Stop Waking Up At 3am (Reset Cortisol, Sleep, & Belly Fat)

How to lower cortisol. If you're waking up between 1 and 3:00 a. m.

with racing thoughts, a feeling of dread in your chest, or your mind is racing when it should be sleeping, this means that your body is probably making too much cortisol, a hormone that keeps your nervous system in a stressed out state. High levels of cortisol can also cause stubborn hanging belly fat to form even when you're eating perfectly healthy. In this video, I'll be giving you a master class on the best ways to bring cortisol down to naturally take your body and mind out of that stress tense state using nutrients, foods, and remedies.

Your body will be able to finally relax, recover, burn fat more easily, and sleep peacefully through the night. In the hours between 1 to 3:00 a. m.

, your liver becomes most active, detoxifying chemicals and breaking down hormones and fats. At midnight, your blood sugar naturally starts to drop and your liver is supposed to release a steady flow of glucose to give your body energy. But sometimes when the liver is congested or inflamed, your blood sugars can drop too much and your brain senses danger and it panics.

So it calls out for cortisol which pulls sugar into your blood and your sleep hormone melatonin drops waking you up abruptly as your mind becomes very alert and active trying to solve imaginary problems when you should be sleeping and recovering. So, the first thing we must do is stabilize your blood sugars during the night. Now, if you can tolerate dairy, simply drink 1/2 a cup of milk kefir about 1 hour before you go to bed.

Make sure to look for plain, unsweetened kefir made from whole milk, not the flavored or the low-fat varieties. Also, check the label to make sure that it has live and active cultures. This kefir will give your body a slow and steady trickle of natural sugar from the lactose, just enough to prevent that 1 to 3:00 a.

m. drop in blood sugar. Kefir also has a slow digesting protein that gently fuels your liver through the night, so the body doesn't need to make more cortisol and wake you up.

Plain kefir is actually one of the best natural sleep restorers shown in studies to raise garba. GABA is a neurotransmitter that relaxes your body and helps to switch off the stress response. But if you also notice that your muscles are very tight and tense around the neck and shoulders, this is a clear sign that your nervous system is stuck in the fight or flight mode, which is also raising cortisol.

The best remedy for this is a magnesium supplement at night, taking between 2 to 400 mg of elemental magnesium from the form called magnesium glycinate. When cortisol levels are high, your nervous system prepares your body for stress, keeping your muscles tense, which can prevent you from sleeping properly. But magnesium and its partner amino acid called glycine naturally raises GABA levels in the brain, the master switch that turns off the stress loop so that you can fall asleep and stay asleep.

Studies show that magnesium supplementation can restore balance and improve sleep quality. So combining the kefir and the magnesium about an hour before sleep creates a very simple but powerful way to keep your body calm through the night. But sometimes even when you're doing everything right, you might still feel wired where your heart is beating faster than it should be.

And that's where this other very simple but ancient remedy can help. Lavender oil has been used for centuries to calm the mind. But why?

Well, it has an active ingredient called linolul, which tells the pineal gland to release more melatonin. Melatonin is the hormone that makes you sleep very deeply, and it restores and heals your body during the night. This actually tells the stress centers in your brain that it's safe to relax.

One study showed that after 4 weeks of inhaling lavender oil each night, blood melatonin levels jumped significantly. So, simply place a few drops of this on a tissue by the side of your bed and just breathe it in during sleep. It really is that simple.

But if you still find that you're waking up in the early hours, your brain may just need a bit of help switching off that emergency mode. This next technique helps you to get back asleep as quickly as possible. Inhale very slowly through your nose, filling up your lungs completely.

When they're full, take one extra small sip of air at the top and exhale slowly through your mouth. Do this five or six times. This sends a very powerful signal of safety to your brain through your vagus nerve, which instantly lowers heart rate and tension.

This is one of the easiest and most effective ways to calm the nervous system and switch off cortisol in the moment. Now that you're starting to sleep better, we need to stop this cortisol spike from happening in the first place. Starting in the morning when your day first begins.

Before you go to bed, place a bottle of water on your nightstand and add a/4 of a teaspoon of sea salt. Ideally, you will use Celtic, Himalayan, or Redmond sea salt. These contain over 80 trace minerals, which your adrenal glands need to function properly.

Now, when you first wake up and you want to start your day, shake up the bottle and drink it right away. But why would you do this? Well, during sleep, your body loses electrolytes through breathing and sweating.

When you wake up, even slightly dehydrated. Your adrenal glands must work harder to raise your blood pressure and energy, so they release extra cortisol in the process. That's why so many people wake up in the morning with a tight chest or that uneasy feeling of dread for no reason at all.

Drnking salt water first thing replenishes those lost minerals. It rehydrates your cells and helps to lower cortisol naturally. It gives your body a calm, steady start to the day instead of feeling wired, tense, or exhausted before you've even begun.

It's also vitally important to keep your phone in another room. I must emphasize this. Keep smartphones and devices in another room and avoid screens at least 45 minutes after waking.

Blue light and notifications trigger dopamine and cortisol instantly putting you back in that stress mode. But I need my phone for my alarm. I can hear you screaming at me.

Buy an alarm clock. Don't make excuses. If you want to relax and sleep properly, trust me on this one.

It's changed both my life and my wife's. I'd also strongly encourage you to get some morning sunlight. When you go outside within the first hour of waking up, certain wavelengths can activate cells behind your retinas, sending a signal to your brain's master clock called the SCN.

Amazingly, this resets your body's sleep and wake rhythm, telling it that it's daytime and helping cortisol to rise in a healthy way. now so that it can naturally fall later at night when you need to go to sleep. Even just 10 to 15 minutes of natural sunlight exposure without sunglasses helps to regulate melatonin, cortisol, and serotonin all at once.

Over time, you'll notice that you start to fall asleep faster, wake up calmer, and your energy becomes steadier throughout the day. Now, the first meal of your day can also have a profound effect on your stress levels because the last thing you want to do is go and eat sugar, cereal, grains, or carbs after you wake up as these breakfasts will spike your blood sugars followed by a crash that will again raise cortisol. Instead, I would suggest that you eat foods that activate the parasympathetic nervous system.

This is the part of your body that controls digestion, relaxation, and normal sleep cycles. To activate this, your body needs something called acetylcholine. And the best way to boost this is by eating choline, its precursor, from egg yolks.

So, simply eating two to four eggs for breakfast supports the lowering of stress, cortisol, and adrenaline. Other good options include smoked salmon, avocados, and pates made from organ meats, which will also supply B12 for healthy nerves. The two other nutrients that are needed for a calm and balanced body are vitamin B1 and B5.

You can get both of these very naturally from nutritional yeast, perhaps eating this with your morning eggs or sprinkling some over a salad for lunch. People often notice that within just five minutes of eating this nutritional yeast, they feel much calmer as their acetylcholine levels rise and their nervous system begins to fully relax. You can also get these nutrients from sunflower seeds, beef liver, and ground flax seeds.

Just try to incorporate these foods throughout the day to calm your body. And if you feel that stress is rising during the day, as many of us do, I would also suggest that you limit yourself to only one cup of coffee in the morning and completely stop drinking it after 10:00 a. m.

because it takes at least 6 hours for your liver to break down just half the caffeine that you drank. So, it will interrupt your sleep if you aren't careful. Instead, you may want to drink one to three cups of green tea per day, which is rich in alenonine, an amino acid that crosses the bloodb brain barrier within 30 to 45 minutes.

This naturally lowers your heart rate and calms your body so that you can feel calm, steady, and focused. You can also get elenine in supplements and some mints as well. By the way, I've also put together a 12step guide book called Unlocking Peace from Anxiety if you'd like a full action plan on paper to calm down your nervous system.

The link to that product is below the video if you'd like to check it out. But why is your lack of sleep causing you to gain belly fat? Your body isn't designed to stay in fight or flight mode all of the time.

So, when you're constantly stressed, cortisol levels remain high, and that keeps your blood sugar high, too. You see, your liver has to keep converting that excess sugar into fat for storage, and most of it ends up right around your belly. That soft fat hanging over the front isn't just coming from food.

It's a sign that your body's been stuck in survival mode for too long. But when you finally bring the cortisol down and start sleeping deeply again, your body can switch back into repair mode and begin burning that fat for energy instead of the glucose. Cravings for sugar will naturally go down and you'll find it much easier to diet and exercise.

So to fix the particular root of this liver problem that we discussed that's raising cortisol in the night, I would suggest that you stop snacking all day and eat two to three solid meals with lots of protein and high quality fats. This alone will stabilize your insulin and blood sugars, helping to reduce fatty liver and inflammation so that cortisol doesn't spike in the middle of the night when you should be fast asleep. You should also stop eating at least 3 to four hours before sleep.

When you eat late at night, your body has to use a lot of energy and resources to focus on digesting that food when it should be focusing on fat burning, repairing the liver, sleeping, and lowering cortisol. So, for example, if you sleep at 11:00 p. m.

, make sure that you aren't eating or drinking calories after 8:00 p. m. Other than that half a cup of kefir, which is going to support your sleep rather than disrupt it.

You will also want to keep your liver working properly so that it can supply you with steady energy at night so you don't wake up. To do this, cut out all of that refined sugar that comes from highly processed foods, especially prepackaged foods and fast foods. Focus on eating single ingredient whole foods, paying close attention to cutting out the bad oils which cause inflammation in the liver and stop it from healing.

Swap these out for natural clean saturated and monounsaturated fats. And watch my video, the five best foods to clear out fat from the liver for more information on this. And for the few of you that are still having trouble sleeping after doing all this, look into adaptogen herbs and nerveines like ashwagandha, lemon balm, tart cherry, or the amino acid tryptophan.

These herbs have natural ingredients that help your nervous system adapt to stress to help you control your belly fat, sleep better, and fully relax. My personal favorite is lemon balm, which I now take as part of a natural sleep supplement that has a unique blend of sleep inducing natural ingredients, and I'll put a link down to that below the video. Science has also discovered that certain probiotics can help with sleep as well.

For example, lactobacillus ramnosis found in live cultured Greek yogurt triggers the vagus nerve and lowers stress hormones. Bifido bacteria longum found in that kefir we talked about has been shown in studies to blunt cortisol spikes during periods of stress. And also lactobacillus plantarum from sauerkraut and brine fermented pickles support serotonin production which again can stabilize your mood and lower inflammation.

And finally, lactocus lactus found in traditional buttermilk or aged cheeses can improve the body's antioxidant status and support better release of melatonin from your pineal gland during the night. So, there you have all the information you need to stop waking up alert in the middle of the night. Please leave any questions down below in the comments and I'll try to answer you as soon as I possibly can.

Don't forget to like the video and subscribe for more science-backed natural remedies. I wish you great health, wealth, and happiness. How to lower cortisol.

If you're waking up between 1 and 3:00 a. m. with racing thoughts, a feeling of dread in your chest, or your mind is racing when it should be sleeping, this means that your body is probably making too much cortisol, a hormone that keeps your nervous system in a stressed out state.

High levels of cortisol can also cause stubborn hanging belly fat to form even when you're eating perfectly healthy. In this video, I'll be giving you a master class on the best ways to bring cortisol down to naturally take your body and mind out of that stress tense state using nutrients, foods, and remedies. Your body will be able to finally relax, recover, burn fat more easily, and sleep peacefully through the night.

In the hours between 1 to 3:00 a. m. , your liver becomes most active, detoxifying chemicals and breaking down hormones and fats.

At midnight, your blood sugar naturally starts to drop and your liver is supposed to release a steady flow of glucose to give your body energy. But sometimes when the liver is congested or inflamed, your blood sugars can drop too much and your brain senses danger and it panics. So it calls out for cortisol which pulls sugar into your blood and your sleep hormone melatonin drops waking you up abruptly as your mind becomes very alert and active trying to solve imaginary problems when you should be sleeping and recovering.

So, the first thing we must do is stabilize your blood sugars during the night. Now, if you can tolerate dairy, simply drink 1/2 a cup of milk kefir about 1 hour before you go to bed. Make sure to look for plain, unsweetened kefir made from whole milk, not the flavored or the low-fat varieties.

Also, check the label to make sure that it has live and active cultures. This kefir will give your body a slow and steady trickle of natural sugar from the lactose, just enough to prevent that 1 to 3:00 a. m.

drop in blood sugar. Kefir also has a slow digesting protein that gently fuels your liver through the night, so the body doesn't need to make more cortisol and wake you up. Plain kefir is actually one of the best natural sleep restorers shown in studies to raise garba.

GABA is a neurotransmitter that relaxes your body and helps to switch off the stress response. But if you also notice that your muscles are very tight and tense around the neck and shoulders, this is a clear sign that your nervous system is stuck in the fight or flight mode, which is also raising cortisol. The best remedy for this is a magnesium supplement at night, taking between 2 to 400 mg of elemental magnesium from the form called magnesium glycinate.

When cortisol levels are high, your nervous system prepares your body for stress, keeping your muscles tense, which can prevent you from sleeping properly. But magnesium and its partner amino acid called glycine naturally raises GABA levels in the brain, the master switch that turns off the stress loop so that you can fall asleep and stay asleep. Studies show that magnesium supplementation can restore balance and improve sleep quality.

So combining the kefir and the magnesium about an hour before sleep creates a very simple but powerful way to keep your body calm through the night. But sometimes even when you're doing everything right, you might still feel wired where your heart is beating faster than it should be. And that's where this other very simple but ancient remedy can help.

Lavender oil has been used for centuries to calm the mind. But why? Well, it has an active ingredient called linolul, which tells the pineal gland to release more melatonin.

Melatonin is the hormone that makes you sleep very deeply, and it restores and heals your body during the night. This actually tells the stress centers in your brain that it's safe to relax. One study showed that after 4 weeks of inhaling lavender oil each night, blood melatonin levels jumped significantly.

So, simply place a few drops of this on a tissue by the side of your bed and just breathe it in during sleep. It really is that simple. But if you still find that you're waking up in the early hours, your brain may just need a bit of help switching off that emergency mode.

This next technique helps you to get back asleep as quickly as possible. Inhale very slowly through your nose, filling up your lungs completely. When they're full, take one extra small sip of air at the top and exhale slowly through your mouth.

Do this five or six times. This sends a very powerful signal of safety to your brain through your vagus nerve, which instantly lowers heart rate and tension. This is one of the easiest and most effective ways to calm the nervous system and switch off cortisol in the moment.

Now that you're starting to sleep better, we need to stop this cortisol spike from happening in the first place. Starting in the morning when your day first begins. Before you go to bed, place a bottle of water on your nightstand and add a/4 of a teaspoon of sea salt.

Ideally, you will use Celtic, Himalayan, or Redmond sea salt. These contain over 80 trace minerals, which your adrenal glands need to function properly. Now, when you first wake up and you want to start your day, shake up the bottle and drink it right away.

But why would you do this? Well, during sleep, your body loses electrolytes through breathing and sweating. When you wake up, even slightly dehydrated.

Your adrenal glands must work harder to raise your blood pressure and energy, so they release extra cortisol in the process. That's why so many people wake up in the morning with a tight chest or that uneasy feeling of dread for no reason at all. Drnking salt water first thing replenishes those lost minerals.

It rehydrates your cells and helps to lower cortisol naturally. It gives your body a calm, steady start to the day instead of feeling wired, tense, or exhausted before you've even begun. It's also vitally important to keep your phone in another room.

I must emphasize this. Keep smartphones and devices in another room and avoid screens at least 45 minutes after waking. Blue light and notifications trigger dopamine and cortisol instantly putting you back in that stress mode.

But I need my phone for my alarm. I can hear you screaming at me. Buy an alarm clock.

Don't make excuses. If you want to relax and sleep properly, trust me on this one. It's changed both my life and my wife's.

I'd also strongly encourage you to get some morning sunlight. When you go outside within the first hour of waking up, certain wavelengths can activate cells behind your retinas, sending a signal to your brain's master clock called the SCN. Amazingly, this resets your body's sleep and wake rhythm, telling it that it's daytime and helping cortisol to rise in a healthy way.

now so that it can naturally fall later at night when you need to go to sleep. Even just 10 to 15 minutes of natural sunlight exposure without sunglasses helps to regulate melatonin, cortisol, and serotonin all at once. Over time, you'll notice that you start to fall asleep faster, wake up calmer, and your energy becomes steadier throughout the day.

Now, the first meal of your day can also have a profound effect on your stress levels because the last thing you want to do is go and eat sugar, cereal, grains, or carbs after you wake up as these breakfasts will spike your blood sugars followed by a crash that will again raise cortisol. Instead, I would suggest that you eat foods that activate the parasympathetic nervous system. This is the part of your body that controls digestion, relaxation, and normal sleep cycles.

To activate this, your body needs something called acetylcholine. And the best way to boost this is by eating choline, its precursor, from egg yolks. So, simply eating two to four eggs for breakfast supports the lowering of stress, cortisol, and adrenaline.

Other good options include smoked salmon, avocados, and pates made from organ meats, which will also supply B12 for healthy nerves. The two other nutrients that are needed for a calm and balanced body are vitamin B1 and B5. You can get both of these very naturally from nutritional yeast, perhaps eating this with your morning eggs or sprinkling some over a salad for lunch.

People often notice that within just five minutes of eating this nutritional yeast, they feel much calmer as their acetylcholine levels rise and their nervous system begins to fully relax. You can also get these nutrients from sunflower seeds, beef liver, and ground flax seeds. Just try to incorporate these foods throughout the day to calm your body.

And if you feel that stress is rising during the day, as many of us do, I would also suggest that you limit yourself to only one cup of coffee in the morning and completely stop drinking it after 10:00 a. m. because it takes at least 6 hours for your liver to break down just half the caffeine that you drank.

So, it will interrupt your sleep if you aren't careful. Instead, you may want to drink one to three cups of green tea per day, which is rich in alenonine, an amino acid that crosses the bloodb brain barrier within 30 to 45 minutes. This naturally lowers your heart rate and calms your body so that you can feel calm, steady, and focused.

You can also get elenine in supplements and some mints as well. By the way, I've also put together a 12step guide book called Unlocking Peace from Anxiety if you'd like a full action plan on paper to calm down your nervous system. The link to that product is below the video if you'd like to check it out.

But why is your lack of sleep causing you to gain belly fat? Your body isn't designed to stay in fight or flight mode all of the time. So, when you're constantly stressed, cortisol levels remain high, and that keeps your blood sugar high, too.

You see, your liver has to keep converting that excess sugar into fat for storage, and most of it ends up right around your belly. That soft fat hanging over the front isn't just coming from food. It's a sign that your body's been stuck in survival mode for too long.

But when you finally bring the cortisol down and start sleeping deeply again, your body can switch back into repair mode and begin burning that fat for energy instead of the glucose. Cravings for sugar will naturally go down and you'll find it much easier to diet and exercise. So to fix the particular root of this liver problem that we discussed that's raising cortisol in the night, I would suggest that you stop snacking all day and eat two to three solid meals with lots of protein and high quality fats.

This alone will stabilize your insulin and blood sugars, helping to reduce fatty liver and inflammation so that cortisol doesn't spike in the middle of the night when you should be fast asleep. You should also stop eating at least 3 to four hours before sleep. When you eat late at night, your body has to use a lot of energy and resources to focus on digesting that food when it should be focusing on fat burning, repairing the liver, sleeping, and lowering cortisol.

So, for example, if you sleep at 11:00 p. m. , make sure that you aren't eating or drinking calories after 8:00 p.

m. Other than that half a cup of kefir, which is going to support your sleep rather than disrupt it. You will also want to keep your liver working properly so that it can supply you with steady energy at night so you don't wake up.

To do this, cut out all of that refined sugar that comes from highly processed foods, especially prepackaged foods and fast foods. Focus on eating single ingredient whole foods, paying close attention to cutting out the bad oils which cause inflammation in the liver and stop it from healing. Swap these out for natural clean saturated and monounsaturated fats.

And watch my video, the five best foods to clear out fat from the liver for more information on this. And for the few of you that are still having trouble sleeping after doing all this, look into adaptogen herbs and nerveines like ashwagandha, lemon balm, tart cherry, or the amino acid tryptophan. These herbs have natural ingredients that help your nervous system adapt to stress to help you control your belly fat, sleep better, and fully relax.

My personal favorite is lemon balm, which I now take as part of a natural sleep supplement that has a unique blend of sleep inducing natural ingredients, and I'll put a link down to that below the video. Science has also discovered that certain probiotics can help with sleep as well. For example, lactobacillus ramnosis found in live cultured Greek yogurt triggers the vagus nerve and lowers stress hormones.

Bifido bacteria longum found in that kefir we talked about has been shown in studies to blunt cortisol spikes during periods of stress. And also lactobacillus plantarum from sauerkraut and brine fermented pickles support serotonin production which again can stabilize your mood and lower inflammation. And finally, lactocus lactus found in traditional buttermilk or aged cheeses can improve the body's antioxidant status and support better release of melatonin from your pineal gland during the night.

So, there you have all the information you need to stop waking up alert in the middle of the night. Please leave any questions down below in the comments and I'll try to answer you as soon as I possibly can. Don't forget to like the video and subscribe for more science-backed natural remedies.

I wish you great health, wealth, and happiness.