Hey, it's Dr. Day, and I'm sitting on the bed, because we're going to be talking about sleep. Sleep is the time where our body actually restores and repairs itself. So sleep is super important to your ability to not only function and feel energetic and vibrant, but to your healing process. Because sleep is a time where we take all the nutrients that we've gotten from the food that we've eaten, and we actually use that to restore ourselves replace and repair ourselves in our body. So sleep is an very important part of that component. And there are some hormones that you need to be aware of that impact your sleep.

So for example, melatonin, you may have heard about this hormone people take it when they are jet lagged or having difficulty sleeping. But actually, we produce melody. honing in our brains. And melatonin needs a completely dark room, it needs our body to be in a relaxed state. You can't have any stress hormones like cortisol rolling around your body because it shuts off melatonin. So when we're relaxed, we're not stressed.

We're in a calm, quiet environment. And we turn off all the lights and all the electronics and things like that. Our body is able to actually release melatonin, which causes us to sleep, and we actually use melatonin during the night. And what happens is in the morning, we actually start to produce another hormone called cortisol. In high enough amounts. Cortisol is our stress hormone.

And with just enough cortisol, it will wake our body up. We should wake up naturally. wishes go refreshed when we wake up in the morning. And we should be ready to start our day, then our cortisol levels actually begin to go down from the morning into the afternoon, a little bit of a peak in the late afternoon. And then they continue to go down the lowest at night. So that melatonin can actually start to produce itself again so that we can go to sleep and that's called our circadian rhythm.

And so we want that to happen in a natural format. When we are super stressed or we're up really late at night, we have a lot of lights on, we're looking at our electronic equipment. All of those things can change our circadian rhythm cycle and make it hard for us to go to sleep or stay asleep. The other thing that's really important about sleep is that it's a time for us to repair and restore ourselves. So we should be turning off our brains and turning off all of our body phones. So we can get to sleep.

So when we're thinking about all the things we have to do, and our minds are racing, that can also interrupt our sleep. Why do we care about being able to get our sleep? Well, one of the most important reasons why I included sleep in this class, is because research now has begun to find out that when we do not get enough sleep, it actually causes insulin resistance in our body. So for example, if you get less than five hours of sleep, like four and a half hours of sleep for a week, your insulin resistance goes up. The other thing that they found in research is if we're sleep deprived, so maybe we are getting an average, maybe five or maybe six hours a night, but if that's not enough sleep for our individual body's sleep deprivation can also cause insulin. resistance.

So the reason why sleep is so important and it's included as a full module here is that we know that insulin resistance is one of the underlying causes of high blood sugar's pre diabetes and diabetes. So if we can get our sleep under control, then what we learn is that our body can restore and heal and repair itself. And we actually reduce the risk of insulin resistance. It's really just that simple. So, now that you have a better understanding of why sleep is so important, and your circadian rhythms, go to the handouts just to review all the things that we talked about related to circadian rhythms and get yourself ready to begin to think about what are the things that you're doing to prepare for a good night's sleep and in the next module, we will talk about sleep hygiene. And how you can improve your habits that will improve your sleep.