The Ultimate Guide to Curing Insomnia
A step-by-step guide to fixing your sleep
Disclaimer: This content is not intended as treatment or support for any medical condition. Content for entertainment purposes only. Not medical or health advice.
Are you struggling to wind down in the evenings? Does it take you hours to fall asleep? Or maybe you wake up in the middle of the night, covered in cold sweats or with a racing mind? Whatever your sleep disturbance may be, the solution is here. This article provides a comprehensive explanation of the many causes at the root of various sleep disturbances that many suffer from, and what to do to remediate them. You might be surprised to see that quite a few of the recommendations in this article might differ significantly from many of the sleep-remediation strategies out there.
My sleep sucked too, and now I want to help you
For most of my life, sleep was not something that I had to think about deeply. Nightfall came, I closed my eyes and came back online 8 hours later. Whether I was going through a period of excessive psychological stress, undereating, excessively worrying about something silly, or staring at a laptop screen set to full brightness immediately before bed, my sleep seemed bulletproof. However, as I came to learn, there are only so many stressors that a body can accumulate throughout life until one of its most basic functions - sleep - starts falling apart.
My first major encounter with restless sleep was a few-month-long episode of night-waking that I experienced in 2018. However, that one was quite easily remediated, and after overcoming it, I thought that any sort of sleep problems were now far behind me. Little did I know, the “final boss” battle was still ahead of me.
In 2021, a perfect storm of factors mostly outside of my control, most notably the long-lasting lockdown, the consequences of which flipped many aspects of my life upside down and resulted in a massive amount of psychological stress, contributed to my sleep falling apart to a degree that I didn’t know was possible. This time around it took significantly more effort to pull my sleep out of a hole.
I can say comfortably now that there is no worse hell than the inability to sleep. Gut issues suck, skin issues suck, menstrual issues suck, but nothing sucks worse than the inability to sleep. Nothing is also more insidious, because the worse that you sleep is, the worse your ability to get good sleep gets, as your cortisol levels increase and emotions from the previous day fail to get processed properly.
The silver lining is that thanks to the severe sleep disturbances that I endured in 2021, I learned quite a bit about what it takes to fix insomnia and its underlying causes, and am now able to share the same knowledge with you, to hopefully help you dig yourself out of the awful sleep limbo.
Sleep issues are like an onion, in the sense that they are a symptom of a bigger issue burrowing in the background, and the harder that they are to remediate, the deeper inside the onion the underlying issue is.
The various layers of this metaphorical onion that play into sleep issues include nutrition, supplementation, hormonal and metabolic health, gut and liver health, circadian rhythm, light hygiene, and exercise, but also psychological stress, trauma, social connections, lack of purpose, or a general way of existing that is out of alignment with basic human needs.
The goal of this article is to give you the ultimate guide to getting to the bottom of your sleep issues. Some of these solutions will be easy to implement, others not. How difficult of a task fixing your sleep will be for you depends on how deep within the metaphorical onion the core problem at the root of your sleep issues lays.
This article is divided into two main parts. The first part focuses on the “theory,” aka, an explanation of the “how” behind how gut issues, liver issues, low metabolic function, our daily habits and high levels of certain hormones/neurotransmitters contribute to bad sleep. For example, you might be surprised to find out that serotonin (the neurotransmitter colloquially dubbed the “happy hormone”) can have a key role in ruining your sleep.
The second part focuses on the practical application of the theory, or, in other words, actionable steps for curing your insomnia.
The “actionable steps” portion of this article will go “layer by layer,” meaning that if you are struggling with sleep issues, try to first make all the changes outlined in the first batch of recommendations. Once you’ve done so, ideally your sleep issues should be resolved. If they still persist then and only then move on to the second batch of recommendations. And so on.
In total, the recommendations span across four “layers,” and the recommendations ascend from more foundational and easily implementable ones to ones that are more specialized and will require an audit and a re-evaluation of larger aspects of one’s life.
If you simply want to know what to do, you can skip directly to the recommendations portion. However, many of the recommendations might be at odds with what you may have heard elsewhere, and the first part of the article will help you understand why certain things are being recommended.
In this article:
What does good sleep look like?
Serotonin and insomnia
The not-so-happy “hormone”
Serotonin and sleep, the complicated relationship
Why supplementing melatonin and 5-HTP are bad ideas
How poor liver & gut health can lead to insomnia
How a low metabolism can lead to insomnia
Boredom, fear, and how unpleasant life experiences can mess with your sleep
Fixing your sleep
Layer 1: Circadian rhythm & blood sugar control
Level 2: Food tweaks & room modification
Level 3: Targeted supplementation & sleep-promoting behaviours
Level 4: It’s time for drastic measures
What does good sleep actually look like?
Ideally, a person should be able to fall asleep quickly in the evening, sleep for 7-8 hours straight through, and wake up rejuvenated and refreshed.
There are many sleep disturbances that get totally normalized, such as waking up (sometimes multiple times per night) to pee, taking hours to fall asleep, waking up in the middle of the night and struggling to fall back asleep, sleeping only 5-6 hours per night on a regular basis, or experiencing nightmares that leave you exhausted.
Due to the normalization of bad sleep, many might not realize that their sleep is disordered. While extreme forms of insomnia (such as a total inability to sleep for multiple nights in a row, struggling to fall asleep before 4 am, or only sleeping 3 hours per night) are more likely to get someone’s attention and get them to work on improving their sleep, the more “tolerable” forms of bad sleep are more likely to get ignored. However, since suboptimal sleep is disastrous as far as our hormonal, metabolic and mental health goes, these subtle sleep disturbances shouldn’t be ignored.
If you find yourself waking up tired, experiencing restless sleeps, or having to wake up to pee multiple times per night, this article will definitely be of value to you.
Serotonin and insomnia
In order to understand what high serotonin levels have to do with insomnia, we must first revisit our understanding of serotonin and what it does. I assume that many of those reading this article might have only heard of serotonin in the context of it being the “happy hormone.”
However, in order to understand how serotonin can make us sleepless, we need to first understand how serotonin affects our physiology and all the factors that raise its levels.
To this I pose the question - What do inescapable stress, gut irritation, low metabolic function and liver injury all have in common? They all increase…serotonin. Keep reading to find out how.