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Summary
On episode 531 of 40+ Fitness, Coach Allan sits down with Diane Macedo, an Emmy Award-winning correspondent and anchor for ABC News, who battled years of insomnia and a circadian rhythm disorder triggered by overnight shift work before writing The Sleep Fix: Practical, Proven, and Surprising Solutions for Insomnia, Snoring, Shift Work, and More.
Diane’s central point is that sleep problems have specific, diagnosable root causes, and treating every sleep complaint with a sleeping pill misses what’s actually wrong. She had both a circadian rhythm disorder and insomnia at the same time, and only found real answers once she started reading sleep clinician research instead of general wellness advice.
The conversation covers how to tell insomnia apart from a circadian rhythm disorder, why worrying about sleep makes it worse, and practical fixes involving worry journaling, alcohol timing, evening carbs, and magnesium.
Links
- https://sleepfixbook.com
Key Takeaways
- Insomnia and circadian rhythm disorder are different problems with different fixes. A good test: if you sleep fine on weekends when you control your own schedule, the issue is likely your circadian rhythm, not textbook insomnia.
- Sleep apnea often goes unnoticed because sufferers feel like they slept fine. Repeated breathing pauses wake the body just enough to fragment sleep without being remembered, while also raising the risk of heart disease, stroke, and high blood pressure.
- Two systems have to align for good sleep: circadian rhythm and sleep drive. The circadian rhythm is your body clock releasing wake and sleep hormones on schedule, while the homeostatic sleep drive builds up adenosine the longer you stay awake, and both need to point the same direction at bedtime.
- Worrying about not sleeping actively powers the “wake drive.” Anxiety about sleep loss triggers the same fight-or-flight arousal as any other stressor, which is often what turns a short bout of insomnia into a chronic one.
- A “constructive worry” brain dump before bed retrains the brain that bed is for sleeping. Writing problems on one side of a page and the next concrete step on the other, done a couple of hours before bed, lets the brain process the day so it doesn’t try to do it while you’re lying awake.
- Alcohol helps you fall asleep but wrecks sleep quality later in the night. It disrupts body temperature, circadian rhythm, and adenosine levels as it wears off, so Diane recommends about an hour of processing time per drink before bed.
- A light, sleep-friendly snack an hour or two before bed can beat going to bed on an empty stomach. For Diane, an empty stomach worsened both her sleep and her acid reflux, so foods like oatmeal or toast with butter solved both problems at once.
- Evening carbs help tryptophan reach the brain and convert into melatonin. Protein earlier in the day builds up tryptophan stores, and a complex carb at night helps that tryptophan cross into the brain and become the serotonin and melatonin that support sleep.
- Diane’s three strategies to get and stay well: prioritize sleep and get properly diagnosed by a sleep specialist rather than self-treating, eat healthy by turning comfort foods into simple better-for-you swaps, and build in periods of silence each day to decompress and process.
“I didn’t realize how bad I felt when I wasn’t sleeping until I finally started sleeping and realized how much better I felt.”
Diane Macedo
