 30 points from your fasting level. So let’s say you were at 90, you don’t want to see it go above 120. You definitely never want to see it go above 140. That’s kind of the max of the optimal range for after eating.
And then measure again 3 hours after eating. You should see your glucose levels going down at that point if insulin is kicking in appropriately. If your levels don’t go down 3 hours after eating, that means that you aren’t having an appropriate insulin response.
Insulin resistance
If your blood sugar is too high, glucose can’t get into your cells, and so it makes you sleepy and slow. When you have high blood sugar, your body will release insulin to carry sugar out of your bloodstream and put it into your fat cells for storage. When this happens too often, the cells refuse to let insulin in, causing insulin resistance.
This resistance is similar to what happens with cocaine, when you need more and more of the drug to feel the effects. When you have insulin resistance, excess glucose and insulin are in your bloodstream causing inflammation, hormone imbalance, and neurotransmitter imbalances.
Insulin resistance causes increased testosterone in women and increased estrogen in men, leading to hormone imbalances that can cause sleep issues.
Too much insulin is also inflammatory for the brain. Whenever your insulin is too high it lowers your brain’s ability to clear the plaques that cause Alzheimer’s disease. Alzheimer’s is sometimes referred to as type 3 diabetes because of the effects that blood sugar has on the brain.
Every time you become hypoglycemic or need a nap due to insulin resistance you’re killing off neurons in your brain.
Symptoms of insulin resistance:
- Feeling tired after meals
- Sugar cravings after meals
- Difficulty losing weight
- Your waist is bigger than your hips
- Need to urinate frequently
- Increased appetite
Neurotransmitter deficiency
Insulin also affects neurotransmitter production. You need the right amount of insulin to make neurotransmitters.
One important transmitter for sleep is serotonin. If you don’t have enough insulin, not enough tryptophan, the precursor to serotonin, goes to your brain. Then you don’t make enough serotonin, which can make you feel depressed and wake you up at night.
Symptoms of serotonin deficiency are depression or lack of enjoyment, PMS, paranoia and poor sleep. A sure sign of serotonin deficiency is craving carbohydrates.
How to balance your blood sugar
To balance blood sugar, avoid refined sugar and carbohydrates and always eat carbohydrates with fat and protein. I help my clients balance their meals and snacks with the appropriate ratio of macronutrients (carbs, fat and protein) for their body using the metabolic typing diet.
The Metabolic Typing diet
Ideally, you want to follow the correct diet for your metabolic type. Something I help all my clients with is finding their ideal balance of macronutrients (fat, protein and carbs). Not everyone should be low carb or high carb or low fat or high fat, etc.. We’re all genetically metabolically different.
Some of us are more protein types where we need more protein, some of us are more carbohydrate types, and the most common is actually in the mixed type, which is in the middle of protein and carb types.
You can find out more about this by googling metabolic typing diet. And there is a quiz from https://metaboliciq.com/en/metabolic-test/ that you can take to find out your metabolic type.
So you want to start with the Metabolic Typing diet because that’s going to have a big impact on your blood sugar levels.
Blood sugar stabilizing hacks
One of my recommendations is not to snack. It used to be the school of thought that if you have blood sugar issues, you should be eating all the time to keep your blood sugar levels steady. It turns out that’s really bad and can lead to insulin resistance over time.
So we want to minimize the amount of time during the day that our bodies have to release insulin to lower blood sugar. If it’s constantly having to do that because you’re constantly eating, that can lead to your body not responding to insulin, which can lead to diabetes over time. And so I actually recommend not snacking and instead having 2 to 3 meals a day.
You also want to make sure to eat at least 25 grams of protein, especially with breakfast. That’s going to be the most important meal of the day because that’s going to set the stage for your blood sugar levels remaining steady throughout the day.
I also recommend taking 12 hours of what I call digestive rest. I don’t necessarily recommend intermittent fasting, which means going 14-18 or more hours without eating and having this really small eating window. You don’t need to go to that extreme, and you actually shouldn’t if you are having trouble sleeping.
But I do recommend taking 12 hours of what I call digestive rest every day. That means going 12 hours without eating to give your body a break from digestion and from raising your blood sugar levels and then your body releasing insulin.
I also recommend limiting fruit to 2 servings a day max. The fructose in fruit turns directly into fat. It isn’t actually used for energy like glucose is. And today’s fruits have been bred to be much sweeter than they used to be.
Some of the best fruits to eat that are lower in sugar are going to be berries, citrus fruits and sour apples like Granny Smith apples. Tropical fruits like mangos and pineapples and bananas are really high in sugar so you definitely want to limit those. Also, you don’t want to eat fruit on an empty stomach or by itself so your blood sugar levels don’t spike too high.
Now, if you follow those hacks and those don’t help with your blood sugar, then I recommend some of the suggestions I learned from The Glucose Revolution, by Jesse Inchauspe.
I highly recommend her book to learn more about blood sugar and glucose. She has some tips that I found really helpful for myself lately as well.
She recommends eating foods in a certain order: you want to eat vegetables first and then protein and then carbohydrates. So you’re getting the fiber from the vegetables in your digestive system first. So that’s going to slow everything down that comes behind it.
It can also help to add a green starter to your meals. So many cultures have a salad first because it helps with blood sugar.
It can also help to drink a tablespoon of apple cider vinegar in 8oz of water before meals. This is also great for digestion and it also helps with blood sugar.
It can also help to move within an hour or so after eating. Going for a walk, doing squats, etc. can also help stabilize blood sugar levels.
You always want to eat sugar for dessert instead of as a snack. So that means you eat something sweet after a meal instead of on an empty stomach. The meal helps minimize the blood sugar spike you get from sugar.
Avoiding any foods you’re sensitive to is also important because food sensitivities cause blood sugar fluctuations and insulin surges.
I suggest starting with these hacks first before moving on to supplements.
Supplements
If all of these hacks don’t work, then that’s when I recommend that it’s time to try some supplements for the short term. You also want to be working on your sleep, ideally, so that then your body can soon regulate glucose and blood sugar on its own.
There are a lot of supplement blends out there which help with blood sugar. Chromium is a mineral that’s commonly in those blends. Cinnamon is an herb that actually helps stabilize blood sugar. (I always add a dash of cinnamon to smoothies when I make them.) And another great supplement that I use with my clients is called D-Chiro Inositol. This helps with blood sugar and insulin. So I’ll tend to recommend this if someone is also having signs of insulin resistance. So it’s a good combo supplement.
There are many pieces to the puzzle of what’s causing someone’s insomnia. And it’s different for everyone. It’s never just one thing. Blood sugar is just one piece of the puzzle.
But I wanted to share this with you because this is something that you can work on on your own. You can test this yourself and see if this can make a big difference in your sleep. And if not, I have created a program that looks at all the pieces as to what could be causing your sleep issues so we don’t miss anything.
You can get the sleep you need to feel rested, function at your best, and enjoy your life! Book a call with me to get started.
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