To understand how stress affects your sleep and other functions in your life, one needs to understand what the word stress actually means in terms of its sources and applications and how that affects your body and your sleep.
Most people associate the word stress in a connotatively negative way, however, although the majority of stress isn’t positive, not all stressors or stress are “bad.”
For example, crying “tears of joy,” or even laughing uncontrollably are stressful events that are the result of happy times. According to Dr. Doni Wilson, a naturopathic doctor who has widely explored the topic of stress in relation to health in multiple online articles and in his e-books, “stress is the primary condition of life”, and he goes on to say that “whether we feel exhilarated, thrilled, or listless, or jumpy, and depressed, cortisol is likely at the root of our experience”.
Physiologically, stress in our bodies is the result of our endocrine system producing and releasing certain stress hormones, the primary one being cortisol. Cortisol is associated with our “fight or flight” response, and any event, natural or otherwise, that triggers the release of cortisol results in other subsequent chemical reactions in our bodies, such as increasing blood sugar levels, stimulating thyroid hormone production (the thyroid gland regulates our metabolism), and suppressing insulin production.
Other chemicals in our bodies besides the endogenous (naturally occurring) glucocorticoids (cortisol, etc.) are catecholamines (adrenaline, also referred to as epinephrine, noradrenaline, also referred to as norepinephrine, and dopamine), growth hormones (such as somatotropin), and prolactin (a very influential naturally occurring protein that is responsible for milk production in females, but is a crucial element to approximately 300 physiochemical processes).
A myriad of conditions that are indicative of poor health are often the result of imbalances in these hormones and chemicals, and a major sign that an imbalance in any of these exists would be if a person is not getting quality sleep.
Alternatively, if a person is receiving an adequate amount (7.5 to 9 hours at a time) of replenishing sleep, then there is good reason to believe that their endocrine system, including all of the hormones that make up the endocrine system, are in balance.
Ideally, cortisol levels should ramp up in the mornings, which in turn increases our blood sugar levels and gives us energy to be productive throughout the day, and as the day progresses into evening, our cortisol levels should be tapering down, and be at their lowest at night when we want to go to sleep.
If, for whatever reason, that process is reversed, or off kilter in any way, then our wonky cortisol levels will affect our sleep in a multitude of ways.
Everything from an upcoming wedding, to a big project at work, to worrying about a loved one in the hospital, and everything in between, can and will affect our cortisol levels, which, in turn, can and will affect not only the amount of sleep we receive, but also the quality of that sleep.
Finding ways (and there are many non-pharmaceutical options, suggestions for which can be found in Dr. Doni’s E-book “Stress Remedies”) of achieving optimal cortisol and other stress hormonal harmony will aid in proper digestion and metabolism, and that will lead to proper sleep.
Proper sleep is a crucial element to our overall health and managing stress and making efforts to ensure that the stimulation of our stress hormones is happening at appropriate intervals and adequate levels is equally as crucial to ensuring that we get healthful sleep.
