Dr. Taz:

The blue light hits our pineal gland. The frequencies impact our ability to rest, and that in turn keeps us in this state of light sleep or superficial sleep where we’re kind of awake but not truly asleep. And in turn, we wake up not feeling refreshed, not feeling quite as good as we could.

Hi everyone, and welcome to Super Woman Wellness. I’m Dr. Taz. I’ve made it my mission throughout my career in integrative medicine to support women in restoring their health using a blend of eastern medical wisdom with modern science. In this show, I will guide you through different practices to find your power type and fully embody the healthiest and most passionate version of you. I’m here for you and I can’t wait to get started. This is a soul fire production.

Welcome back everyone. Welcome back to another episode of Super Woman Wellness, where we’re determined to bring you back to your superpower self. Today, yours truly, me, I’m going to talk to you guys a little bit about sleep. I’m just meeting a ton of people coming in and having a really hard time sleeping. Now that’s trouble falling asleep, trouble staying asleep, and a little bit of both sometimes. Sometimes I can say it’s hormone related. They’re having hot flashes or night sweats. Sometimes it’s purely stressed. They’ve got a lot in their minds, and for many women, they simply can’t explain it. Men are suffering from this too.

But here’s the fallout of not sleeping and remember, I was the one that used to pride myself. I’ve done ER, I don’t need a lot of sleep, but here’s the fallout. When we are not getting about seven to eight hours of deep, consistent sleep and at least 90 minutes of REM sleep and 90 minutes of deep sleep, well then we know that we don’t wake up refreshed, ready to go and ready to start the day, but more importantly, the rest of the body starts to rebel. It’s almost like the body’s like, Hey, stop. I needed more rest. Our gut health suffers. We experience more inflammation. We have more leaky gut and nutrient deficiencies, and worse of all, we have complete hormone chaos.

So it doesn’t have to be this way, and we know there’s so many ways to really improve how much sleep you’re getting on any given night, but a lot of that is built on first building really good habits and then finding products that work to help keep you asleep. And all of this is before you even touch a medication. I know a lot of you are on some of the heavy hitter medications, right? Ambien, Lunesta, Trazodone, and you’re needing these medications otherwise you simply cannot sleep. Well, what’s the answer? I’m going to break it down for you today.

We’re going to talk about strategies to really improve sleep because we know sleep is the foundation for health.

So much so that Hippocrates actually used to put sick patients in sleep chambers to help them recover and heal, knowing that the body had an incredible capacity to heal itself. All right, here we go. Let’s break this down. One of the places we always want to start, and I hope I don’t get too many eye rolls here, is with your food. Remember, your food impacts the quality of your sleep. Here’s what we know. We know that if you are drinking caffeine or alcohol or eating a lot of sugar, that will impact both deep sleep and REM sleep. Let’s get a little bit more specific. There are some of us, I think I’m one of them that are incredibly caffeine sensitive. What does that mean? That means caffeine after about 12 noon or so is still with me at seven or eight o’clock at night impacting my nighttime sleep.

So I have to be careful to cut off my caffeine before about 12 o’clock or so. Others of you can tolerate the caffeine, but if you’re having caffeine in any form, whether it’s chocolate, one of my personal favorites, coffee, tea, or even in a soda, and you’re having it too close to bedtime, well then we know it’s going to cause issues with you falling asleep. And then for some women, it actually triggers hot flashes and night sweats. Now, let’s talk about alcohol for a second. So relaxing, helps you wind down, that glass of wine, that nightcap, whatever we want to call it, but here’s what it does. It creates an insulin spike a couple of hours later, triggers hypoglycemia or a drop in your blood sugar. So many of my patients have found this and that in turn is waking you up. How do you break that cycle? Well, you don’t want to necessarily be drinking alcohol at night. It should be a treat, should certainly not be a daily habit, and I know we’ve talked about that many times before, but that’s another factor that really impacts your overall sleep.

All right, Super Women, I know the drill, right? We all live the same lifestyle. We’re running around, we’re juggling. We don’t have time for 20 different products, 20 different bottles, trying to find information and put it all together. We want solutions and we want answers. That’s why I developed the EastWest Way. It’s my product and lifestyle line full of formulas that I personally curated to really get us the answers we need. I couldn’t find anything on the market that adequately merged Eastern and Western medicine together in formulas that work and gave us the answers that we were all so desperate for. I’m right there with you guys losing hair, having acne, hormones all over the place. I needed something that worked but also worked efficiently. I didn’t have time to take an herb over here and a supplement over there and a medication may be somewhere else.

The EastWest way is the answer for all of us, and I couldn’t be prouder of the formulas that I’ve developed. If you aren’t familiar with some of the products, I

want to share some of them with you. I’ve been super excited about them and have taken a lot of time and energy to put them all together. Collaglow is one of the newer products as CollaglowC. It has collagen, amla, and goji berry. So now we’re merging together Ayurvedic and Eastern medicine concepts there for beautiful skin and hair, getting that glow and that circulation we need, and also a massive antioxidant burst and may be repairing the gut a little bit along the way with the collagen. The Defender was born out of my anger around the pandemic. It’s a combination of astragalus, vitamin C and zinc, and I use that every single day, especially when I’m traveling or worried that I might be exposed to more germs.

Boost is the hero, the hero product that started it all. The line started because I couldn’t find a methylated formula that really answered all our needs around hormones, mood, memory, and so much more. Today, Boost continues to be the product that so many people say they can’t live without. Belly Fix, again, so much around gut health I know. My patients and even I, we retired of having a bottle here, a bottle there, mixing things together, remembering to take four or five different things. Belly Fix is the gut kitchen sink. Has collagen, spirulina, prebiotics, probiotics, and so much more. I love this formula. It has been a game changer for so many people. Hormone Helper again hits close to home. I’m someone who has PCOS, as many of you know, a combination of maca, inositol, saw Palmetto and choline supporting the liver, lowering androgens. It’s our answer for really balancing hormones.

Sleep Savior, and another favorite has magnesium, melatonin and magnolia bark because oftentimes falling asleep or staying asleep or both. So we needed something to answer all of that. That combination is a triple punch, works beautifully. Lush Locks I take every day. Lush Locks has Ayurvedic and Chinese herbs that are known for regrowth and regeneration of hair and improving blood flow to the scalp along with micronutrients that research tells us we should be focused on. This month, I’m offering an exclusive discount for Super Woman Wellness listeners. Just go to theeastwestway.com and enter SWW 30 to get 30% off at checkout. Don’t forget, if you rate and review any of my episodes, you’ll get a free bottle of Boost. Just email me. It’s hello@doctortaz.com and I’ll make sure it gets to you. All right, I can’t wait for you guys to try these products. Let me know which one’s your favorite and take advantage of the code SWW 30 at theeastwestway.com.

All right, moving on from alcohol, sugar. I mean, we all love a little dessert right before we go to bed, but sugar also, again, the mechanism or the chemistry is it simply messing with insulin levels and then in turn, impacting your hormones, your insulin, your sugar, and spiking cortisol, which is going to impact your sleep.

So when it comes to food, eating consistently, getting the protein that you need, eating every four hours or so, and then really having maybe like an eight o’clock cutoff if you have a 10 o’clock bedtime or you’re not eating or drinking alcohol, caffeine, or any of these type of things, and the gut is truly allowed to rest. All right, so caffeine, alcohol, sugar, we know all of those play an impact on sleep quality. We also know that your environment matters. So making sure the room is dark and at a cool temperature, 68 to 70, 72 is what most people need.

When there’s any light, whether it’s external light or light from light sources or even blue light from our devices, it’s going to impact our sleep quality. The blue light hits our pineal gland all light actually hits our pineal gland. The frequencies impact our ability to rest, and that in turn keeps us in this state of light sleep or superficial sleep where we’re kind of awake but not truly asleep. And in turn, we wake up not feeling refreshed, not feeling quite as good as we could. We know hormones impact sleep, being low in progesterone, being high in cortisol, low in estrogen, or having thyroid malfunction. All of these impact sleep as well. So the hormones play a role. And then last I think, but certainly not least, is your overall stress levels. If you’re super stressed, then we know that sleep is going to be something that sometimes is sacrificed because the mind simply cannot stop racing.

All right. If you’re suffering from any of these sleep conditions, remember that there are things you can do. Cleaning up your diet, making sure your environment is dark, cool and quiet, having maybe some meditations or mindfulness work that you do, whether it’s tapping or breath work, these are things that can help with getting better quality sleep. I also love the idea of moving the body throughout the day. We know that people move throughout the day, sleep better at night, so even doing a little bit of yin yoga or Qi gong right before bedtime can be helpful to move stagnant energy out of your body. And if you’re an overthinker or an over processor, one of the things that can help with sleep includes just journaling. Write everything down right before you go to bed, maybe in a little journal right by your nightstand, and that in turn can help you dump kind of the garbage, so to speak out of your brain and help you get a better night’s sleep.

So those are some of my favorite sleep tools. And then I do turn to natural substances to help with sleep. And some of my tried and true include melatonin, which helps you fall asleep and stay asleep. Things that are calming to the brain, like passion flower or theanine. I love magnesium as well. Many of these ingredients can be found in some of the Olly gummies if you don’t want to take yet another pill. Or there are melt aways which dissolve in the mouth. So again, these are strategies you can use to help you with both falling asleep and help you with staying asleep, and hopefully that in turn will help you to heal. Remember,

the answers are within us. We hold all the clues and the body does regenerate itself, but if it doesn’t get an opportunity to rest, then we know there’s all kinds of repercussions after the fact.

I experienced this personally through my ER lifetime and my med school lifetime, where the shifts and the flipping back and forth triggered inflammation, really triggered my PCOS and my hair loss and continue to be something that I have to be very mindful of to this day. I thought I was doing a really great job by getting at least four or five hours of sleep once I started the practice. But as I’ve gotten older and more mature, I can see the difference between sleeping seven hours and sleeping five hours. I can function at both kind of hallmarks, but boy do I crave less sugar, less salt, I’m more alert, more patient, and really more joyful, honestly, when I get that seven hours of deep sleep.

So where do you start when it comes to your health and when it comes to hormone health? I actually do think you start with sleep, and then we build from there outwards. All right. I hope this information is helpful. Remember that we’ve got new podcast episodes every week. And if you want more information on hormones or hormone health, join my Super Woman Circle. Go to doctortaz.com, join the circle. We have a great community of women that are banding together to support one another, change the conversation around health and wellness, and get the hormones balanced while getting the rest of their bodies in alignment. All right. I hope you enjoyed this episode of Super Woman Wellness. Don’t forget to rate and review it and share it with your friends. I will see you guys next time.