What if I told you that there was one simple shift that could help with your hormones, help you manage your weight and help decrease anxiety, and it has nothing to do with eating less or trying harder. Your body runs on an internal clock called your circadian rhythm. And I am going to teach you how you can hijack your circadian rhythm and program your circadian rhythm to help you with all of these things, the circadian rhythm is working quietly in the background to control how your hormones are released, but it also helps your metabolism work better. It controls how you sleep, it controls how you handle stress, and it even helps how your brain processes in motion when that clock is aligned, everything works better. So I'm going to get into exactly what we're doing that is making our circadian rhythm imbalanced. And tell you the very simple things you can do today right now to get that circadian rhythm back online and get you sleeping better, feeling energetic all day, and getting your hormones balanced. So let's get started.
Sometimes things like this can sound really complex and boring, but the circadian rhythm is actually one of the most impactful things that I see make a difference in patients' lives. This is something that people come back and say, Wow, I can't believe that actually worked. Stay with me and we're going to talk about how this can impact your life. So when we talk about circadian rhythm, this is our sleep wake cycle, we have a little area in the brain that just really controls our clock. It's really our internal clock that helps us understand where we exist in time and space in the world around us, and that clock speaks to other peripheral clocks that live in certain organs. One of those organs is our ovaries, but it also goes to our gut and our liver, our pancreas, our thyroid, all of these different organs rely on our central clock from our brain to know what we should do throughout the day. We have several systems in our body that rely on a rhythm, that rely on this waxing and waning, and our hormones are the best cycle that we're aware of, right? We know that that has a monthly cycle, but it can also have a daily cycle, and we also know that our eating has a daily cycle. And all of these cycles are related to our circadian rhythm. Circadian rhythm is based on three main signals. One of those is light. When we see light in our eyeballs, then that's how our body knows that the day has started. Our eyeballs have actually specific receptors, cellular receptors in them that really are just there to sense what kind of light is going on around us. So I'm going to come back later to how we can utilize those little receptors to program our bodies. So the first main signal is light. The second main signal is food. When we eat, that signals to our body that our day is starting. Now there's some nuance here that I'll come back to, but just take that for now, that food is another big timing signal in our body's natural circadian rhythm and clock. And then the third main signal is sleep. When we're asleep, then the body does certain things. And when we're awake, the body does certain things. Now, if all of this aligns, what this should look like is that we should wake up and get light in our eyeballs. Then we should get more light throughout the day, until midday, when we get the brightest light, and then that light should go away through the evening, until we get darkness. And then we should sleep. We should have eaten somewhere in there, right? This is what it should happen. If we're not doing that, then there's a good chance that our circadian rhythm can get confused. Think about people who work graveyard, right? That can be really difficult, because someone has to take care of patients in a hospital at nighttime, and yet it's still not very good for our bodies. Our bodies do not really know what to do with that information. When it sees light, when you're exhausted, and then you go to sleep, and then it wakes up and it's dark outside and you're eating at random times, it's really confusing for the body. So these are the three main cues that we want to get right for our bodies. Circadian rhythm affects multiple different systems in our bodies. So I want to go through that a little bit. The first system that I want to talk about is our stress system, our cortisol. We often think of cortisol as a bad thing, right? My cortisol is high, therefore I'm not doing very well, but that's not really the case. If you didn't have any cortisol, you would be dead, right? So cortisol is our stay safe hormone. It's also our Go get them hormone. So when we wake up in the morning, the cortisol should be high. It should have this big spike, and we should feel great. We should have our spike that then leads us to go eat. That then leads us to go work and do what we need to do to have energy, to have our brains to work well, our blood sugar should feel nice and stable through the day, and then our cortisol should start to die off as the sun sets. If this rhythm is disrupted, then we might feel really wide awake but tired at the same time. Or it might translate into being really sluggish in the morning and then again, really sluggish in the afternoon, where our body just doesn't know what to do. It might also translate to a. Different hunger cues, and we'll come back to that in a second. So this cortisol really should match the circadian rhythm very closely. We also know that cortisol and melatonin have to play in a rhythm with each other. As the cortisol goes down, the melatonin comes up. If the cortisol stays high, the melatonin can't come high, and melatonin is what's supposed to help us go to sleep. So now we see if our circadian rhythm is messed up, then our cortisol is messed up, then our melatonin is messed up, then our sleep is off, which then makes our circadian rhythm even worse. So it can create this self perpetuating cycle that can cause problems. Now the next system that we know our circadian rhythm is very closely attuned with is our metabolic health and therefore our weight. So in the circadian rhythm, we should wake up and have a lot of insulin sensitivity. We should wake up and feel like we are ready to go. We're going to go eat some carbs, eat some glucose, go hunting, and that insulin will allow the blood sugar to come back down very easily. That should continue through the day, and towards the end of the day, we should not be as insulin sensitive, meaning our bodies are not planning to eat when it's dark outside. That's really not the way that we were built. You've heard me talk a lot about the cave woman before, if you've listened and the cave woman is very much at play here. Our bodies, at the circadian rhythm, were built around the cave woman's routine. Wake up, go get food, stop eating, go to bed. And so part of that is that our bodies don't tolerate that food late at night as well. So we will actually respond less well to carbohydrates and sugars late at night. When you're having your milkshake before bed, it's going to be handled less well in your body right before bed than it would earlier in the day. This is planned to be that way. That's part of how our body should metabolize through the day again. If our circadian rhythm is disrupted, then we're going to have problems with our metabolic health. The other thing we have to talk about when we're talking about circadian rhythm and metabolic health are two hormones called ghrelin and leptin. Ghrelin is one of our hormones that stimulates hunger. So when we've had a healthy amount of time with no light, it's been dark, we've been sleeping, and then we start to see light. First thing in the morning, our ghrelin will go up. So we will have hunger. Once we've eaten, our leptin should go up. Leptin is the body's cue of I've had enough to eat, I don't need anything else to eat, and so leptin should go up towards the end of the day, where we say, I don't need any late night snack. I'm good. I'm full. When our circadian rhythm is disrupted, then those hormones can get flipped around or just not turn off. Oftentimes, people with chronic sleep deprivation will have high leptin levels chronically, and that leptin should be saying you're full, you're full, you're full. But we'll also develop leptin resistance, where the brain says, I don't hear you. And so if we're staying up late, if we're not getting enough sleep, the body will be trying to tell you to stop eating, but the other part of the body that's supposed to hear that message won't hear it, and you'll just keep eating and eating and eating. Therefore, when we have circadian rhythm disruption, we'll often gain weight. Not many of us want that ghrelin will do the same thing. If we have sleep deprivation or disruption of our sleep cycles, then that ghrelin increases and we just feel hungry all the time. So the ghrelin is high, telling us we're hungry all the time. And the leptin, you have leptin resistance, where the brain isn't hearing that satiety cue, this leads to just eating more and feeling like you have cravings all the time, especially nighttime cravings, this can be an indicator that your circadian rhythm is not in tune with the rest of your body. There's other systems that can be affected as well, namely our cholesterol and our blood pressure. Our blood pressure is supposed to actually have this dip while we're sleeping at night. It's called the nocturnal dip, and if we don't, that can be really bad for our blood vessel health and therefore our cardiovascular health. And the way that we get the cue to have that dipping of our blood pressure at night is part of our circadian rhythm. If we stay up too late, if we get disruption of our sleep chronically, if we are just not getting enough sleep chronically, we're not getting that dip down, and you can have worsening chronic hypertension and cardiovascular disease. This is true also of our cholesterol. Our cholesterol revolves around this awake time and sleep time, and if that's disjointed, then that will also affect our cholesterol levels.
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So I don't have to spend time looking at the labels and trying to find the ingredients that trying to remember what I was supposed to avoid. They just do that all for me. So I know anything that I buy from them is already screened and is something that I can trust. Use code uplift for her for 10% off at just ingredients.us, now, back to the show. And then the last system I'm going to talk about is our reproductive hormone system. This is the one that really comes up in my clinic the most is that when women have reproductive dysfunction, so that might be heavy periods, that might be worsening, PMS, that might be PCOS, even hypothyroidism, irregular cycles. These are all more common when we have significant circadian disruption and sleep disruption. So one of the things that we do when we're trying to balance hormones is really pay attention to the sleep cycle. As you may imagine. This is not always easy to convince people to do, because it seems a little bit silly, right? So you're telling me I have all of these medical conditions. I'm gaining weight, I'm exhausted every afternoon. I feel anxious all the time for no good reason, and also my periods are really irregular. And you're telling me, Dr craycroft, that all you want to do is fix my circadian rhythm. And yes, that is what I'm telling you. It's at least one of the very first things that I would do, because that circadian rhythm communicates with a part of our brain called the hypothalamus. The hypothalamus acts through a series of pulses. We think that our hormones just change throughout our menstrual cycle, throughout the month, but actually they're changing all throughout the day through a series of pulses from the brain goes from the hypothalamus to the pituitary, then to the ovaries, and it's those pulses that need to be timed appropriately to get the ovaries to respond appropriately. So just having a flat amount of hormone at the right time is not nearly enough. That's why we're not very good at just giving hormones and having it perfectly mimic the female menstrual cycle. We actually have to get the brain to pulse in the right rhythm to get the ovaries to respond, and that's then how we start to see the hormones all balance out. Now, there may be other things that are causing fertility or hormone disruptions, but this is a big part of it, and it's one of the easiest things, actually, to fix. Before I tell you how to fix it, let's just review. How do we know how our circadian rhythm is doing. What are the signs that it's working just great? What I want to do is I want to talk through what it should feel like in a day. So when you wake up, you should wake up feeling okay. You shouldn't be snoozing your alarm 10 times. You shouldn't feel like you can barely get out of bed. You should be able to get out of bed now. You may not feel like a million bucks when your alarm goes off, but you should be able to get your feet on the floor, get out of bed and move on with your day. One of the other markers that I like to hear from patients is how long it takes for that morning sluggishness to burn off. Some people just have a hard time getting out of bed. I'm probably one of those. I really like my bed, but when I get up these days, that burns off really quickly. By the time I'm in the bathroom and starting to wash my face, I'm fine. It takes maybe a minute, maybe two minutes, before I'm totally fine for the day. In another time when my circadian rhythm was really disrupted as a busy OBGYN staying up all night, who knows what my circadian rhythm was doing. I had a lot of issues with that, but one of them was that I was absolutely and utterly exhausted when I got out of bed in the morning, it might take me 234, hours before I even felt like I could get going. And then I would get like, one good hour, and then I would tank in the afternoon. So that was a sign that my circadian rhythm was not working well. So you should wake up feeling good with energy, then you should have some hunger in the morning. Ideally, this one can be variable because of the way that insulin works and because of insulin resistance and because of training when we eat, but in general, we should wake up feeling like I'm ready to go for the day. Let me go get a meal and get started with a bang. Now, we should also feel pretty steady energy through the day. We shouldn't need caffeine spikes and we shouldn't feel a big crash in the afternoon. Along with that, we should feel like our satiety cues are appropriate. I ate a meal. I'm not hungry anymore. I'm good. I can now go about my day again. There can be other things that can affect our hunger and satiety cues, but this can be a major part of it that's sitting there waiting for us to fix it with no supplements and no expensive gadgets, we just need to take some simple steps to get our bodies in line with a healthy circadian rhythm, and it will help our cravings and our hunger and satiety cues. Then we should have good energy through the afternoon, and then we should start feeling sleepy at night. We should lay down, close our eyes and go to sleep. So having insomnia can be another symptom of circadian rhythm dysfunction. Is where we feel like we're just getting our second wind in the evening. Now some people probably truly are night owls, right? They just really do their best work at night. And so there is some wiggle room here for individuality, but for most of us. We shouldn't feel wired and revved up at night. We should feel like I am ready to settle down. I'm ready to curl up in my bed and maybe have some a warm beverage or do some stretching, but really then drift off to sleep. Another symptom of circadian rhythm dysfunction is waking up in the middle of the night. I see this most from two to 4am people will wake at two to 4am say, I can't get back to sleep. Sometimes this can be for other reasons, like progesterone, but stress is a big reason for waking up at two to 4am remember, if our sleep cycle is in line with our stress cycle, then we should be fighting Tigers through the day, and then we should go home to our village and be safe. So our cortisol should start to go down as the sun is setting, which means our melatonin should go up, and that melatonin should stay up through the bulk of the night and keep us asleep until the cortisol starts coming up in the morning. And if we're waking at two to 4am that's a symptom that either the cortisol is spiking or that the melatonin is not staying in where it should be. So we wake up feeling like we want to go fight all the Tigers, solve all of life's problems right in the middle of the night, and it can also be very difficult to go back to sleep. Irregular Periods can also go along with this. Constipation. Can go along with this feeling weight gain, or like your weight is stuck no matter what, or cravings, feeling tired, but also really restless and like you can't just drift off to sleep, those are all symptoms of circadian rhythm problems.
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Now, back to the show. Here's the part you've all been waiting for. Now what do we do about this? How do we fix it? This actually is pretty straightforward. It does take some discipline and habit change, but it really is quite simple. And the very first thing that I recommend is get light in your eyeballs. Natural light in your eyeballs within the first few minutes of waking when my circadian rhythm was really out of shape, then I would lay in my bed and I could see when my alarm went off, that the sun had risen, but we had blackout blinds in my bedroom, and so there was a tiny little sliver of light that would peek out from the edge of the blackout blind and the edge of the window frame, and I would just stare at it and try to get as much of that little sliver of light in my eyeballs. And soon I graduated from that and I could make it to the bathroom, and then I would look out my bathroom window and try to get that light in my eyeballs. And it truly made more of a difference for me than just about anything else that I did in those early days of really severe fatigue, just getting that natural light. Now you could do better than I did and go stand on your porch or your deck and just get some direct natural light into your eyeballs. Some people will get fancy and say, you need 10 to 20 minutes. That's probably true. I've never been able to get those 10 to 20 minutes. For me, it's like 10 to 20 seconds. And I swear it makes a difference for me, so I hope it will make a difference for you. But that light in the eyeballs quickly within waking some people will say, within 30 minutes, I think the sooner, the better. But Don't over complicate it. Just go to the window and get the light in your eyeballs. The next thing that can make a difference is a protein rich breakfast. This is sort of the body's cue. Your ghrelin should be coming up you ate, and then hopefully the leptin is coming up to say you're full, and there you go. The morning's done, right? I can put the food behind me, and I can move on and go to work and get things done that I need to hopefully, at this point, my brain is feeling pretty alert. I'm able to think clearly through things. I have enough calories around so that my brain has the energy to work. This is what's supposed to happen occasionally when we're talking about metabolic health, we'll talk about maybe fasting through the morning. So that's a little bit of a different situation, but assuming that all is going well, then I would recommend eating that breakfast first thing in the morning. The other thing I will say is, when we have multiple problems, like some people will listen and be like, Well, I'm tired and I've got afternoon fatigue, but also my hormones are off, and I'm gaining weight and all of these different things. Sometimes we have to fix one thing at a time, and I think sleep and the circadian rhythm are one of the first things we should focus on that and probably eating enough food more than what to eliminate, more than how to exercise, more than how to fast and fix our ins. And resistance. I think first we need to go to sleep and wake up correctly and then eat, emphasizing this rhythm. So I would start adding breakfast before I would ever take breakfast away, make sure that it's got enough nutrients, so plenty of protein within that first one to two hours of waking up. And then the next thing that I would do is I would try to get light in my eyeballs right in the middle of the day, like 1pm can you go to a window in your office or in your house or wherever you're at? Can you go to a window, look out the window, and get that light directly into your eyeballs? If you can go for a walk. Even better, that direct signal in our eyeballs in the middle of the day is signaling our body that 12 hours later should be the middle of the night. This is especially helpful for children, actually, if you can get kids, and especially babies, who you're trying to get them onto their appropriate sleep cycle, that midday, bright light can be really powerful. I have a two month old, a two month old newborn, at home, and the first week was survival, but this was one of the first things that I did with her in that second week was, can she get some natural light right early in the morning, eight, 9am
and then can we go outside somewhere between 11am and 1pm and just get some natural light on her skin or in her eyeballs just to reset her sleep rhythm? And I feel like it makes a major difference with babies. So just like the babies need to learn when they should be awake and when they should be asleep, we need to remind ourselves when we should be awake and when we should be asleep. And waking up in the morning, getting that light, getting that food, can really help that. And then again, in the middle of the day, and then this goes to follow, which is not going to be a surprise, the end of the day, then should be our winding down time. This isn't the ideal time to get our cardiovascular exercise in revving us up. This probably isn't the best time to work out all of your marital issues before bed. This probably isn't the best time to be doing our most intensive work for the day. We want this to be a time that we can settle down now. That's not always going to work, right? There are going to be some of us that that just doesn't have just doesn't happen, and that's okay, but especially when we're trying to reset our circadian rhythm, this is when we want to be a little more picky about it. The next thing that I would add at night is cutting down on screen time, at night time, and this is why I preface it with it doesn't have to be perfect, but when we're trying to reset our circadian rhythm, that's a good time for it to be perfect. This can be really tricky, because a lot of us get wrapped up for the day, whether that's getting kids in bed or finishing our work or whatever it is. We get that wrapped up and then we just want to check out, we just want to scroll or watch a show or just do nothing in that time. And that works for some people, but when you're trying to reset your circadian rhythm, that doesn't always help. And so really limiting the amount of screen time and stimulation that we can have right before bed is a really important cue to the body of it's time to go to sleep. I aim for about a month to two months of getting this cycle right before you start to cheat, and maybe you watch a show with your spouse, or maybe you, you know, scroll a little bit or watch a show yourself, but trying to be pretty good about avoiding that light at night is the better way to get your circadian rhythm in balance. Now, the other thing that goes along with cutting down on screen time and stimulation at night is cutting down on effort digesting at night. So this would mean, ideally, stopping eating at least two to three hours before bed. Now, if you stop eating after dinner at six o'clock, then that's even better, but at least two hours before bed, so that your gut is not working on digesting all night, your gut can rest as well while your body is doing the things that it's supposed to be doing during sleep. Well, what is it supposed to be doing during sleep? It's supposed to be doing its immune system work. It's supposed to be repairing itself. It's supposed to be cleaning things out. It's when the body goes through and does a lot of the housekeeping, like clean out dead cell parts and replace broken cell parts with new ones. This happens while we're deep in sleep. Well, if we're digesting and our glucose levels are high and then dipping down, or we're secretly worried in the back of our brains while we're trying to sleep, then it's going to be really difficult for the body to prioritize repair and recovery. So this circadian rhythm is more than just about having energy in the day. It's also about allowing us to get the good things that are supposed to happen at night while you're sleeping. Of course, this is probably not news to most of you, aiming for a good environment. This should be cool, this should be dark, this should be quiet, hopefully getting rid of any ambient light or any alarm clock lights or cell phone lights. Some people are sensitive to EMF, and so trying to get your cell phone out of your room. If that's something that's a problem for you, just really trying to have this really lovely sleep cave so that you can just be in a deep, restorative sleep throughout the night. Sometimes we will need additional support to get the circadian rhythm in order. Or maybe melatonin, maybe magnesium glycinate, maybe ashwagandha, but definitely the morning sunlight is the number one thing that I would aim for if you're trying to reset this now, again, like I mentioned, don't feel too overwhelmed by this. Maybe this isn't something that you can do perfectly right now, if this is something you're struggling with. However, I would really try to tighten your habits up at least a week, maybe two weeks at the bare minimum, and you should start to see your body reset if you can keep it going a little bit longer than you're just really cementing in that sleep rhythm. This is especially important if you do work graveyards, that when you're not working nights, you can kind of get right back into this routine, so your body at least knows where it's headed. This is also really important for people who are traveling and changing time zones. When you're at your time zone, do these steps to give your body the cues that it needs when you move to the new time zone, get that first morning light and then that midday light, eat at the appropriate times and then decrease light and stop eating at the appropriate times in the later part of the day, so that your body knows what it's supposed to be doing. This may take three cycles or so before you start seeing it affect hormones. Sometimes it takes a little bit longer, and sometimes it's a little bit faster, but you really should start to see your body work better. Hormones, cortisol, hunger cues and cravings, weight loss, immune system, you should see the body really start to repair itself as you go into these really healthy circadian rhythm. So if there's one thing I want you to remember, it's that the circadian rhythm is not just about sleep. It's really about programming your hormones to do the things that you want them to do. If it's not supporting you in those ways, it's just because it's confused by the circadian rhythm cues. So we can teach it how to do the right things, and then our bodies will feel like they're working better, which is really what we want out of life. We want our bodies to feel like they are just supporting us and working really well. So try it out. Report back. Let me know how it goes for you. I'd love to hear about your experience with this, and we'll talk to you next time. Thank you so much for tuning in to today's episode. We are grateful for the incredible support from our sponsors and to all of you listening. We couldn't do this without you. If you enjoyed this episode, please consider subscribing on your favorite platform. You can find us on our website, uplift for her calm YouTube, Apple podcast, Spotify, or wherever you love to listen. And if you found value here today, please share this episode with someone who would benefit from it. Leave us a comment or give us a review. It really helps us reach more listeners like you. Thank you for being part of our community. Stay tuned for our next episode. Lastly, this information is for educational purposes only and not intended to be medical advice.
