The Importance of Sleep with Celiac Disease Ep. 90

Why is sleep so important once diagnosed with Celiac Disease or when accidentally glutened?
Find the answers in this episode.

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Transcript

Speaker 1: 0:24

Sleep is so important for many, many reasons, but I believe it's extra important for those of us with celiac disease. Whether you've just been diagnosed with celiac disease or you've recently accidentally been glutened, sleep is so important to help your body to thrive and heal. Now, I live in Australia and there's a statistic that in Victoria sleep or lack of sleep rather causes more than 20% of car accidents. So<laugh>, if you're driving around tired, then you could be out there on the road and cause a car accident. That's a massive statistic. So there's a lot of people out there tired, there's a lot of people not getting enough sleep, and there's a number of reasons for that, which we're going to talk about. But first of all, why do we need sleep when we sleep? This is the time that our body rests. This is the time that our body does most of its healing. This is when our body restores itself. So obviously when we've just got diagnosed with celiac disease, there is a lot of inflammation in our body. There is a lot of damage to our intestine that needs to heal. So the best thing that you can do for your health is make sure that you are getting lots of good, adequate sleep. And we're talking about that deep restorative sleep, sleep that actually heals your body, nourishes you, and make sure that you are doing the best for your future self. It's, it sounds like something so small, but it's something that's so important. Now, being in business myself, I follow online a lot of different people that are business people as far as, um, entrepreneurs I guess is more the case. And so many of them talk about hustle and grind and getting up at five o'clock in the morning to get things done and doing all of this crazy stuff. And I just sit there and go,<laugh> guys nuts. Like, you're gonna burn out. You are not looking after your body. You might be hustling and grinding and building your business, but the end of the day, the only reason that people are in business for themselves is to have more time. Okay? So for me, working for myself and having my own business is so that I can be a stay at home mom and be here for my children. If I'm not healthy and I'm not getting enough sleep, I'm a cranky cow. No one wants to be near me if I am sleep deprived. I am brutally honest about this. I know without a shadow of a doubt that I am not a nice person when I don't get sleep.<laugh>, and you've probably heard me talk about this on other episodes, our daughter is, uh, three and a

Speaker 2: 3:23

Half now and she is finally sleeping better. She still wakes, but at a time there she was still waking every single night and waking me up and breaking my sleep. And it is hard<laugh>, if you're a parent, you know what it's like getting woken up, having that broken sleep. That's rough, but it's not forever when we're talking about kids waking us up. So there is light at the end of the tunnel, and I have to remind myself of this all the time, but if you are struggling with a lack of sleep by choice, then what steps can you take to put in place so that you can get more sleep? Because when you're not getting enough sleep, it affects things like your concentration. It affects your mood, it affects your digestion, it has this flow on effect of all the things that it does to your body. And if you're like me, you probably can recognize very easily when you are tired because you might be more snappy, you might be more cranky, you might be have a very short temper and you can, you can look at the night before and realize you didn't get enough sleep. So for me, I need about eight hours of sleep. You may not need that much. Uh, you might need more. We are all different. And you know, they can't, the experts<laugh> kind of say everyone needs this amount of sleep. I think it is about eight hours. But for some people, like my husband, he doesn't need that much sleep. He can, he can survive on less sleep than me and it doesn't affect his mood as much. My son, oh my goodness, he's terrible like me, if he doesn't get a good night's sleep, he's cranky like me. So we are all different and it's learning what that amount is for you. If I have too much sleep, it has an adverse effect on me. I find that it makes me a little bit too sluggish in the daytime. So I've found my healthy balance by tracking how much sleep I have and seeing how my moods are the next day and, and keeping an eye on that for a little while so that I can understand how much sleep my body needs for me to thrive. So that might be something that you want to do as well. Grab yourself one of my daily health trackers. If you haven't already, you can track your amount of sleep in that and whether you've been woken up during the night, things like that. So you can grab those over on Amazon at any time. They're available in most countries. So I'll pop a link to those in the show notes as well. So you can order one, but that's a good way of seeing how much sleep you are getting and checking the next day, how that affects your mood and, and the way that you are feeling. It can even affect the way that you eat when you are not getting enough sleep because you're tired and you probably need sugary food. So I've recently done an episode talking about sugar and the gluten-free diet and it could be that you are eating differently when you aren't getting enough sleep. So making sure that you're getting enough sleep so, so important. But again, whatever works for your body is right for you. So doing a little bit of a study on yourself and seeing how much you need to thrive. Now if you are not getting enough sleep because of things like technology, so you're up on your phone late at night or you are watching a TV show that you might be binging, you know, you might be having a bit of a Netflix session and you're binge watching tv. These are things that are within our control. So these are things that we can change for ourselves. But if it's something like, you know, perimenopause that's changing the way that you sleep, you know, you're noticing that you're waking up with hot flushes or things like that, sometimes it can be out of our control. It can be a little bit trickier to make sure that we are getting enough sleep, like I said, with the whole parenting thing that is out of our control. But if it's something that's within your control, you can put steps into place to change those habits before you go to bed. Now if you find it really hard to wind down before bed, there are some things that you can do to make that easier for yourself. My mom, she loves popping a headphone in her ear at night and just listening to talk back radio. She finds that it just makes her doze off very quickly. So that would keep me awake. That would not work for me. I prefer to have either quietness or my, um, air purifier going. So I've got a air filter in my room and it makes kind of this noise. It's kind of like white noise, I guess it's just having some sort of noise. I like that. Or I like listening to meditations. Having a dark room really helps as well because what happens is when the sun goes down, our body releases hormones to help us go to sleep. And that is why shift workers have a lot of trouble with sleep because they've been exposed to the sunlight and then they come home and they try to go to bed and it's hard to go to sleep. So that's why a dark room is important. And then when we get up in the morning as quickly as we can, we should expose ourselves to sunshine. So whether that be looking through a window to look at the sunshine or going outside, that shuts off those hormones and that helps you to get through the day and feeling brighter and not so sluggish and tired. So yeah, that's a tip for helping you to get moving in the morning. But yeah, at night a dark room is super important for helping you get to sleep. We have, uh, what's called roller shutters on our bedroom windows, and we put those down just before we need to put our kids to bed to kind of trick them that it's dark<laugh>. So we have them in our bedroom in the kids' room and we make sure that we shut them. We close all the blinds in the house upstairs and we kind of trick our kids in daylight savings times because it's still daylight at their bedtime. So we trick them that it's dark and it helps to get them to bed easier. So that could be the same for you. You need to trick your body that it's nighttime. So you need to make your space dark. So this is where it's important not to be staring at your laptop or your phone or the TV right before bed. You know, you might need to grab a book and read a book and relax in bed and wind down that way. Maybe a, you know, a her book tea, something like that can help you to relax and make you feel that it's time to go to bed. And just having those calming effects before bed can make a big difference. Smelling things like essential oils can help as well. So there's lots of different things that you can do to help you get into that ready for bed period of time that that sleep time is coming and helping your body get used to these habits. So try some of these things out and see if it helps you, because if it is that you're going to bed and you're struggling with getting the sleep, these little habits can help you big time. Now, if you're going to bed and you can't switch your brain off, I know this time of the year it can be even trickier for people to switch off. There's so much to do, so much going on. Write yourself a list, pop it down on paper, get it outta your head even if you need to keep a pen and paper by your bed. And if you can't sleep quickly, write down what's on your mind quickly get it out onto paper and you'll probably find that you've taken that outta your mind for now and you'll be able to sleep. It's, it's a big game changer. So try that if you haven't already done that, because that can really, really help to get you to sleep. So we want you getting restorative sleep. We want you healing your body. We want your veli back to being perfect so that you are absorbing all those beautiful nutrients from all the delicious, healthy food you're eating. And we want you to know that when you are sleeping, it's good for you. So get the right amount of sleep that your body needs because I don't think people understand the importance of sleep enough. So restorative sleep, getting enough that's right for your body and in the right environment, so the right sleeping conditions for your body. So thank you for listening. I hope this has helped you and that you can take some of these tips away and get a better night's sleep and help you improve your health through having a better night's sleep. So thanks for tuning in and I look forward to talking with you again soon. So take care and I'll uh, chat with you again next week. Bye.