Then after a while, I started getting calls, I average a few calls a week of people asking different questions. And then somebody said, I wish I knew this when I was a teenager. So then I started offering teen courses for girls and then later for boys. I’ve visited some high schools and middle schools, which is really fun to teach live classes.

And I do a lot of Zoom calls with people all over the country.  Yeah, so you are a wealth of information. I have been watching some of your recordings for a while, and I always love your info. And then when I got your email about sleep, I had already had the idea that I wanted to talk to my audience about sleep.

And then here you were doing a video on everything that I wanted to say. And I thought you said it way better. So that will bring you on so , let’s just dive in with how sleep or lack of sleep affects the metabolism   I’ll start with a story. When I was in college getting ready to be married, so I wanted to look good in my dress.

I noticed that if I stayed up late, I seemed to gain weight overnight, magically, weirdly. And at first I thought it was because I was munching late at night. You’re up at 10, 10 30, go grab an ice cream bar.  And then I disciplined myself to not do that. And I still was putting on weight if I didn’t go to bed early. 

And so then I started experimenting just going to bed early and not watching what I ate and I lost weight.  This is probably the first time in my life I’ve really been watching the scale and my behavior in that level of, in that level of detail.  But then as I got older, I researched and I found out that when we’re short on sleep because we wake up too early or we stay up late,  We have more of the chemicals that make us hungry.

Ghrelin, which you can remember because it’s like your stomach’s growling with ghrelin,  and we have less leptin, which is what helps us feel full.  So on a hormonal level, those things already shift.  And then in addition to that, even in situations where they.

 

 This is even in, controlled situations, not missing a full night of sleep, just a short night of sleep, like a five hour night instead of an eight hour night.  And then, of course, the biggest piece, really,  is that when you’re sleep deprived, your prefrontal cortex is not going to be online the same way.

 

And that’s the front of your brain  part that helps you make good decisions, exert willpower, delay gratification.  Everything feels harder.  It’s harder to shift your attention. It’s harder to remember. So you could make a great meal plan and it’s going to feel way harder to execute when you’re sleep deprived and spacey and distracted and maybe you forget your keys or you do something else that kind of derails your day. 

 

And you’re also likely to feel more emotional when your prefrontal cortex is not so functional. The back parts of our brain, the more limbic parts tend to be more active.  So there’s just a ton of different reasons why short sleep will tend to shift your metabolism and your weight because of how it affects your behavior. 

 

And probably the last reason is it tends to raise your cortisol when you’re powering through fatigue. Your body needs to make more cortisol. That in itself, just simply stress, even on a regular night of sleep, will also change your metabolism. And of course your behavior too.  Oh, I love this. This is really helpful.

 

So let’s dive into each one of those areas and just really like really simplify it. So when you  let’s start with the cortisol.  So when you have cortisol, the receptors of cortisol are more in the amygdala and in the limbic system. When you say the limbic system, would it be fair to just say The stress part of the brain, the emotional part of the brain.

 

Exactly. Okay. So everyone listening to this, just know that when you have an increase in cortisol, it acts in the stress part of the brain,  we feel more stress,  which then affects our blood sugar and our insulin.  Yes, if you get a spike in your cortisol, it will tend to mobilize resources from your body.

 

For instance, if you have sugar stored in your liver. and you haven’t eaten in a while and you get a cortisol spike, it will dump some of that sugar into your bloodstream. So then you can get an up and then a down,  or it may be that you’re out of sugar and you start to feel hangry or your muscles start to feel exhausted and you don’t feel like exercising.

 

The two things that can happen with the cortisol release is you can have, an increase in sugar and energy in alertness, which is our bodies were beautifully designed that way. And then the crash.   But I believe the second piece is knowing that when we have an increase in insulin and blood sugar is, as you said, mobilized or sugar is dumped into the blood, you guys, your insulin goes up and anytime insulin goes up, you’re in fat storage mode.

 

Exactly. Cannot access fast stores at all. Exactly. And what women tend to notice when they’re having a high cortisol time of their life is they’ll tend to gain weight in their middle. which is very much a sign of your insulin having gone up, and our bodies will often tend to store fat in our middle, it’s very convenient, it doesn’t interfere with our range of motion,  but also if you have any condition like polycystic ovary syndrome, or if you’ve been alerted that you’re prediabetic, or you know that runs in your family,  then you really don’t want to mess with the insulin if you can help it. 

 

Yeah, so let’s just leave that piece there. Let’s go on to the part of when we are sleep deprived, the prefrontal cortex being not as what would you say? It is compromised? It’s not as dominant. Yeah, it’s not. It’s not as dominant. So you guys, the prefrontal cortex is that wise owl part of our brain that is so helpful.

 

Jen said, logical thinking, thinking through long term consequences, strategizing, remember what we, remembering what we really want, not acting on impulse. It’s just that calm place that we can make these beautiful meal plans. So if my prefrontal cortex is not as dominant or it’s compromised, even making my plan for the day will feel harder.

 

Yes. And definitely executing on it because you have a limited amount of attention and willpower and  you’re probably managing other relationships and other decisions throughout your day. And that’s going to be a smaller pool of willpower and attention if you have a compromised prefrontal cortex.

 

Yeah. And I love again, that if the prefrontal cortex is not as strong as it could be with a great night’s sleep, we’re activating The other part of our brain, the limbic system, the emotional part of our brain, the stress part of our brain. I think that’s pretty, I think we could all say, Oh yeah, that makes sense.

 

  Now let’s talk a little bit about Graylin and Lepton.  Can you review what you just said and then even give us some examples?  Yeah there’s so many studies about this with different amounts of sleep deprivation but leptin is the satiety, or satiety, hormone. It’s the one that tells us when we are full and there’s a lot of different ways to tune in to leptin, obviously.

 

If you eat more slowly, if you drink water, if you give time for your stomach to communicate with your brain, then you’re acting in favor of leptin, right? In terms of those signals getting to your body. But  the fullness signals are suppressed when we are sleep deprived, and this is probably to our advantage in terms of survival of the species because Historically if you were short on sleep because there was some kind of stressor in your environment It probably meant that food would be at a premium And the people who ate more under stress probably are the ones who lived to pass their genes on.

 

 But under modern conditions, that doesn’t work in our favor the same way.  We don’t need to survive a long winter with, limited food resources.  And so you can see why  there would be this programming to, suppress our sense of fullness when there might be a reason that it could be helpful long term to overeat a bit.

 

I think that’s so cool, , here’s the one sentence to take away from that.  When you’re sleep deprived, your fullness  signals  are suppressed   and I’ve seen this with some  really hardworking, tired moms, you sit down to eat a meal  and they are just ravenous. They’ve waited the whole day or the whole afternoon to eat.

 

They’ve done, they’ve taken care of everyone else in their life. And then they just inhale this meal that is so  much bigger than what you would expect they could comfortably eat. That you think, wow, your sense of fullness is in a different place  than, the mom who’s sitting down to one plate of food and she seems content with that.

 

And I’ve seen people not even be aware of it. And I also know,  when I’m tired and I’m eating dinner, at the end of a long day where I powered through and did all the things, it is hard to feel when I’m full, even if I’m eating slowly, and I’m sipping water, sipping tea. In fact, sometimes that I have learned to just tell the kids, I’m so much more tired than hungry, I’m not sure how much I want to eat. 

 

And I tell a lot of moms, it’s okay to sit down with a cup of tea. You’re still present with your family at dinner.  But if you’re amped up. And you’re just going to eat on autopilot  and not  get that feedback from your body. It’s better to just drink a cup of tea and calm your nervous system and then decide, what am I actually hungry for? 

 

I love that you said that. I, oh, you guys. In our community, we always have a plan for the day and I often hear women say it and that at dinner, they just don’t feel satisfied and you’re giving us new information that perhaps it is that they’re so fatigued that their fullness signals are compromised.

 

Yeah, and I really feel it for myself, on days that I’m able to rest a little bit before dinner and I lay down with the baby.  It’s really easy to just have one plate, it’s really clear if I’m rested.  But then if I just went all day, I might dig into that second plate and I’m like, Oh, did I really even wanna?

 

And I had a really interesting story from a mom in her late 40s or 50s who was trying to balance her blood sugar  And she was getting high readings in the mornings when she would go in for her fasting blood draws.  It was always a little over a hundred and they say maybe you’re prediabetic. So she bought the pricker, to prick herself. 

 

And I had this conversation with her. I said are you eating dinner late? Because if you don’t have a fast metabolism, and you go to sleep and you’re 48, You can wake up with your blood sugar a little too high because you just haven’t fully metabolized everything you ate a little more than you needed to that close to dinner, or that close to bed.

 

And she said, Yeah, I’m really not that hungry in the evening. I just sit down and eat on autopilot because that’s what everyone else is doing.  And so we made this planned experiment.  And I said, What if you eat dinner earlier, or if you just don’t eat dinner if you’re not actually hungry? Okay.

 

Have a cup of tea, have a little salad or whatever, and just see what happens.  And she experimented by checking her blood sugar, and she found that if she didn’t eat as much dinner, which she wasn’t really hungry for,  then her blood sugar was totally fine in the morning. And in fact, she found from checking her blood sugar throughout the day that it was actually fine all day. 

 

Because she was up and moving and she was eating  normal things. But at the end of the day, her fatigue was making it harder to feel those fullness signals.  That’s great. And so then she wasn’t eating quite the right amount and it was making her blood sugar a little high in the morning. So really she was okay overall, but this was her weak area. 

 

So tell me a little bit about ghrelin.  So the hormone that tells us we’re hungry.  I think everybody’s experienced this when you  wake up from a late night party and you have to get up early and it’s a Monday morning and there’s that cheesecake in the fridge that you just had a piece of for dessert and you look at it and you think that’s what I want for breakfast with Fritos on the side, right?

 

This is The Graylin is It’s telling you eat more and  eat those hyper palatable foods. Graylin is saying eat a big fruit bowl and an omelette in all likelihood.  It’s telling you just eat all the fun things. And so I think everyone’s experienced this when they are tired and the doughnuts look extra good. 

 

And I love healthy food in the morning, but I’ll go for that cheesecake if I’m on five hours of sleep. It sure looks appetizing. Yeah. So we should expect that when we’re short on sleep to be aware that we will be craving more food. And the types of food will be more of those. You said hyperpalatable.

 

Some people would call like our junk food or sometimes foods or foods that  we don’t normally feel good about eating for breakfast. Exactly. Exactly. And there’s ways you can. Hack this a little bit. For instance, if you wake up and you’re really craving something, fatty, salty,  you can make a healthy breakfast that checks some of those same boxes.

 

You can exert a little discipline. But it’s still interesting to notice in yourself what you’re drawn to as a response to what’s happening in your body. Yeah, I think what’s so cool is just,  The awareness. Oh, it makes so much sense. I didn’t get a lot of sleep. To expect us to have different tastes or cravings or, more emotions.

 

And this  is something that I think would be awesome to create a protocol for. So when I have low sleep, what are the foods that I’m going to eat? How am I going to talk to myself? How am I going to treat myself? Is there a way that I can, lay down and get a few extra, moments of rest. How am I going to handle dinner?

 

And Jen just laid out a couple options. Maybe  we have tea or  we sit down with our plate and we eat it slowly. And then we just have a plan of I’m going to get up and move on because I cannot trust in a sense my leptin, my fullness signal, because I am sleep deprived. I just think being aware of this and starting, like you said, experimenting like you did with that one mom,  experimenting with ourselves, becoming our own, science experiment.

 

And if you find that you’re really munchy, sometimes people just  eat a couple carrots. Celery, if you just have this kind of need to chew as a result of your stress and kind of unwinding, there’s also some teas that actually really calm your nervous system.  Like a Roybos tea or chamomile, teas that people typically can help you, settle down into your body a little bit more.

 

 Oh, this is such great info. Okay. So we keep using this term sleep deprived, low on sleep. Can you talk to us about. What exactly does that mean? In the research that you’ve seen, what constitutes sleep deprived?   The general consensus is that most people need seven to eight hours And if you think you need less, you’re probably kidding yourself  Now there are people who truly seem to just sleep efficiently Very efficiently and they really manage okay on six and a half hours for years and years at a time, but many of those people who  think they feel okay when they get more sleep, they find that their relationships are better.

 

They learn more easily. Their cycles normalize.  Lots of different things happen.  I tell women that I’m doing nutrition work with to assume that you need 8 hours, but give yourself a 9 hour sleep window. This is partly so that we don’t feel that sense of urgency or stress that we have to fall asleep right away.

 

Or we have to get up at a certain time. Or what if I wake up in the middle of the night? Because that background anxiety. About sleep can, of course, add to your sleep problems, especially as we get into middle age and our sleep tends to be a little more interrupted anyway.  And so if you have a nine hour sleep window, And you also have the ability to sometimes take a little power nap or power rest.

 

You don’t have to actually fall asleep in the middle of the day. Then that can calm your brain to say, I have a plan.  It’s going to be okay. And if you have a nine hour sleep window most nights and you have a short night here and there, you’re going to be okay.  But a lot of my coaching  is talking moms through how to say no to some things. 

 

and set appropriate boundaries to allow themselves a nine hour sleep window.  That’s so good. I’m thinking to myself, wow, I really need her to coach me on how to do that. Okay. This is so good. Okay. So do you find that there’s a difference between the person who is sleeping short on sleep because they stay up late, versus the person who is short on sleep because they get up early.

 

Is that, does that make a difference? Yes. I do think there’s a few different things going on. Overall, the research says for many people, for most people  the hours before midnight are going to be really valuable. But there are people who are genuinely night owls.  But I would say there’s a different personality phenotype that kind of goes with the different types of being short on sleep.

 

People who are waking themselves up early are You know, motivated, driven, alarm,  and the people who are staying up late, he could be the same person too. There’s an element of, avoiding or wanting to treat yourself or you did everything for everyone else all day and you finally have this window that is your time. 

 

And, these are often the same very diligent, disciplined people, but this is a different manifestation of it. Yeah.  And, I’ve, talked to many women over the years who found different ways to get that time by themselves. But they do it in the middle of the day or at some other point of the day so they don’t have to stay up late to watch a movie so they can feel like an adult. 

 

But it’s a real challenge for busy moms to, it’s a real, temptation to stay up late and get that time to yourself. Or maybe you want, that’s the only time with your husband. And even there I think that’s a really important conversation to have. You probably both need more sleep in that case. And maybe It’s better to watch a show a couple nights a week, but not every night. 

 

our stress hormones on our hunger hormones on the cravings. Does it seem to be different depending on if you stay up late or wake up early or is it just in general sleep deprivation? I think it depends on the person how their sleep cycles are working. But in general, what happens with sleep is we get our deeper sleep in the first half of the night  and we get our REM sleep in the second half of the night.

 

And to totally oversimplify it, the deep sleep is the brain cleaning part. All your brain cells shrink and then your body washes a ton of fluid through your brain, like street cleaning.  And then the later part of the night when you’re dreaming more  and you’re not having such deep sleep, that tends to be the part that we think organizes our thoughts and feelings and helps us feel emotionally okay and learn better. 

 

And so for teenagers, you can really see this with their studying. If they’re getting six, six and a half hours, school feels like a lot more work than if they’re getting eight or nine hours, but they’re going to survive. You will absolutely survive on six and a half hours of sleep because you’ve gotten the deep sleep.

 

And you’ve gotten a little bit of REM. But I  personally feel like if I miss if I miss more of the deep sleep, I might want simpler foods.  Like it makes my mouth feel yucky if I’m deeply bone tired, if I miss more of that first part. And then if I’m just waking up too early, if I’m missing that last 90 minute sleep cycle by cutting my sleep to six and a half hours, instead of eight. 

 

That tends to make me munchy throughout the day and a little touchier. So I feel like it’s more of the emotional piece that comes to the forefront.  And I do know people that say if they’re completely exhausted, then they don’t want to eat.  But it’s when we’re a little bit underslept that we tend to get munchy. 

 

 This is so good. This is really good.  I’m just looking over my notes.   So Jen, can you share with us some of your tips on how to get better sleep?  All right So the first thing to realize is  for most people as you get older  you need to be a little more systematic  And there’s all sorts of great advice out there about sleep hygiene, right?

 

You’re not scrolling on your phone  You don’t  Do all your homework for your, your class and your bed, and you don’t use your bed for things other than sleeping.  And,  if you are finding yourself tossing and turning a lot, it makes sense to get up and change locations so that you’re not coming to see your bed as a place where you just toss and turn.

 

So there’s that’s general sleep hygiene advice  and get the room a comfortable temperature and make sure your beddings comfortable that sort of thing  now specific to middle aged women You might start to get a little bit of hot flashy kind of stuff at night or just not night sweats But just feel restless and our brains start to wake up at 2 a.

 

19. Or You’re up from 2 to 4, you just can’t settle. Do I need a snack? Am I thirsty? Oh, I’ve got to go to the bathroom. Which, you never had to go to the bathroom in the middle of the night when you were 19. And what I end up telling a lot of ladies and they find out for themselves through experimenting also is it’s helpful to get outside at some point in the first half of the day.

 

The earlier, the better to set your circadian rhythm. We have to set it, to some degree every day anyway.  But I have found that as I get older, I have to be a little more assertive in how I set it.  And so if I get out for even 10 minutes, early in the morning around sunrise, right before, after sunrise.

 

Even a little bit of time seems to set it. If I’m getting out more middle or later of the day, it seems that it takes a little bit longer time  to send that signal to my brain of what time of day it is and when I should be going to bed.  Interesting. But I think most people have experienced this when they go camping.

 

How easy it is to fall asleep when you’re camping  from the super clear Signals that your brain got all day about what time it is. It’s day. It’s day. It’s day. Oh, it’s afternoon evening The other thing that I encourage them to do is hydrate really well throughout the day  so that you’re well hydrated going into it and nourish yourself well throughout the day.

 

Because if you  are having disrupted sleep, it’s possible that you ate a bunch of your food late in the evening or you just didn’t eat enough in the day overall.  And when I’m talking to women who are in their 30s or 40s and nursing a baby, because some of, they have younger children,  then it’s a particular challenge to stay nourished and stay hydrated.

 

Or if you’re an athlete,  It can be a particular challenge to stay nourished and hydrated as we get older and our sleep is a little more unreliable.  And then another main thing that people notice is their sensitivity to caffeine changes as they get older. They have to have an earlier cut off time,  or they can’t have that second cup of coffee at 2 p.

 

11. They’ll be up till 11. And then the other thing that people notice is their sensitivity to alcohol can change.  As you get older, you tend to notice  that the alcohol is changing how you sleep. 

 

So women will come to me and say, yeah, now that I’m 43, I just can’t have a glass of wine  two hours before I go to bed. I’m gonna toss and turn a little bit.  And, or, I can’t have, two glasses of wine, even with a really nice, long, slow dinner.  Even if I hydrate. So your tolerance, of course, is going to be individual to you. 

 

And there’s ways to hydrate and make sure your body gets what it needs, but just processing the alcohol.  is a sleep disruptor for many people. So just be aware of that and plan accordingly. If you’re gonna be out at a social event, just, make a choice about whether you’re willing to potentially take a little bit of a hit on your sleep. 

 

And some people find that it’s worth it and some don’t.  There’s also supplements that people sometimes use, such as magnesium, which is calming, people take this at night. Glycine, which is, an amino acid that’s calming. Inositol is a B vitamin that’s calming. And they actually make combo powders that include all of these that you can buy on Amazon.

 

Like sleep powder,  and they have cool names and it’s very easy to find things like that.  But I would say do all the sleep hygiene things first and set your circadian rhythm because that’s to your advantage in so many ways.  And just to clarify, when you say set your circadian rhythm, it’s essentially because we live indoors.

 

It is an opportunity to go outside and your brain can be like, Hey, it’s daytime. It’s time to be awake. And then it can go through the rest of your day knowing that it will eventually go to sleep. Our eyes are sensing whatever different quality of light is at different times of day. And that’s telling our brains. 

 

What time of day it is, more or less.  And so you can technically set your circadian rhythm by being out at a  Set it in the daylight at any time of day.  But it seems anecdotally and research wise that it’s more powerful to set it in the first half of the day. If you can get sunlight in the first half of the day, it seems to set your circadian rhythm a little more assertively. 

 

I love that.  With regard to the sleep hygiene, I just wanted to say a couple tips that I have found and that my husband and I both really like. We set our thermostat down to colder at night. We also have fans in our room, mostly for the white noise. Yep. And then finally, you guys, I have trained my brain to not have emotional thoughts or heavier thoughts.

 

I have simpler thoughts before going to bed. And then when I wake up in the middle of the night, so when I’m laying in bed, I’m only allowed to either pray the rosary or pray the rosary.  Exactly. Exactly. If I’m worrying about it, I’ll find myself worrying about something and you’re questioning every life decision at 2.

 

30 in the morning  and then it’s time to pray. And then I have hardly ever stayed awake through a whole rosary or even a whole decade. Yeah I find that, I don’t wake up worrying. I wake up thinking of oh, you know what would be a great holiday program for the ladies? And that is so stimulating and it starts to wake up my brain because it’s exciting.

 

And then I was like, no, we can’t do that right now. It’s rosary time. And I really say there’s no other thoughts. We’re not allowed to think about anything else. So I thought that was funny.  Oh my gosh, Jen. Is there anything else with regard to sleep or anything else you’d like to share with our audience?

 

Before we talk about how they can find you and any of your upcoming programs? I just encourage you to look at where your time’s going and your energy and figure out a solution that works for you.  Very often women are short on sleep because we want to be there for all the people all the time.  And they do not need us actually every hour they are awake once they’re about three years old. 

 

 I just encourage you to realize that you can be a good mother, wife, sister, friend, and still  take care of yourself.

 

And that actually, Taking care of yourself makes you a better wife, sister, mom, friend. If you’re Mother Teresa, if you’re an actual saint, maybe you’ll manage to be nice to everybody when you’re sleep deprived, but most of us are not. So it’s a lot simpler to just get enough sleep and try to take decent care of ourselves.

 

And then it’s a lot easier To be a good person.  All right, Jen. I so appreciate all this information I know it’s so valuable for our audience. So tell everyone where they can find you and what you have coming up,  I’m at bright families on Instagram and bright families calm as my website I also have a couple Facebook groups bright families nutrition and bright moms They’re very easy to find.

 

They’re attached to my name, Jen Dunlap.  And I have an online course that moms can watch 10 minutes at a time whenever works for them. It covers sleep and so many other things that come up for moms to take good care of themselves. And like I said, it’s the short versions of everything with the most action steps

 

I also teach live zoom classes for teens about a lot of these, and I do one on one coaching for moms and  a mom’s club that meets three weeks a month for an hour on zoom and we have topics and also Q& A time.   I love it. Thank you so much for sharing your time with us today.

 

Okay, everybody. So if you have any more questions about sleep, you can reach out to Jen specifically. All right. Have a blessed day.