Why Your Nervous System Won't Let You Sleep
A Third Quarter Reflection
As a holistic sleep specialist, I've spent years helping patients understand the root causes of their insomnia: such as high cortisol, blood sugar crashes, gut dysfunction, hormonal shifts, toxic burden, and breathing disorders. I've written about these patterns extensively, tested for them consistently, and treated them comprehensively with acupuncture, functional medicine, and breathwork.
Recently, I've been thinking about what ties all of these root causes together. What's the common thread running through every single sleep disruptor I see in my practice? The answer keeps coming back to the nervous system, and more specifically, a nervous system that's forgotten how to feel safe.
The Sharp Inhale
Think about the last time you were genuinely scared. Maybe a near-miss on the highway, a loud noise in the middle of the night, or a moment when you thought something terrible had happened, or when somebody jumped out and scared you.
What did your body do?
Sharp inhale. Body tensed. Heart pounding. Ready to run. As my husband says, "sympathetic happens on the inhale."
Within milliseconds, your sympathetic nervous system flooded you with adrenaline, spiked your heart rate, rushed blood to your muscles, and released cortisol for fast energy. This response kept humans alive for millennia, and when it works the way it's supposed to, it's beautiful. The problem is that for a lot of us, it never turns off.
Living 16 Hours in Survival Mode
Your autonomic nervous system has two main branches. The sympathetic branch is your "doing" mode: alert, muscles tense, shallow breathing, heart rate up. It's the "ON" switch. The parasympathetic branch is your "being" mode: settled, muscles soft, belly breathing, heart rate slow. It's the state where your body knows it's safe to let go.
For optimal health and restorative sleep, we want to spend 80-90% of our day in parasympathetic mode, with brief bursts of sympathetic activation when actually needed, like a deadline, a workout, a real threat. But here's what I see in my practice: most people live 16 or more hours a day in sympathetic mode.
Even if you don't think of your life as "that stressful," your nervous system is responding to constant micro-stresses. There's emotional stress like worry, anxiety, and relationship tension. Mental stress from decision fatigue, information overload, and the endless mental load. Physical stress from under-eating, over-exercising, or chronic pain. And physiological stress such as gut inflammation raises stress hormones, hormonal imbalances create their own cascade, and blood sugar swings keep the body on alert.
Your body doesn't distinguish between a lion chasing you and an inbox full of emails. It just knows that a threat has been detected, and the message is clear: stay alert, don't rest.
What This Looks Like at Night
When I work with patients on their sleep, we're really working on one fundamental question: does your body feel safe enough to let go?
Because here's the truth. All of those root causes I've written about, such as the cortisol dysregulation, the blood sugar crashes, the gut issues, the hormonal shifts, they're not just random problems: they're symptoms of a nervous system stuck in survival mode.
When your body doesn't feel safe, it keeps cortisol elevated at night, waking you at 3am wired and alert. It stays hypervigilant to blood sugar changes, jolting you awake with adrenaline. It prioritizes survival over digestion, creating the gut dysfunction that disrupts neurotransmitters. It can't properly regulate hormones because reproduction isn't a priority during threat. And it maintains shallow, chest breathing, which perpetuates the stress response.
You can't force your body to sleep when it believes it needs to stay alert to survive. This is why sleep hygiene alone doesn't work for most people. You can have the perfect dark room, the ideal temperature, the best bedtime routine, but if your nervous system is stuck in sympathetic dominance, sleep remains elusive.
The 24-Hour Framework: Creating Conditions for Safety
For good sleep, we need a particular pattern throughout the day. We need to be mostly parasympathetic during the day with bursts of sympathetic when needed. We need deeper parasympathetic by evening. And we need to be fully in that "safe to let go" state by bedtime.
Here's what supports this shift.
In the morning, we're setting the rhythm. Sunlight within 30 minutes of waking helps set your circadian clock. Gentle movement, especially if you're stressed, helps discharge some of that sympathetic activation. 30 grams of protein at breakfast stabilizes blood sugar and you can start your day balanced. And a caffeine cut-off by 10am ensures it's not interfering with your ability to downshift later.
The 7pm shift is the game-changer. This is when we dim the lights, lower the temperature, and make sure our last meal is finished by 7pm. This is when we shift to yin activities—reading, stretching, calm conversation—and put the phone away. This evening transition is where most people miss the mark, staying in "doing" mode right up until they try to fall asleep.
By bedtime, we want consistency. Consistent timing, a cool, dark, quiet environment, and a wind-down ritual that your body recognizes. And most importantly, we want to notice our body. Are your shoulders relaxed? Is your jaw loose? Are you breathing into your belly? These signals tell you whether you've successfully shifted into parasympathetic mode.
This framework works regardless of your specific root cause because you're creating the conditions for your nervous system to shift out of survival mode.
The Piece That Most People Miss: Breath as the Bridge
In my practice, I use three pillars to address sleep: acupuncture, functional medicine, and breathwork. Acupuncture helps calm an overactive nervous system and signals safety to the body. Functional medicine addresses the root causes. We test for cortisol patterns, gut dysfunction, hormonal imbalances, and toxic burden, then use targeted supplementation and protocols to correct what we find.
Here's what I've learned after 15 years: while addressing root causes through testing and treatment is essential, there's one practice that directly retrains the nervous system faster than anything else. And it's the one thing patients can do themselves, anywhere, anytime.
That practice is breathwork.
Not just any breathing, but breathing done correctly, the way your body was designed to breathe. Most people don't realize that the way we breathe throughout the day is either signaling safety to our nervous system or perpetuating the stress response. Shallow chest breathing, mouth breathing, and over-breathing keep you locked in sympathetic dominance. These patterns literally tell your body that there's a threat and it needs to stay alert.
Proper breathing—through the nose, using the diaphragm, at the right rhythm—activates the parasympathetic nervous system. This practice retrains your nervous system, because we can't consciously keep thinking "I need to take deeper calm breaths."
Why Buteyko Changes Everything
This is why I'm so passionate about the Buteyko method. I've used this practice with my patients as the breathwork pillar of my approach, and I've watched it transform sleep in ways that surprise even me. When patients learn Buteyko, everything else I do with them works better. The supplements are more effective. The acupuncture holds longer. The lifestyle changes actually stick.
Buteyko retrains your breathing patterns to:
Improve CO2 tolerance, which directly calms the nervous system
Shift you out of chronic hyperventilation (and yes, most of us are over-breathing)
Support proper oxygen delivery to tissues
Reduce sleep apnea and nighttime breathing disturbances
Signal safety to your nervous system—not just at bedtime, but all day long
It's not a band-aid and it's not a relaxation technique. I'd call this a re-patterning of how your body regulates itself.
The reason I'm so passionate about this method is simple: I've seen it work when nothing else has. I've watched patients who've tried everything (supplements, sleep studies, medications, perfect sleep hygiene) finally find rest once they learned to breathe correctly. And unlike the other interventions I offer, this is something you can learn and practice on your own, for the rest of your life.
What's Next for Your Sleep and Nervous System Regulation
If you recognize yourself in any of this—the wired-and-tired pattern, the 3am wake-ups, the feeling that your body just won't turn off—I want you to know that this is addressable. Your nervous system can learn to feel safe again. Your body can remember how to rest.
Sometimes it requires comprehensive testing for cortisol, gut health, and hormones. Sometimes it needs targeted treatment through acupuncture and functional medicine protocols. But almost always, it requires retraining the breath.
In the meantime, I invite you to simply notice your breath today. Are you breathing through your nose or your mouth? Is your breath shallow in your chest, or deep in your belly? Does your body feel tense or relaxed?
These aren't small details. They're signals your nervous system is receiving all day long, telling it whether it's safe to rest or whether it needs to stay on alert. Your body wants to sleep well. It's just waiting for permission to let go.
For a deeper dive into root causes: Check out The Deep Blue Sleep – A roadmap to fall asleep and stay asleep naturally
