Dr. Cindy Geyer

speaker

241 appearances 4 recordings 1 series first heard Nov 2024 last heard 1 Jul

Dr. Cindy Geyer’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.

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Recordings per month over the last 12 months — 1 in all, peaking in Jul 2026 with 1.

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The Dr. Hyman Show · This Is Why You’re Not Sleeping Well—and How to Fix It Fast · 4 Nov 2024 podcast

So sleep is when we're repairing the powers of both the mind and the body. Sleep is when we reduce inflammation, repair tissues. The discovery of the glymphatic system in 2012, 2013 is this passive channel that runs alongside our arteries and veins in the brain that fills with fluid when we're in deep sleep and allows a washing out of debris we may have accumulated during the day.

So all those bad thoughts get washed out? Well, not the bad thoughts. No, but the amyloid plaque, that sticky plaque that we secrete in response to inflammation or injury, if it accumulates, of course, it can damage surrounding neurons and is associated with neurodegenerative disease and Alzheimer's disease.

It's definitely playing a role. And this concept of bidirectionality, we know that sleep disruption, circadian rhythm disruption, sleep apnea is present in two thirds of people with insulin resistance, prediabetes, diabetes. And it is a chicken and the egg thing. It is driving the bus. We used to think, well, you get the sleep apnea because you have insulin resistance and gain weight.

But if you have disrupted sleep, your insulins are higher, your cortisol's are higher, your glucose is higher. You're looking for highly processed, quick, energy dense foods and less able to resist them.

Absolutely.

And cancer. And dementia. And flares of autoimmune conditions.

And chronic pain and fibromyalgia. And anxiety and depression. I mean, it really affects everything.

but the more you worry about it, the harder it gets to sleep.

Right. So I do think that there's a need to address underlying contributors to anxiety and depression, independent of their impact on sleep. So talking about what's going on, bringing in some kind of breath-based practice, whether that's yoga or Tai Chi or meditation, just to ratchet everything down. That's another important component of it.

And thirdly, you've already touched on a little bit about the dopamine with the phone, but it's also the dysregulation in our circadian rhythms. You know, we think about how there's been a lot of research about how important it is to avoid light exposure at night, for example.

But everything we do during the day and when we do it is ultimately going to influence our ability to go to sleep when we want to and get the rest that we want to. So in other words, when we're eating all day long and snacking late at night and watching TV at night, that's signaling. Yes. And on our computers, that's telling our bodies and brain that it's day, it's day, it's day.

So we want to actually could reestablish a consistent circadian rhythm meal timing. So we're having eating earlier in the day and then building in a fasting interval before we go to bed.

No. Interestingly enough, there's as you know, there's a connection as well with digestive function that eating late at night not only disrupts your sleep, but it's contributing to higher reflux, which can also interrupt sleep. So everything's interconnected.

It's interesting. They even looked at LED streetlights disrupting the circadian rhythm of animals and insects too. So it's not just humans that are being impacted by this.

Well, one of the conditions is restless leg syndrome. It's hard to diagnose. It's more of what we call a clinical diagnosis. People describe this creepy crawly sensation in their legs or this irresistible urge to rub their feet together. Typically, it's treated with dopamine medications. It's connected to relatively low dopamine levels in the brain.

Dopamine, yes, revs you up, but dopamine also seems to play a role with movement. So it's treated with some of the same medications they used to treat Parkinson's disease. But it turns out that that can be more prevalent in people who have autoimmune conditions, in which case we want to address the underlying autoimmune conditions.

There are some nutrient deficiencies that are going to make the symptom of restless legs more significant. Low iron, low vitamin D, low folic acid, low magnesium. So we really want to look at somebody's nutritional status.

So if we identify a nutrient deficiency, for example, the next step is why? What's the why that somebody's nutrients might be low? And there we come back, like so many other things, to the function of the gut. And interestingly enough, there is a higher correlation in people who have small intestinal bacterial overgrowth also having restless leg syndrome.

maybe because it's contributing to ongoing inflammation, maybe because it's also contributing to difficulty absorbing those nutrients from your food. So we're even going to go a step further and say, is there an underlying issue with digestive function, absorption and assimilation of nutrients?

Absolutely.

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