Beyul Training

Hello Everyone,

I think I am starting to feel the effects of a little bit of chronically high cortisol. I have been having trouble sleeping through the night and find myself waking up every couple of hours. This makes me nervous because interrupted sleep patterns are an early sign of high cortisol.

In a healthy individual cortisol should be high in the morning (helps wake you up) and the level should steadily decrease throughout the day. At night, when your levels are at the lowest your melatonin level should be at its highest, and this combo = sleep time. When your cortisol level starts to stray from this pattern you start getting that “Tired and Wired” feeling. The “Tired and Wired” feeling is usually the first stage of adrenal fatigue ( A Q&A from Robb Wolf regarding his own Adrenal Fatigue). If you have ever felt tired at night but for some reason you can’t get to sleep, that’s “Tired and Wired”.

The second stage of adrenal fatigue is when your cortisol levels follow a contrary pattern to the norm (low in the morning and high at night). Ever wake up and feel like someone punched you in the face, but for some reason at night you have a ton of energy? Thats stage 2 of adrenal fatigue.

Finally, the last phase, which isn’t pretty, is chronically LOW levels of cortisol. Your body pretty much shuts down and this is when depression and utter exhaustion sets in. This is UGLY and takes weeks of proper sleep, stress management, and a healthy diet to get you back inline.

With that said, I think it is pretty important to be aware of adrenal fatigue and to be able to take the necessary precautions to avoid ever going into adrenal fatigue. As athletes, its extraordinarily important to focus on preventative measures that reduce cortisol levels while minimizing activities that promote cortisol levels.

Things that promote cortisol are poor sleep quality, a diet high in sugar and refined carbohydrates, a stressful lifestyle, and overtraining (Working out can cause high cortisol, what!?). This is another reason why I always stress diet, sleep, and smart programming for all clients.

I am going to tackle my sleep, because at the moment I believe it is the part of my life that is contributing the most to my fatigue. If you want to be scared into sleeping more at night give this a read Lights Out: Sleep, Sugar, and Survival. It is a good read, but I do wish it was supported by empirical data a little bit more, but most of the reasoning is sound.

The book makes the argument that when you deviate from the standard circadian sleep cycle (sleep soon after dusk and wake soon after dawn), you can start doing some serious damage to your body. She argues the main culprit for screwed up sleep cycles is an overexposure to artificial light.

The author argued if we limited our exposure to artificial light and turned the lights out, when the sun went down, we all would be a lot better off. Obviously we all won’t be ditching our computers and TVs for candle light anytime soon. So, with that said I wanted to point out a couple practical pieces of advice that everyone should try to do:

Try to make your room as dark as possible: Use dark curtains/shades, turn off all electronic devices and tape any LED displays so no light comes through.

Keep your bedroom slightly cool: Think dark cave…

Don’t use the computer, or watch TV within a couple hours of bedtime.

Last night I taped the LED display from our cable box and baby monitor for the first time and it made a WORLD of difference. You would be amazed by the amount of light that can emanate from a simple alarm clock or cable box display.

On the computer throughout your day? Try installing f.lux. It controls the color temperature of your monitor based on the time of day.

Just so you know I’m not just speaking crazy talk, the effects of artificial light are getting into the mainstream media. Take a look at an article at CNN that talks about a personal experiment to eliminate light after dusk.

I will be employing a couple of these techniques in the following days, and hopefully I can get back to some restful sleep.

To recap:

If you sleep in a room like this…

Anyone have some E?

Train like this…

Then this happens

-Dana