A good night's sleep is your best friend — everyone knows that. It is a relationship that feels wonderful and delivers a near-endless list of health benefits: less inflammation, easier weight management, lower risk of heart disease and diabetes, a stronger immune system, balanced hormones (hello, sex drive), better brain performance, less anxiety. Modern life, unfortunately, keeps getting in the way of it. Sleep problems are increasing, putting people at higher risk of physical and mental illness — literally making us sicker and less happy.
Why Do You Wake Up at 3am?
Waking suddenly in the small hours, often between two and four in the morning, is one of the most common patterns linked to stress. It is usually not a sign that something is wrong with your sleep itself, it is your cortisol rhythm firing at the wrong time.
Blood sugar naturally dips overnight, and a body under chronic stress can overreact to that dip by releasing a burst of cortisol and adrenaline to compensate. That burst is stimulating rather than calming, which is why it can pull you fully awake instead of easing you back into a lighter stage of sleep. The mechanism is the same cortisol rhythm covered below, just firing early and out of sequence.
Stress and the cortisol connection
It will surprise nobody that one of the main culprits behind sleep problems is stress.
Stress, and prolonged stress especially, can disrupt the hypothalamic-pituitary-adrenal axis — the HPA axis — a delicate inter-communicating mechanism that controls secretion of the hormone cortisol. Under normal, unstressed conditions, the HPA axis produces cortisol on a controlled diurnal rhythm: levels are higher in the morning on waking, which is what gives you the energy to get out of bed and start the day, then decline gradually until they reach a very low point in the evening, allowing you to relax and fall asleep.
Cortisol is also the stress hormone, however, and it is released in response to stressful situations, emotional or physical. Picture yourself walking down the road when a bus nearly hits you, stopping abruptly just in front of you. Your heart rate climbs, your blood pressure spikes, glucose pours into your bloodstream. That is a surge of cortisol released to help you meet the challenge — the acute "stress response".
The problem begins when that response is triggered chronically by everyday events: you are late for work, you argued with your partner, you are worried about money. The cortisol diurnal rhythm gets disrupted. Cortisol may run high in the evening when it should be low, which impairs sleep. It may also fail to peak on waking, leaving you flat and tired in the morning. These are just a few of the ways a disrupted HPA axis and disordered cortisol secretion affect your sleep and your energy.
Worse, a poor night's sleep feeds back into HPA dysregulation — studies show it raises cortisol levels the following evening. What forms is a vicious circle: high cortisol produces poor sleep, poor sleep produces high cortisol.
The focus here is cortisol's effect on sleep, but disrupted cortisol also contributes to weight gain, high blood pressure, insulin resistance, mood changes and low libido, and it can interfere with digestion and cause irregular cycles in women. If you suspect stress is a factor, you can have your daily cortisol pattern checked with a saliva home test, under the guidance of a qualified medical professional or naturopath.
Reduce stress — do more by doing less
We have become a society of doing more: connected to phones and social media around the clock, going to the gym, obsessing over food and diets, planning the next holiday or retreat. We want to do everything, we live in constant search, and we rarely give body or mind a break. When did you last stand in a supermarket queue without immediately reaching for your phone — just waiting, looking around, doing nothing at all? You probably can't remember. You are not alone; this is the reality for most of us.
But it is exactly this constant engagement with everything and everyone around you that may be perpetuating disrupted cortisol production, and affecting your sleep alongside other health problems. An already overloaded body registers all that stimulus as stressors. We need to learn to slow down and switch off, and let the magic happen. Five self-care habits you can start today:
Breathe. Research shows that deep breathing activates the parasympathetic nervous system — the "rest and digest" system. Check in with your breathing through the day and practise Four-Square Breathing, also called the Box Breathing Technique.
Meditate daily. Ten to fifteen minutes in the morning is an excellent way to calm the mind and set the tone for the day.
Give yourself permission to pause and make your soul happy on a regular basis — curling up on the sofa with a book, walking in nature, or simply spending quiet time tuning in to yourself.
Take control of your phone. Turn off message and WhatsApp alerts, and set aside a specific time of day to check them. A constant flow of notifications pulls you out of the present moment and out of any attempt to relax.
Practise yoga. It engages body, breath and mind at once — three in one. Yoga with Adriene and Yoga Glo are great online resources. Put it in your diary.
Your emergency "stress toolbox"
Honestly, even with the best intentions, a stressful stretch is sometimes unavoidable — or you may simply be finding it hard to slow down. Fortunately there are excellent supplements and herbs to help you through those moments: magnesium, B complex vitamins, and adaptogens. Adaptogens are a class of herbs known for their balancing effect on the HPA axis and their modulation of cortisol; as the name suggests, they help the body "adapt" to stressors and restore balance. The top adaptogens on my list are ashwagandha, siberian ginseng, rhodiola, schisandra, licorice and holy basil.
Those are all good short-term choices, but my real advice would always be to change your mindset and adopt the self-care routines above. That is the way to build a sustainable, healthy relationship with stress, cortisol and sleep. Happy cortisol, happy sleep, happy you.
References
Cited by the original article:
Fang R, Li X. A regular yoga intervention for staff nurse sleep quality and work stress: a randomised controlled trial. J Clin Nurs. (2015). doi:10.1111/jocn.12983
Hirotsu C, Tufik S, Andersen ML. Interactions between sleep, stress, and metabolism: From physiological to pathological conditions. Sleep Science (2015). doi:10.1016/j.slsci.2015.09.002
Leproult R, Copinschi G, Buxton O, Van Cauter E. Sleep Loss Results in an Elevation of Cortisol Levels the Next Evening. Sleep. 1997;20:865–70.
Stansbury J, Saunders P, Winston D. Supporting Adrenal Function with Adaptogenic Herbs. J Restor Med. (2013). doi:10.14200/jrm.2012.1.1007
Zaccaro A, et al. How Breath-Control Can Change Your Life: A Systematic Review on Psycho-Physiological Correlates of Slow Breathing. Front Hum Neurosci. (2018). doi:10.3389/fnhum.2018.00353
