Whether playing the adorable, ditzy Chrissy Snow on “Three's Company” or pumping sales for the popular Thighmaster machine, Suzanne Somers has always seemed “ageless.” The best-selling author and health advocate visited “Today” to discuss her book, “Ageless.” Here's an excerpt:
Chapter 16
Sex, Sleep, and Stress
The Importance of SleepSleep . . . glorious sleep. You never appreciate the fact that sleeping is a daily function until you can’t sleep. Without hormones, it is really impossible to sleep. Without sleep, prolactin keeps escalating. Prolactin is a pituitary hormone that induces lactation and prevents ovulation. Prolactin is the domain of nursing mothers. A mother with a new baby needs to be awakened many times during the night to feed her baby . . . thus the high prolactin. Nature has provided this phenomenon for the new mother.
A young healthy reproductive woman has a full complement of hormones, and if she goes to bed early, sleep is a given; but as we age and begin to lose our hormones and develop bad sleeping habits, the body gets confused and prolactin keeps escalating.
T. S. Wiley writes in Sex, Lies, and Menopause, “At the end of perimenopause, cortisol soars and estrogen and progesterone hit bottom . . . just as they do during labor and delivery. At this point in the template, your immune system revs up so high that it may attack your cartilage and mucous membranes, and that scenario creates joint pain (arthritis), allergies, and an autoimmune disease called Hashimoto’s thyroiditis can also happen. Once your immune system has attacked and halted thyroid function, with the insulin resistance from sleeplessness, you just keep getting fatter” [and more and more tired].
Wonderful things happen in the night if you go to sleep early enough. Early is between 9:00 and 10:00 p.m. I know, I know, nobody goes to sleep that early; it is one of the reasons we are in such poor health in our country. As a nation we are sick because we don’t sleep. In fact, sleep loss is the new American deficit. We are fat and diabetic from lack of sleep. We are dying from cancer and heart disease from lack of sleep. Our healing hormones have no chance to do their work without sleep.
When you lose sleep, you really can’t catch up. Your hormones don’t spring back like that. Sleeping less than you need affects at least ten different hormones, not just melatonin. That’s just the tip of the iceberg. Sleeplessness causes shifts in all these hormones and changes appetite, fertility, and mental and cardiac health.
The National Institutes of Health concludes that six hours of prolactin production in the dark is the minimum necessary to maintain immune function like T-cell and beneficial killer-cell production. But you can’t get six hours of prolactin secretion on six hours of sleep a night. It takes at least three and a half hours of melatonin secretion before you even see prolactin. So if you don’t go to bed two or three hours before midnight, there won’t be enough time for this hormonal action to happen. Remember, if you sleep enough each night, you will lose weight as a result of your cortisol going down. Now you’re listening, aren’t you?
If we go all the way back before electricity, we had to go to sleep when the sun went down. There was no light—at all—so there was no choice. During the night healing hormones would go to work. Going to sleep early caused cortisol levels to drop, and when the cortisol levels were lowered, insulin levels lowered. We had no choice but to sleep until it was light the following morning. When the sun came up, cortisol and insulin levels would rise. Nature had it all worked out beautifully. Plenty of sleep, increased vitality and energy, controlled weight because the lowered insulin at night helped to keep weight at optimum. This is the way it is supposed to work. Did you ever think that going to bed early was a component of weight loss? If you are eating correctly, exercising in moderation, and going to bed at 9:00 or 10:00 p.m., you are ahead of the game. I tried this experiment on myself this year. I do eat correctly almost all the time, I do exercise in moderation regularly, my hormones are balanced, but there was some extra weight hanging around me through the middle that I just couldn’t shed. I have a lot of stress in my life, and I tax my adrenals regularly as a result. I know that if one hormone is out of whack, they are all out of balance.
So for the past year, I have been going to bed at 9:00 and 10:00 in the evening most nights. Guess what? Without trying, without changing my eating program or changing my exercise routine, I lost ten pounds . . . from sleeping!
And one more thing—you must sleep in complete darkness. Even the smallest bit of light keeps your cortisol from lowering. Put tape over the computer lights, and the light on the phone, and the light from your digital clock. These tiny bits of light will all affect your sleep and keep your cortisol level high. There was a study done where they put people in a completely dark room except for one tiny pin light on the backs of their knees, and their cortisol stayed high as a result. In Lights Out, T. S. Wiley says that “an avalanche of peerreviewed scientific papers supports our conclusion that when we don’t sleep in sync with the seasonal variation in light exposure, we alter a balance of nature that has been programmed into our physiology since day one.” The National Institutes of Health confirms that it is a scientific “given” that light and dark cycles turn hormone production on and off and activate the immune system. According to T. S. Wiley, “If the lack of prolactin at night doesn’t get you, the lack of melatonin ultimately will. Melatonin is the most potent antioxidant known. Less melatonin and more free radicals mean faster aging even without chronic high insulin racking up a ‘clock time’ of four years for every one you live.”
Now here’s the problem: When you are losing hormones and cannot sleep, your doctor most likely will prescribe antidepressants and/or sleeping pills. If your hormones were balanced, believe me you would not have trouble going to sleep. Once you get on the antidepressant merry-go-round, you’ll have a hard time getting off. Why take an antidepressant when balanced hormones and a regimen of proper sleeping will do the same thing, but more effectively and naturally? Because it’s easier for the doctor to give you a pill, and you will feel better. You will sleep better with an antidepressant; you will stop complaining to your doctor. He can go on about his business without having to do the work of trying to get to the bottom of why you seem to need an antidepressant. In essence, you are allowing your doctor to give you a Band-Aid instead of fixing the problem. Then the problem will continue to get worse and worse. He will up your dose, then give you sleeping pills. Your emotions, which were originally calmed down by the antidepressants, will get harder and harder to control. Doesn’t this upset you? But you keep taking the pills because you are feeling so much better . . . for a while. Then you are going to be bothered by the fact that even though you are enjoying your drugged sleep, and your drug-induced daytime calmness, you will start asking yourself, Why am I gaining so much weight? And you will get fat on antidepressants. The reason is that you haven’t addressed the underlying cause of the problem, which is hormonal imbalance. It happens to everyone—all of us experience hormonal decline as we age. Shockingly, it is happening at earlier and earlier ages. It is not uncommon for women in their mid- to late thirties to start perimenopause because of the stressful lives they are living. Stress blunts hormone production.
Now the antidepressant scenario continues. Guess what—you will lose your sex drive, you will continue to get more and more depressed, and you will eventually get sick because the antidepressant has been a Band-Aid masking the underlying problem, which is hormone decline. Without hormones, the internal “you” starts to decline, then the diseases of aging begin, among them heart disease, cancer, and Alzheimer’s.
The good news is that bioidentical hormone replacement therapy can rectify this entire scenario, along with sleeping, eating right, and managing stress. It’s a little tricky and will need constant “tweaking” from your doctor because of your surging hormones. But a good qualified doctor will know how to handle this. Remember, sleeplessness and stress will change your hormone levels, and the fact that the surges come and go will change your hormone levels. This is the exciting part of this new medicine; when you are working with your doctor to balance during this tricky phase, you would call when you have even the smallest symptom, because every symptom is an indicator that things are not in balance . . . and balance is the goal.
From “Ageless: The Naked Truth about Bioidentical Hormones” by Suzanne Somers. Copyright © 2006 by Suzanne Somers. Published by .