The 2 Most Common Causes of Insomnia and Sleep Issues

Most of the sleep advice you're probably seeing online has an element of the truth. Not drinking coffee too late, staying away from screens, going to bed early, not watching a TV as you fall asleep. But what I find clinically is that there are two large categories of why people tend to have insomnia. And I thought I would share what those are today, because one of them is something I don't see any other people talking about. Hey guys, I'm Dr. Alex Hine, author of the health book Master the Day, doctor of acupuncture and traditional Chinese medicine. Now before we jump into this video, there's two very important links right below the video. The first is for a free guide, which is four daily rituals that could potentially help you add years to your life with traditional Chinese medicine. And the second is if you'd like to become a patient of mine locally in Los Angeles, or virtually via telemedicine, you can reach out to my contact and my private practice right below this video. So let's talk about the two general buckets that I see for insomnia. There aren't things that you may think about very often. The first is let's call dysfunction in the digestive system. And the second is let's call dysfunction in the nervous system. Now, these are legitimately the two most common issues that I see for people who have chronic insomnia. One is dietary related. I rarely hear people bring that up, but we treat and fix their digestion and their sleep goes back to normal. And the second is more nervous system related. So let's jump into these a bit more now. Let's talk about digestive dysfunction here. As a doctor of Chinese medicine, my goal is always to figure out the root cause of a pattern. And the pattern of symptoms may not be coming from where you think they're coming from. Very often, my patients have seen the best specialists at UCLA, the best specialists at Stanford until they come to me, before they come to me. And that's when I end up fixing them. So how is it possible that me, one guy who doesn't have a whole department, a whole hospital can fix someone that a bunch of specialists couldn't? My honest to God, humble answer is purely that the field that I operate in looks at patterns, not just individual symptoms, not just individual locations. Like if your thumb hurts, what's going on with the thumb? We look at the entire body and everything that could be related to that location, where the illness or the symptoms are. So paradoxically, one thing that I ended up finding clinically with so many of my chronic insomnia patients is that a high percentage, number one, have a history and a frequency of acid reflux. So these are people, you know, they get reflux or indigestion. They feel excessively full. They tend to be coffee drinkers and alcohol drinkers. They tend to eat a lot of standard American diet sort of foods. And also, they tend to eat larger meals. Sometimes there are business people who tend to go out to business dinners at night where they're getting a large meal late in the day and they're having two glasses of wine or two cocktails with it. So the stomach is often left with a lot to process when you're only going to bed maybe four or five hours later. Now, how do we know if you are the stomach archetype? A few main symptoms I would say to look for. One, do you have acid reflux, indigestion, GERD, or chronic stomach dysfunction that bothers you? That would be my very first question. Two, are you taking medications for any of those symptoms? And three, are you someone who, let's say, wakes up from time to time feeling a little nauseous, a little indigestion, a little bit of sourness in your stomach, or even if you sleep through the night, you wake up feeling those things. If so, you may be one of these stomach archetypal people that is having issues with indigestion and reflux and is interrupting your sleep quality. So there are two other kinds here as well. Chinese medicine, we break things down into excess or deficiency. The excess archetype is really, let's say, the standard American businessman. He's an overweight guy. He's got a red face. He has bad breath. He doesn't eat consciously at all. He just eats for pleasure, right? He obviously could lose some kilos. He looks like he's unhealthy and overweight. He has a lot of indigestion or acid reflux, maybe even lives off Tums or antacids or Prilosec, whatever medication he's taking. That's the standard archetype for excess. But there's a deficient type too, which is people who tend to be pale-faced like me, thin like me, and just in general have weak digestion where their stomach is easily upset. They're prone to food allergies, excessive bloating, and abdominal fullness. These people can often have insomnia too, not because the stomach is bothering them, but because they're so bloated, they feel uncomfortable. So what is a simple habit you can do for this archetype? The simple habit is three main things. One is eating five hours or more before bed. So if you go to bed at midnight, try not to have a meal later than 7 p.m. to give your stomach time to digest it. Two would be just a 30-day experiment. Stay away from coffee and stay away from alcohol because both of those can be very, very hard on the stomach if people have a tendency towards GERD and acid reflux. The third is eat more of a Mediterranean or more of a vegetarian-based diet because within Chinese medicine, many kinds of acid reflux are considered stomach heat. And so eating a more temperature-neutral diet like more vegetables, preferably more cooked vegetables, more Mediterranean diet, will help work on some of the inflammation that's going on within the body. So those three things will often help if you're having issues with the stomach. The last piece of advice is if all else fails, just try fasting. Eat a meal early in the day, let's say 5 p.m., and fast all the way until the time you go to bed. And that will often reduce some of the burden and the discomfort in the stomach and let you sleep. Now, the second archetype is what I call dysfunction in the nervous system. Who here doesn't have dysfunction in the nervous system these days? Feeling anxious, feeling depressed, getting heart palpitations, noticing your heart, feeling an elevated heart rate, not sleeping well, feeling stressed for no reason. Lots of this is the nervous system. Now, one of the ways you know that your sleep may be related to something going on with the nervous system, meaning your overall stress response and stress hormones, is basically what your body does during the day. So people in this picture definitely are correlated with more waking through the night or more incomplete sleep. Or sometimes they say, you know, I just wake up after five or six hours and I'm never rested. Whereas normally a full night of sleep is let's say eight hours for them. Also, a lot of people with more of the reflux archetype have difficulty falling asleep, I've noticed, as opposed to this one is more staying asleep. So these people often wake up at 3 a.m. It's the most common time of night that I see. More correlated with the stress response. They're prone to heart palpitations, arrhythmia, elevated heart rate, noticing their heart. Sometimes they have a big meal and they notice their heartbeat as well. So these are clear signs of nervous system dysfunction. Too many stress hormones firing off in the body all day long. Now, what can you actually do for this person? This person's mantra is simple. How I live my life during the day and while I'm awake is how I sleep at night. So I would repeat this to myself when I was going through a phase of this in my own life. What I would say, how I conduct myself during the day is how I'm gonna sleep at night. So if I'm stressed all day, I'm feeling stress, I'm noticing my heart rate, I'm not feeling hungry because I'm losing my appetite. I know that I'm firing off stress hormones all day long and it's no surprise that it's gonna be harder to sleep that night. Now, anyone can do that in the short run but in the long run, it can really cause excessive sleep issues and insomnia for many people or even panic attacks. So these two archetypes. Issues with the stomach and reflux. Some people it's even silent reflux. And on the other side, people who are stressed out or even sensitive nervous systems that are just experiencing such a heightened stress response that at night that is carrying over and they aren't sleeping well. So these are two maybe lesser known buckets that I think are worth investigating. Sure, there's the obvious blue light, not looking at your phone too late, environmental noise, etc. But I find for many, many people with chronic insomnia, I treat these two issues with Chinese formulas and their sleep goes back to normal even if they have some of those other bad habits. So I hope that helps you guys for the insomniacs in the audience. Check out those other related links below the video and I'll see you soon.