Slumber-EZ® ...sleep well tonight and awake naturally refreshed!

Too Exhausted to Sleep?

An Advanced Approach Using Multiple Pathways and Targeted Nutrients

Since 1994 Lidtke has been a clearing house, where health professionals and lay people alike share information on the often baffling question of poor sleep – particularly when there is no identifiable disease. On the surface, symptoms are usually the same… exhaustion, inability to concentrate, and a volatile moodiness/ irritability.

In addition to feeling awful, many people with this complaint feel their livelihood is threatened because they simply cannot stay awake on the job. Typically, when you are in this state, you fall into the trap of stimulant dependency. As a large portion of the world's population has come to learn, stimulants are addicting, and they eventually lead to a crushing, adrenal exhaustion.

When a person's livelihood is at stake, it is easy to fall into the two-pronged trap of stimulants followed by barbiturates, followed by stimulants. Every day. Stimulants to stay awake; barbiturates to fall asleep.

The fact is that common sleep deprivation for only a few days begins to mimic the physiology of depression and aging. According to the Center for the Study of Biological Rhythms, "… a state of sleep debt, as is experienced by a substantial fragment of the population in modern societies, is likely to increase the severity of depression and widespread age-related chronic conditions such as obesity, diabetes and hypertension." Getting good, sound sleep is not treating any of those diseases. Rather, it is following the common-sense approach of not exacerbating them.

Acting as a clearing house for these reports has motivated Lidtke to begin unraveling what at first seems like a complex knot of causes. What we have learned is that there are distinct biochemical mechanisms in your body that govern sleep.

As our colleagues from the pharmaceutical industry report, when it comes to sleep research, all the money goes into computer-designed chemicals and a battering-ram approach to sleep. Almost no attention is paid to nutrients and how nutrients can modulate the subtler, safer pathways to normal sleep.

L-Tryptophan is one of the few exceptions. An enormous body of research paints a detailed picture of how L-Tryptophan is able to convert to serotonin, and later to melatonin. But here again, complexity raises its ugly head. The pathways that L-Tryptophan can follow are like the branches on a vine. A true nutritional approach requires auxiliary nutrients that help usher L-Tryptophan along that one pathway that does the most good.

To take it to an extreme, without the right spectrum of nutrients, nothing you eat will be metabolized properly. Your venous and lymphatic systems may end up loaded with useless waste-products. The same could happen in any of the pathways influencing sleep.

Combining Nutrients for Best Results

When it comes to nutrition, one thing we all need to know is that a shot-gun approach is not the same as a carefully selected spectrum of nutrients. Nutrients compete against one-another. Pathways compete against one another.

Nearly sixty years ago, Dr. George Watson made some rather remarkable observations regarding metabolic typing. He probably was the first to make popular the notion of fast oxidizers versus slow oxidizers. Just like blood type, if you give the wrong nutrients either to a fast oxidizer or to a slow oxidizer, you cause problems - particularly over the long-run, where they may stay under your radar.

If you are taking L-Tryptophan for sleep, for example, you need to know that L-Tryptophan competes against other amino acids (L-phenylalanine and L-tyrosine are two) that have caffeine-like effects that can keep you awake. What you may not know is that L-phenylalanine is a major component in a popular, artificial sweetener. Without knowing it, you could be medicating yourself and hindering L-Tryptophan from circulating in your brain, simply by your choice of sweetener.

Once 5-HTP is in your brain, it may efficiently produce serotonin, but it may not be as effective as L-Tryptophan in competing against other amino acids for passage into your brain. The dosage for L-Tryptophan, after all, is ten-times the dosage for 5-HTP. It may be for this reason that L-Tryptophan usually outshines 5-HTP for promoting sleep.

Feeding the L-Tryptophan > Serotonin pathway by adding more L-Tryptophan to your diet works for many of us, but other amino acids promote this pathway, as well. L-Lysine, for example, not only seems to accelerate the production of Serotonin, but a metabolite of L-Lysine, pipecolic acid, plays an important role in the effectiveness of GABA, another sleep enhancing biochemical produced by your body.

Hormones, too, play a role in sleep. When you think your hormones are at fault, and you've heard that bio-identical hormone replacement is all the rage, still, it may not be the key. Chronic low-level infections in the digestive tract – which we all have to some degree or another - can be a cornerstone of the problem.

Hiding in your digestive tract, common gram-negative bacteria and fungi just naturally produce a variety of hormone-like and neurotransmitter-like endotoxins that seep into your bloodstream. These chemicals can play havoc both with your nervous system and your immune system. This is not a good thing, because it makes the balancing of your hormones nearly impossible.

According to Dr. Thomas Crook, MD, author of The Yeast Connection, and an authority on fungal infections, chemicals such as aldehydes may build up from an overgrowth of fungi, triggering a stress response that then unleashes the hormone, cortisol.

Cortisol, we all know, is an essential hormone produced by your adrenal glands - but it also is a chemical that can interfere with your sleep. If you find yourself waking up around 2am or 3am in the morning, this may be a clue of what is happening.

Again, as our colleagues in the pharmaceutical sciences are quick to admit, addressing this kind of infection simply by not feeding it can do wonders. Nutritionists, such as Steve Coulter, Ph.D., further point out that assisting the metabolizing (breakdown) of aldehydes into innocuous end-products, with the addition of molybdenum to the diet, works wells with the natural approach.

When we take a step back and look at the whole person, our clinician friends who are adept at identifying allergens point out that we now have a better understanding of how your allergies and intolerance to common foods, such as dairy products and grains, can set your nervous system on edge and be yet another source of elevate cortisol. In these cases – which are frequent - both a change in diet and targeted nutrients can bring peaceful relief.

Be at peace in body, mind, and spirit!

For Physicians

Stimulants of any kind before bedtime, including foods or beverages containing caffeine, chocolate, mahuang, ephedra, guarana, yohimbine, L-arginine, or allergy-producing foods, such as dairy products, or simply bright lights or loud entertainment shortly before bedtime may either prevent sleep or cause wakefulness later in the night.

Dosage may be increased to six (6) capsules before bedtime if sleep is difficult. Slumber EZ may also be given during the night if wakefulness occurs.