260: Dr. Michelle Jorgensen, Pioneer in Holistic Dentistry: Your Dentist Might Know Your Sleep Problem

 Welcome to the Sleep As a Skill podcast. My name is Mollie Eastman, and I am the founder of Sleep As A Skill, a company that optimizes sleep through technology, accountability, and behavioral change. As an ex sleep sufferer turned sleep course creator, I am on a mission to transform the way the world thinks about sleep.

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Each week I'll be interviewing world-class experts, ranging from researchers, doctors, innovators, and thought leaders to give actionable tips and strategies that you can implement to become a more skillful sleeper. Ultimately, I believe that living a circadian aligned lifestyle is going to be one of the biggest trends in wellness, and I'm committed to keeping you up to date on all the things that you can do today to transform your circadian health, and by extension, allowing you to sleep and live better than ever before.

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Welcome to the Sleep As a Skill podcast. What if your sleep struggles are connected to something happening in your mouth? So in this episode, we sit down with Dr. Michelle Jorgensen, a holistic dentist, author and founder of Living Well with Dr. Michelle to explore the connection between oral health, airway function, and sleep quality.

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After experiencing mercury poisoning from removing silver fillings in her dental practice, Dr. Michelle shifted her focus to health-based dentistry, uncovering how dental structures and hidden infections can influence overall wellness and sleep. Now together we discuss how airway restriction, inflammation, and dental health can impact breathing during sleep and contribute to issues like poor sleep quality and teeth grinding and so much more.

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So if you've ever had silver fillings, root canals, wisdom teeth removed, chronic sinus issues, bruxism quote, mystery fatigue, or suspected sleep apnea, this one is for you. We're gonna jump right into the episode, and as always, if you have any questions, don't hesitate to reach out. And as a quick reminder, we'd love to have all of you listening subscribe to our weekly newsletter.

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It goes out every single Monday, sleep Obsessions, and that's been going out every Monday for over seven years. So get on there. You can sign up for that at sleep as a skill.com. Welcome to the Sleep is a Skill podcast. We are very lucky to have our guests here today. Dr. Michelle, thank you so much for taking the time.

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Glad to be here. Thank you. 

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Yes, absolutely. So as always, one of the challenges is to dive in and put all the things that we need to discuss with our different guests into a relatively short period of time. So we're gonna see what we can dive in because I think there's such an important opportunity for people to understand that.

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This angle, this area of medicine, of dentistry being crucial for sleep and for really being on the front lines of helping to identify disordered sleep signs and sleep disorders in general and airway health and so much more. So having said that, maybe starting at the beginning as far as how you see this connection of the work that you do and how it kind of bridging that gap to help support people with their sleep.

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Yeah. You know, it's interesting because. When I started in dentistry, I had no idea that I would be talking to anybody about sleep. Right. It just wasn't, you know, it wasn't on my radar. It wasn't on any of my patients' radar. It certainly was nothing that I was trained to talk about in school whatsoever.

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Yes. But my entire career is definitely deviated from what I originally planned it to be. I got very sick doing dentistry. Ended up finding out it was from removing silver fillings. They're 50% mercury and drilling on them releases those vapors into the air, and if you think about it, the dentist's head and is right above the patient's mouth.

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So I got really desperately ill with mercury poisoning from removing those fillings. And after I figured this out, finally had a new direction for my career path, I started asking a lot of questions about, well, if I had never even been told that this could. Literally ruined my career and my health both, and it was inside of dentistry and is today.

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There's still these fillings placed and felt mouths all already, you know, all over the United States today. What else could also be impacting health? 

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Yes. 

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That are states in the mouth. And those were the questions that I started asking myself. And it was really interesting because patients started saying things like, oh wow, I'm really glad that you're using these precautions when removing fillings.

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What do you know about fluoride? Or what do you know about root canals? My doctor said I should look into them. Or What do you know about sleep and the challenges that people have? Does that have anything to do with what you're doing? So these were not things that I. Really had an intentional path towards doing it.

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These were all provocations that came from patients from other practitioners outside of dentistry. And as I started going down those paths and trying to answer the questions that I didn't have answers for, I found that there was such an enormous connection with dentistry and overall health. And as you know and talk about so, well, sleep is huge when it comes to the overall spectrum of our wellness.

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And that's my whole platform is about wellness. Helping people live well. And I found that, uh, you know, I found research showing that if you do not get adequate sleep. You are decreasing your quantity of life. Not only quality of life, because we all know that, you know, if you don't sleep well, you, you feel lousy.

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But quantity of life by 20%. So I tell people this all the time, that, listen, okay, you're not sleeping well, you're telling me this well because of that. If you were going to live till 80, you're actually only only going to live till 65. Now, how do you feel about that? How do you feel about taking 15 years off of your life?

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And of course, nobody feels good about that. So then I said, well, what can I do about it? So this has been a real evolution for myself as well. I don't see a new patient now that I don't talk about sleep with and talk about solutions that we as dentists can provide that are actually root cause solutions.

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So I'm so glad you're talking about this because there's a lot of things people can do from a supplement standpoint, from a lifestyle standpoint, but there's also things you can do structurally. That a dentist can help with that can really get to the root cause of your sleeping issues. 

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Yes. Oh, well said.

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Oh my goodness. And one, thank you so much for vulnerably sharing your backstory and that I'm so happy that you were able, I'm not happy that this happened to you as far as the Mercury's concerned, but I'm, I am happy that you were able to, one, connect the dots and two, to really delve in more deeply and then help support others by bringing this issue to light and then helping to provide a pathway for action.

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So how many of us have fillings and questions on how to navigate these and have you seen just, I know we've got a lot of directions to go in, but just on that Mercury piece, have you seen the mercury aspect of things impacting people's sleep directly? What do you see there? And then alternative solutions.

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So it's interesting, there's a lot of things going on in the mouth that are going to impact two primary systems in the body. Number one, the inflammatory system. 

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Yeah. 

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So things like mercury are going to create more inflammation in the body. So do we directly say mercury fillings will impact your sleep?

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No, but what I'm saying is mercury fillings impact your inflammation. Inflammation, particularly local inflammation. So it's not just mercury fillings, I call it. The big three I always discuss are metals in the mouth, in, uh, infections in the mouth, hidden infections, things like failed root canals that have no symptoms that nobody even knows what's going on, or infections were wisdom teeth were removed.

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This is a big one that no one knows is going on, but is a huge issue. Yeah. So hidden infections and then sleep and had, and they all correlate together. So if you have higher inflammation, especially in the mouth. What it's going to do is it's going to create swelling in the tissues or in the back of the mouth, which is tonsil tissue, soft tissue, soft palate, uvula, even, you know, back into the throat and the esophagus and these areas, they're going to be more swollen.

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Hmm. 

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Well, next time you have swelling in those areas, it's going to impact your sleep because it's going to limit your airway space. So do mercury fillings impact? Sleep. Yes, but not in a necessarily, oh, you have a mercury filling. You're not gonna sleep anymore. It's you have a mercury filling, it's gonna swell your airway.

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It's gonna create inflammation in the system. The other thing that I find is an, basically an attack on the immune system. So inflammatory system and immune system. A lot of things going on in the mouth, metal. Hidden infections, both are going to impact your immune system. When your immune system goes awry, all of a sudden all sorts of things go awry, including sleep because of hormones, because of just the regulatory pathways in the body.

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Because you're not able to defend yourself against that roving, cold or flu that might come along that's gonna now impact your sinuses. And so, you know, all of these things. So there's an enormous connection with the mouth, through the inflammation pathway and through the infection pathway that we talk about all the time.

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And so for people listening that do have those fillings and maybe they're overdue for, or have speculated that they might need to do something about those, are there steps that they can take? How can they get aligned with someone like yourself who is educated on this and not just gonna say, oh yeah, okay, we'll take 'em out.

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What does that look like? 

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Yes. Because that's actually really dangerous. Yeah. Just to take them out without any precautions, because that's what was happening to me. Yeah. I was getting all of that. Mercury vaporized, getting it in my head, got me very sick, you know, as. Remove the removal process of the filling, and every silver filling is 50%.

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Mercury, people will say, well, do my silver fillings have mercury? Every silver filling is 50% mercury. So the most, the, the most dangerous time is actually during the removal that mercury is released 24 7. I used to be told that if I told anyone that their, that mercury could affect their health, I would lose my license.

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That was what I was told school. But now I can tell you these things because there is research that's supporting these, these fillings are in mercury 24 7. Every time you chew, every time you punch your teeth, every time you swallow, every time you have a hot, uh, you know, a hot drink and a cold, something to follow, it's releasing mercury.

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So that yes, is happening on a daily basis, but. The time that you're gonna get the most mercury releases during the removal appointment. So the last thing you wanna do is just go to any dentist and have those removed because you're gonna get a whole load of mercury into the system. And I have patient after patient that comes to me saying, I had the removed and my regular old dentist and I have been so ill ever since that time.

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How can you help me now? So you do not wanna do it unless you're gonna do it safely. So how do you find a dentist that is going to remove it safely? And what does safely mean? Yeah, safely means there's a whole bunch of precautions. So as a dentist, we use a, we use covering, so we cover your face 'cause mercury can be absorbed through your skin.

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So we cover the face, we cover the body. We use a giant vacuum that sits at the base of your chin. We have a couple of vacuums that go in the mouth. We use what's called a rubber dam, which is gonna collect any chunks or pieces. Come off of the fillings while we're removing them. The nose is covered so that there's oxygen going in the nose without mercury in it.

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So all of those things are what you're looking for, and you're gonna find someone who can do that in two places. Number one, I have a directory on my website. So my website is living well with dr michelle.com, right? Go on there. There's a dentist directory there. It's all free. So go on there and find a dentist that's near you that anybody on that list is going to be someone who already is thinking about this.

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They're doing it the right way. They're already talking about root canals and hidden infections. They're, they're doing this, those kinds of things. There's another directory on a website called iao mt.org. So again, you can put that hopefully in show notes. Yeah, ia omt.org. That directory is largely about this silver removal process.

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That's where I found the protocol. So when I got sick and found out it was mercury poisoning, my doctor said. You can't keep doing your job 'cause you can't put it in and expect to get it out. That's not how the body works. So you gotta stop putting it in if you're gonna get it out. So I had to go find where their protocol to do that.

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And this is where I found the protocol, the I-A-O-M-T. So every dentist on their list is going to have training or at least an awareness of these extra precautions that need to be taken. So absolutely don't do it unless you're gonna do it safely. 

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I mean, I certainly speculate that that was a part of my story when I went.

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So my whole origin story for the creation of this company was about a decade ago. I went through a period of insomnia co. Clearly changed source, you know, course of my life and the source where there was kind of a perfect storm of a lot of things that were going on, healthwise and stress wise and travel wise, and jet lag and all the things.

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And yet. I can just certainly say just purely on the timeline of things, just a few months before all this kind of flared up, this was one of the things that happened was the removal of some of those. Now I'm not saying anything, but it's definitely sure that did not help a single thing. So I'm so grateful for people like yourself that Ruth sharing also from a personal perspective and who've been through it and can really empathize with what that looks like, and yet are now helping to provide these pathways for action for people to take these steps to make a difference.

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So really grateful for that. So that's the piece on Mercury and or at least a, a little fraction of it. I know it's a huge topic. And it sounds like also in your practice paying a lot of attention to the airway and how that all connects, of course, with Mercury and other things. So how are you thinking about the airway?

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What should people maybe be considering with their kind of dental provider and professional of how there can be that connection? Because certainly there's over a hundred sleep wake disorders, and even just right off the bat, knowing that bruxism is a sleep disorder, knowing that there's so much in the world of sleep apnea, upper air resistance syndrome, so many things that your trusted dentist can spot that the average doctor might miss.

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So maybe guide us on, on this topic of airway and, and dental health. 

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So really at the foundation of everything sleep-wise, you cannot sleep if you can't breathe. 

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Yeah. 

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Okay. I mean, that's just foundational. You can't sleep if you can't breathe, because your body will not let you suffocate. It will not let you.

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So what it will do is it will wake you up. 

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Yeah. 

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You must wake up if you cannot breathe while you're asleep. So why would there ever be this struggle? Why would there ever be this challenge of, okay, I can't sleep and breathe at the same time? The reason is the airway that you talk about is literally a tube, and this is a conversation I have multiple times every single day.

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Oh, I bet. 

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And the tube itself isn't created too small because people will always say, well, let me back up for just a bit. 

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Yeah. 

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In, in the dental office, we use something called a cone beam CT scan. Mm. On the cone beam CT scan, I can identify so much. It's absolutely, I will not see a new patient without this scan because I can see this scan is, you know, people think a CT scan, it's like this big old bed at the doctor, at the hospital.

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You know, it's, it's, it's not that. It's a one that goes around your head. It's different than the one that you had when you had braces. A little different but. The, the machinery looks the same, so it's going to go around your head. What this scan does is it shows me everything in three dimensions. A typical dental X-ray just shows me two dimensions.

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It shows me a flat image, so it shows me, you know how wide your tooth is, how tall it is, but I can't see how deep it is. I can't see if there's actually infection on that third route that's hiding behind the other two that are overlapping each other. I can't see so much on this three dimensional code beam CCC scan.

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What I can do is I can literally turn you upside down and inside out. 

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Hmm. 

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I see every tooth in detail. I see the entire jaw structure. So top jaw, bottom jaw. I see your nose. I see your sinuses. I see your airway. I see all of the structures in the back of the skull. I see your pineal gland, which is where hormones are regulated.

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I see muscle attachments. I see swallowing issues. I can see all of that in one scan. Wow. We pull up the scan and we have a measuring tool that can actually measure the volume of the airway. So it's telling us what is the volume of the airway from basically the base of the soft palette. So if people dunno what the soft palette is, that's if you reach up to the back of your, you know, you reach up with your tongue, the back of your mouth, you're touching the soft palette.

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Okay. Yeah. So everything from there down to, it's about collarbone level and that's what we term the airway. That's the tube that air has to get from the nose and the mouth. Down to the lungs. So on the co CT scan, we have a measuring tool where we actually can measure the volume. So it's not just the height or the width, it's the volume.

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If you think about a pipe, it's how much space is inside of that pipe in every dimension. 

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Yeah. 

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So when we measure this, the number that we're looking for is 25 centimeters cubed. That is a typical airway volume is 25 centimeters cube. So I pull up a CT scan on patients, and again, like I said, this is every single, you know, every single day of new patients in our practice, we pull up the scan and we measure the airway volume.

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And it's not unusual for us to measure an airway volume of eight. So if 25 is the norm and we're measuring eight, that means they have a third of the space to breathe that they should, okay? Mm-hmm. Yeah. So that's the first thing we'd measure is we say, okay, this is the airway volume. So then the first question people usually ask is, well, why did I, why is my tube too small?

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Why is it just too small? And my answer is, it's not. It's what is also occupying that space. 

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Mm-hmm. 

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So my favorite analogy is a garage and a really extra long pickup truck. Alright. 

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Okay. 

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Trying to park the pickup truck in the garage, but it's too small. So the, you know, the, the end of the pickup truck.

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Pickup truck hangs out onto the driveway. Your airway is the driveway. So it's not that the tube is too small, it's what else is on the driveway that doesn't allow the air to pass? Why is the pickup truck hanging onto the driveway? It's because the garage is too small or because there's too much also trying to fit in the garage.

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Like you literally just bought 15 pallets of things and you're trying to shove 'em all in the garage and they don't fit. So they gotta the driveway. So the airway is fine. The airway is what you are born with and it is adequate. It's what else is occupying. That space. What else is crowding it out?

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Oftentimes it's tongue, it's tonsils, it's soft palate and uvula. It's all of those things are hanging out into the space that you're supposed to be breathing through. Why don't they fit in the garage? Because the garage is too small or because all of those tissues are inflamed, so now they're swollen. If you have swollen tonsils, you know, what do they say?

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Well, let's just take the tonsils out. The tonsils aren't the problem. It's that they're swollen. We have to figure out why are they swollen? The tonsils are, are super important. We, that's the immune system for the lymphatic system, for the head and neck. We don't want to remove the tonsils. We just need to find out why are they hanging onto the driveway?

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Why can't they fit the garage like they're supposed to? 

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Yeah, 

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so this is what we look at on a daily basis is, is the airway? What is the airway volume? Is there enough space to get air from the nose down to the lungs, from the mouth down to the lungs? If it's a third of the space that it should be, we say, okay, no, there is not enough space.

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So in our world, typically what patients are told or given is A-C-P-A-P. So let's talk a little bit about the fallacy of A-C-P-A-P. So now you have more air being forced through the nose or the mouth, sometimes both going through a third of the space that it needs to pass. So what so many patients tell me is, I can't stand that thing.

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I cannot with a C pap on why? Well imagine trying to force all of this air through a teeny tiny straw. So what a lot of times happens is the mask for the CPA literally blows back off their face. Can you see now why? Because there's all of this volume of air trying to pass through a teeny tiny passage away.

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It can't fit. So it's gonna come back out the nose, back up the mouth. It's gonna blow the mask off the face, it's gonna dry out the eyes, it's gonna drive you absolutely insane. So you're gonna rip it off in the middle of the night. 

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Right. 

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So you don't sleep. You don't sleep with it on. You don't sleep with it off.

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Exactly. 

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So what do you, right, so what do you do? And people sometimes will say, well, but it's gotta be better than nothing. The answer is no. It's not better than nothing. What we do is we make the garage bigger, or we make all of the things that have to fit in the garage. Smoke. 

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Mm. 

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That's all I do as a dentist.

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I make the garage bigger or I make the things to fit smaller. So we tackle first are the things that need to fit in the garage swollen because you have infection, because you have metals. What's going on? 

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Right. 

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So that's where we go into the root canal and areas where teeth were removed. Where those hidden infections could potentially be.

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And there's research, not from dentists, but from doctors saying 60 to 80% of chronic disease, including airway insufficiency, is related to the mouth. Hmm. So you need to look in the mouth if you have a sleeping issue. If you cannot sleep and breathe at the same time, you've got to look in the mouth and see, is this just literally a structural issue?

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I, is my garage too small? Or is the stuff that fits in the garage too big? So we look at that same CT scan and we look for infected root canals. Now, how often does this happen? Sure. How often do infected no degree canals get infected? Research shows about 90% of the time. 

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Mm. 

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And there are 25 million root canals performed in the United States per year.

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So that means 90% of those root canals at some point in their lifespan are going to get infected. But it's silent. The problem is, is inside of a tooth, there's a main root. We call it the root canal. It's a main, a main canal inside of the root. It holds the nerves, it holds the blood vessels. It's how the tooth, like when you tap on your tooth, you can feel it.

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Right. How do you build, 

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right, exactly. Yeah. 

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Because there's little, there's a nerve inside of that tooth, and there's little nerve channels that go all the way out to the outside of the tooth. 

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Right. 

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Hold sensitivity. Like if you drink really something really cold, you go, mm. All that 

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Exactly. Be like painful.

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Yeah. 

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How does it fill it? Because there's nerve channels that go all the way outside of the tooth. 

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Yeah. 

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The problem with the root canal is they can't clean all the way to the outside of the tooth. Mm-hmm. They can only clean and fill those main nerve channels on the center of the root. So any you get a root canal, even if it's the best root canal in the entire world, you have dead tissue still left in those little outside feeder channels that go all the way outside of the tooth.

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And every dentist knows about this. They're called dentinal tubules. There's a mile of them inside of every single tooth, so there's always dead tissue left behind. Anytime there's something dead in the body, it attracts bacteria. Anytime bacteria starts to congregate, it signals your immune system to come and take care of it.

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Part of the immune system's job is to create inflammation. It comes, it swells up the area. It does all of this. So we get localized swelling due to these infected root canals in the mouth, swells up the tissue, swells up the tongue, swells up the soft palate, swells up the uveal, swells up the tonsils. Now all of a sudden you may have a perfectly fine airway, but there's too much stuff spilling back into it and you can't breathe by it.

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So this is the connection between these infections. So that's one infection is root canals. The second infection is where you had teeth removed. Mm-hmm. And a lot of people have heard about this before, but it's where wisdom teeth were removed as well, because people will say, well, I've never had a tooth removed.

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Well, if you had wisdom teeth out, oh yeah, I had those out. 

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Right. 

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Sometimes they don't heal properly. It creates a dead zone in the jaw bone. Again, dead stuff attracts bugs. Bugs attract the immune system. Immune system creates inflammation. So it's the same scenario over and over again. So on the Conium CT scan, we identify, do you have a failed root canal somewhere?

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Do you have an infected tooth somewhere? Do you have an infection in the jaw bone where it didn't heal after a tooth was removed? Do you have any of those things that could be contributing to swelling in the airway? So this is what I'm talking to when I'm measuring an eight centimeter cubed airway. I'm saying, all right, let's go back and look at the teeth, 

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right, 

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find any reason that there's no, there's not enough space back here, here anymore.

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So this is absolutely imperative if you aren't sleeping well, that you really find out is this just a space problem. 

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So if someone's listening and they're freaking out 'cause they're now saying, oh no, I have like all of these, I had the root canal, I had the wisdom teeth removed, I had the silver fillings removed.

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Like what do I do? Am I doomed? What are some of those next steps to hopefully quell? You know, if we're running in insomnia world or undersleep, we often can be emotionally kind of, you know, defunct for a while. How can we breathe life into these individuals that now are like, oh no, is this uh, destined? Am I destined for poor sleep and problems?

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What does that look like? 

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Yep. So you're gonna go to those exact same directories we talked about before and you're gonna go get a cone BM CT scan and you're gonna have the dentist tell you what is going on. Now let's say that you have no infection, there's no root canals. And actually lemme back up for just a second because a lot of times people will say.

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I've had my teeth looked at, I've had my root canals looked at, and the dentist said, it's just fine. So there's a story I will always remember because really it was a turning point in my understanding as well. A patient came and had an old root canal and um, I saw her myself. I, I'll always remember her.

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She tapped on her tooth like this and she just said, it just has never felt quite right. And that's what people will say most often. They don't say it hurts because the nerve's gone. It doesn't hurt anymore. They'll just say, I dunno, I just, it just doesn't feel right. So we took a regular dental x-ray, the kind that you put in the mouth, right.

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Took a regular dental x-ray, pulled it up on the screen and I said, it looks fine. And if you had shown it to 10 dentists, 10 dentists would've said it looks fine. But I had just gotten my first cone beam CT scan machine. 

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Oh. So 

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you know what? 

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Nice. 

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Let's go take a scan. I'm just super curious. You know, I don't, I don't know.

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Let's go take a scan. We went and take a scan. Pulled up on the screen and my jaw dropped. There was a quarter size hole that had been eaten away in her jaw bone from this root canal that was reinfected. What? I couldn't a thing. So now this infection had spread into her jaw bone. Every single time she was chewing.

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It was like stepping on a blister and sending that infection through the entire bloodstream, through the entire body. So she said, get that tooth outta here today. Like can it come out today? You know? So these are the things that we can't see with regular dental X-rays. If you've never had a colon BM CT scan to check on your root canal, you've not checked on your root canal.

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Hmm. 

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If you cannot see them. So you've gotta go, you've gotta get it checked on. Now what do you do then? Yeah. What if there is an infection? Well, we can take care of it. We can take care of it. What we do is people don't like this answer, but if it's an infected root canal, we remove it. We remove it, and we replace it, we can replace it with ceramic dental implants.

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Yeah. 'cause. Is it worth losing 20% of your lifespan, root canal? No. No. And honestly, dentists, we are trained, our job is to save teeth. Like that is what we are trained to do. And so I used to tell people all the time, I will do anything to save a tooth. Say I will do anything to save your health. Even if it means removing and replacing a tooth.

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'cause I can replace your teeth all day long. 

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Yeah. 

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But I can't give you that 20% of your lifespan back. So let's remove the tooth, let's replace it. Let's clean out those wisdom teeth areas. I've had this done on myself. Mm. Let's those wisdom tooth areas out. If you have low grade like la, chronic, chronic, long-term, just fatigue.

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Yeah. Your adrenals are shot. Like you just can't get on top of it. Go check your wrist and teeth. There is, that is one of the first places we find, I can tell you story after story after story of people who had. Like, I remember this woman, she was in her mid thirties and had to move home with her mom. She couldn't work anymore.

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She was nearly bed bound, had no idea what was going on. She had tried everything. We went in, cleaned out her wisdom teeth area. The next morning she was up doing dishes. 

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What, 

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what? What are you doing? She said, I feel better than I felt some decade since I got sick. Teeth out. Literally, because it's a drain on your entire energy system, Jesus.

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So go get these things checked out. Now, let's say you get a CT scan and I say, you have no root canals. Your wisdom teeth areas look fabulous. Everything's great. Then we're gonna look and say, all right. Is it just simply because your mouth is too small, the garage is just too small? Mm. Your tongue and tonsils and soft palette and you can, they just not fit inside of it because it's too small.

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This goes all the way back to growth and development. Yeah. I mean this is like, starts from the day we're born and unfortunately in today's world, a lot of us grew with small jaws. 

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Yeah. 

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And it's nutrition based. This is Dr. Weston Price's research, you know, early 1930s. Yeah. And it showed that a lot of times today's food just doesn't have the nutrition levels it used to, and we're really lacking in nutrients.

‍

Well, this is fascinating to me, but the first bone affected by malnutrition 'cause the top jaw. 

‍

Mm. 

‍

Yeah. And I learned this because we adopted my son when he was two and a half. He had been extremely malnourished and his top jaw was so small it fit entirely inside of his bottom jaw. If you look at your teeth, you'll see the top juggles on the outside.

‍

It's supposed to go on the outside. Sure. Because were lined up like. Airplanes on a runway, like he literally, his teeth couldn't even fit in his mouth at all. So the top jaw is the first bone affected my malnutrition. Wow, we're not getting enough nutrients and we're not as evidenced by the fact that everybody has crooked teeth.

‍

Yep. Everybody skin increases as a teenager. Everybody has no room for wisdom teeth. If you look at skulls back 300 years ago, everybody had straight teeth and all 32 teeth, including their wisdom teeth in their mouths. Yeah. So, and 

‍

they 

‍

got outside and they got sunlight too. They 

‍

had all of that because that's where the, that's where the nutrient, that's where the vitamin D three came from, which is totally minerals properly.

‍

That's how we get minerals into our cells properly. But through vitamin D three, which is yes, the sunshine. So these, our mouth are just too small today. Yes. They just don't fit all of the things that need to fit in the garage. And this is largely what we find with people that we see the CT scan for. We say your mouth is just simply too small.

‍

So then the next question is, what can you do about it? Right. Right. Do about it. So first of all, we wish we had seen you when you were eight, but we didn't. If you wait, we do what's called interceptive orthodontics, where we actually help the mouths grow intentionally. Yes. So that there's enough space so children don't even need braces, so they have room.

‍

Right? 

‍

Like that's the best thing and that's the best of all worlds. If you're looking for somebody to do that, go to, it's called tooth pillow.com. Mm. pillow.com is a company that they basically employ a lot of dentists all around the country that can help with growth and development in children and special appliances that you wear for this.

‍

So go to two kilo.com if you have a child that you're saying, I really wanna prevent this in them if possible, and, and if any child is grinding or clenching their teeth, but they get a DHD symptoms, if they're bedwetting, these are all signs that they aren't getting enough oxygen at night. Yes, a child should not grind or clench their teeth period at all.

‍

If their baby teeth are crowded. If there's not enough teeth in their mouth, they absolutely do not have enough space for breathing. So you need to go and get on top of this today. Go to Tooth pill, tooth pill.com. Get on top of it, figure out how to intercept their growth and direct it. Wow. But if you're already an adult, you're already, you know, 50 years old, you say, well, okay, I don't think I'm grown anymore.

‍

Now what do I do? Yes. We have appliances that we can use that actually can expand mouse, even in adults. And sometimes we even just use Invisalign type appliances where we're just tipping teeth out, making more space for the tongue. We're clipping tongue ties. We're training tongues to come up and out of the way.

‍

There are so many things that we as dentists can do structurally, and I have patient after patient, after patient that we make more space in the mouth. We train the tongue how to come forward. All of a sudden they're sleeping fine with none of the sleep hacks they're having to do for forever even. Yes.

‍

Because this is foundational. If you can't breathe, you can't sleep, period. 

‍

Right, and I'm so thankful that you're addressing from such a holistic perspective because if we pan out and look at the current way that we're addressing something, like for instance, sleep apnea as you're speaking to in CPAP, and if we're just addressing the nights and trying to force that air thrown even for the happy users that say, oh, change my life and what have you, there's such a concern about what, about the whole rest of the entire day where you're likely trending in a sympathetic dominant state from not being able to properly breathe.

‍

And of course, we can leverage gravity and that can support a little bit improvements in the airway. But at the same time, this is all a system that works together. And if you're stressing it all throughout the course of the day, and even if you're lucky enough to have your CPAP firing in a way that's working for you to some degree at night.

‍

To your point, we want to get to one that's, that's often not what we see. Unfortunately, compliance rates are just abysmal because often exactly what you pointed to of just throwing it off throughout the course of the night is usually what we see. And I guess that is another piece that I would wanna check in with you on is do you see a bridge in that journey being oral appliances?

‍

And is that something that you see using as like in a temporary way as we're fixing the foundational problem? Or how do you think about that topic? 

‍

Thank you for asking that question. Yeah. So there's two things I wanna talk about that you've mentioned. Sure. One is that one is bruxism. So let's get to both of those.

‍

Okay. Let's go to bruxism first. Bruxism is a sign that you're not getting enough air. Yeah, because as I'm sure you talk about in extensive, you know, extensively, there are sleep cycles that we all go through during the night, right? We go through light sleep, and I'll do a very simple version, but light sleep, deep sleep, REM sleep, right?

‍

And then we come back up, we're light sleep, deep sleep, m sleep, and we cycle through this about every 90 minutes. That's a natural sleep cycle for our bodies. Well, one of the definitions of REM sleep is paralysis. And I've heard that this is because, so we don't like act out our dreams. You know, we don't go running across the street or whatever.

‍

So, you know, somebody created us in a nice way that way. But everything paralyzes in REM sleep, including the muscles holding the airway open. Mm. So let's say that when you're laying down and gravity is now not on your side because all of those tissues in your mouth, all the stuff in the garage is all falling out the back garage door.

‍

'cause you've tipped the garage on, you know, upside down here, it's now falling out the door and onto the driveway. When you're in light sleep, you can instill, you can still engage your muscles, you can still engage all of these muscles in the throat, all of these muscles in the tongue and keep everything braced and open.

‍

Deep sleep you can as well. As soon as you hit REM sleep, yeah, and your muscles paralyzed, you no longer are able to brace the muscles and no longer able to keep your airway open on your own. It's called airway patency. You can no longer keep that airway open on your own because the tissues fall back into that space.

‍

So your body will do a couple of things automatically to accommodate. First thing it does is clench your teeth. Mm. So bism is a sign that you aren't getting air when your muscles relax. But the other problem it does is you cannot stay in REM sleep as soon as you brux, as soon as you clench. Not even just grinding, but clenching.

‍

Because remember, REM is defined by paralysis. As soon as you engage a muscle to a, to open your airway, you're out of REM sleep. Mm. So these are people that wake up and they say, I swear I slept, but I just feel like trash every single morning. And I don't know why. It's because you can't get into those deep restorative sleep cycles because when your muscles relax, you can't breathe.

‍

So your body has to pop you out of those deep sleeps. This is why people are waking up, you know, three or four times a night, and sometimes they're waking up really panicky. Sure. They're waking, they're like wide awake. Why? Yeah. 'cause push them into sympathetic overdrive. Cortisol spike because they were suffocating.

‍

And the body said, um, excuse me, you are suffocating right now. Oh, wake up now. And so you wake and you can't go back to sleep. You've got that cortisol spike you are running on, you know, everything at that point. So bruxism is a sign that you aren't getting enough air, that you don't have enough room back here for things.

‍

The other thing the body will do is it will bring your bottom jaw forward. 

‍

Yes. 

‍

Why? Why does it do this? Because of side view. It brings all the things in the garage forward, right? Yeah. It brings the whole garage, including the tongue, the tissues, everything with it forward and outta the airway. As soon as you do that, you're out of deep sleep because you can't engage a muscle and stay there.

‍

So as soon as you bring a bottom, Jeff forward, you're not sleeping. You're not restoratively sleeping anymore, but it also wears out your teeth. Yes. So a sign people can look for, look for, you know, for, for from home if you have worn front teeth, but your back teeth are fine. This is not bruxism. Bruxism means you are wearing all of your teeth evenly.

‍

If you look in the mouth, it looks like somebody took a nail file and shaved everything off evenly. 

‍

Mm. 

‍

I very rarely see that. Very, very rarely see that. And I've seen tens of thousands of patients, okay. I've been doing this Wow. 28 years. I very rarely see everything shaved off evenly. Okay. What I always see is front teeth worn.

‍

Mm-hmm. So, I want you to think about this. You don't chew like this, right? Right. Because their front teeth together, I, there's a few, few people whose teeth do touch when they're chewing, but very rarely. Yeah. You don't chew like a rabbit. You don't chew like that. So how can those teeth get worn out? They can only get worn out if you're bringing them.

‍

Forward and touching each other. This is happening at nighttime and it is simply a survival mechanism. Wow. It's your body keeping you alive while you're sleeping. So if you are grinding your teeth at all, if you are waking up in the morning and you have sore muscles, you have headaches, you have sore head and neck, and you're like, why do I feel like I worked out all night long?

‍

Yeah, because a kid, yeah, you had to work out to stay alive to keep breathing. If you're w, if you're waking up feeling like that your jaws are sore, all you are not getting enough air. If you have worn front teeth, you are not getting enough air. All of those things are signs that you aren't getting enough air.

‍

So now let's go to the oral appliance is a solution. You can see why it would help, right? 

‍

Yeah. 

‍

It holds your butt and Jeff forward. It makes more space back here. 

‍

Sure. The 

‍

problem is, is the anatomy of that joint. So what there is, is there is a ball and there is a socket, and in between those two things, there's a piece of cartilage that acts like an insulator, just like a knee has cartilage in it.

‍

We always talk about the cartilage in our knees, you know? Right. 

‍

Sure. 

‍

That cartilage in your jaw joint as well, that cartilage is held in place by a muscle and a ligament. That cartilage goes along with the ball as you move the jaw forward. So when you hold the jaw forward in this position overnight, sure it does open up your airway, but it brings all of those jaw structures forward, including that cartilage, and it stretches the ligament out.

‍

Hmm. 

‍

Don't unstretch. Yeah, so this is called ligament laxity. So what now happens is that ligament gets stretched overstretched. It's like a rubber band that doesn't unstretch anymore. 

‍

Yeah. 

‍

And now that cartilage slips in and out of the joint as you're opening and closing. This is why you get popping and clicking.

‍

That is that piece of cartilage slipping on and off the ball of that joint. As you move in and out, the more you hold it forward all night long, the more changes you are going to get in this joint. Mm-hmm. As that cartilage slips off of the ball, you now have an unprotected ball. So now you've got bone to bone with no cartilage in between.

‍

So what does research shows is that at four years of wearing these oral appliances that hold your jaw forward, you're going to have irreparable jaw joint changes. 

‍

Wow. 

‍

The ligament doesn't unstretch. The cartilage will displace out of the joint and now you'll have bone to bone contacting each other. Hmm.

‍

So those oral appliances absolutely can be used in the temporary and they will help. They will help. They will help your jaw come forward. Sometimes people can't even stand them though, because if this is a small garage issue. Try putting a giant appliance in that small garage. 

‍

Yeah. 

‍

Now there's even less room for the tongue, less room for the tonsils, less room for the tissue.

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And people literally will gag their way, gag these things out of their mouth because the body's saying, there is no room for this. You're gonna put a plastic in here and I don't even have room for my tongue. Mm-hmm. There's no way this is gonna work. So a lot of times people can't use the long term because they can't stand to wear them.

‍

They're just too big. But again, irreparable jaw joint changes. So what I choose to do instead is like an Invisalign appliance where we're expanding making the, making the the root problem better. You know, fixing the root cause issue. But then we actually have appliances you can put on top of that, that hold the jaw forward.

‍

So we're doing them at the same time. We're holding you forward temporarily. 

‍

Temporarily. 

‍

Sure. While we're expanding to fix the root cause issue. So we understand that holding you forward helps. Absolutely. Got it. 

‍

Yeah. 

‍

You can't do it over the long term otherwise you're gonna now have jaw joint problems, TMJ issues, headache issues, muscle problems, car issues, you don't wanna go there because those issues are really difficult to repair.

‍

If, if not impossible, let's fix your airway issues without creating other issues. 

‍

Wow. And are you someone, and now of course I'm sure there's bioindividuality in each case you address differently, but in general, do you tend to go in the direction of kind of like a PY device or vivos or is something entirely different or is that just too basic of a question?

‍

Is it take a lot more than that? 

‍

So there are really, we like to think of it as um, you're on the football field and there as ahead of you, you know, the goalpost. Okay. A PY device, a vivos device. Those things again, though, have some challenges, especially a vivos device. It's really huge. So I have a patient who, I call it the Ambien generation because there was an entire generation of people where they took teeth out for braces.

‍

This was an easy way to do braces, so they took teeth out for braces because it's much easier to make teeth straight if there's fewer of them in the mouth. Unfortunately, when you take teeth out for braces, you've made the mouth permanently smaller. Now it's the garage is too small for everything to fit, so you try to put a vivos appliance in somebody like that, and they can't tolerate it.

‍

There's not enough space. These are people who gag brushing their teeth, who gag on pills because the gag reflects initiates when all the tissue in the mouth is too far back and it's enough falling mechanism. 

‍

Wow. 

‍

So you're gagg if the, you know, you're listening to this and you're like, man, I'm so easily gagged.

‍

It's because your garage is too small. Your mouth is too small. Ah, so you try and put a vivos appliance. Have you ever seen a vivos appliance? They're mask. 

‍

Yeah, exactly. Right. 

‍

And there's no way somebody that has a small mouth and then, you know, hyper reflexive gag response is gonna be able to wear that appliance at the beginning.

‍

So we look and say, first of all, can you even tolerate an appliance in your mouth? Now a Maree or a Sarpy is something that's gonna go in the roof of the mouth. That's a little more lower profile. Mm-hmm. A little bit easier to tolerate, but it's going to require surgery and Sarpy. In fact, Sarpy is pretty substantial.

‍

They're gonna, yeah, they're gonna actually release the entire upper jaw. They're gonna disconnect it in essence and move it out. So it's pretty substantial. So what I choose to do is we oftentimes will start with those clear aligners, those Invisalign type appliances. Why? Because we're going to just be tipping teeth.

‍

I just wanna make the garage even a little bit bigger. 

‍

Okay. 

‍

So that maybe we can then put a vivos appliance in so that we could try to avoid a surgical approach. Does that make sense? 

‍

Totally. 

‍

We have to walk our way a little backwards to get there. 

‍

Okay. 

‍

So we have to determine, okay, are we trying to make it through the goalposts or are we just trying to make it on the field?

‍

Mm-hmm. Like, how bad is this sleep disorder? How much is this is structural based? Sometimes we just need to get on the field and Invisalign is gonna get you on the field every single time. And then you combine it with myofunctional therapy, which is to get up and out of the way. Yeah. Tongue, eye releases.

‍

You combine that. We can take care of about 80%, 80, even 90% of people with that. No surgery, no massive appliances in the mouth. Now what about those other 10 to 15% of people? Mm. And those people, we gotta get through the goalposts. We have to have something's very, very specific. So that's going to be a Maree, a Sarpy, a Vivas appliance, something.

‍

Typically, I don't trend towards sars. I don't like to do surgery. If we can at all avoid it. 

‍

Sure. 

‍

So we are gonna use a vivos appliance. We may have to start with the liners first. We may have to move things out first enough to make enough room to even put the appliance in. Then we get the expansion we need from the vivos.

‍

So it is individual, but I'm gonna say 80, 85, 90% of people are gonna fit into that category of tipping teeth, moving the tongue forward. Retraining the tongue is going to do that for 'em. And honestly, I think what a lot of people in dentists are missing in this scenario is the inflammation. Is there an infected al?

‍

Is there a spot in the jaw bone that didn't heal right from the wisdom teeth? Is this impacting everything? Is this creating tons or swelling? Is this impacting everything? And we also talk about environmental allergies. I mean, I'm sure you hit all of that as well. You know, environmental allergies and how do you deal with the swelling in the tissue there So many times though.

‍

There's a dental problem. I mean, I have patients that have been through three and four sinus surgeries and their N ENTs just thrown up their hands and said, I don't know what to do for you. I don't know why. Wow. I just keep filling. We do a M CT scan and I find they have a massively infected upper molar, upper molar tooth, and the sinus is kind of like a bony bowl.

‍

So the, the floor of the sinus is thin bone, and the teeth sit right at the root of that thin bone. Well, when you have an infected tooth, whether it's an old root canal that's reinfected or an abscess tooth, that infection as it grows, likes to find a release valve. It has to find a way to release, so sometimes it'll go out the cheek side, and this is why people get big, old, swollen cheeks and swollen underneath their eye and things, but that bone is pretty hard.

‍

The easier release valve is actually to go up through the base of the sinus. That bone is much thinner. So when you have an effective root canal tooth or an abscess tooth, it more than likely will actually go and make a hole through the base of the sinus floor and start draining into the sinus. So these people who've had multiple sinus surgeries, we take a cone V CT scan, I'm like, it's your tooth.

‍

The NT didn't even look at it. It's your tooth. What? And it's created a dime size hole on the base of the sinus floor. So they do the sinus surgery, they clear everything out, they destroy the terminate. They just, they basically destroyed all of the mechanisms that. We intrinsically have to filter air to, you know, to, to humidify it, to do all these things that the nose is phenomenal at doing.

‍

They take all of that out, yes, and hope to open up the sinuses. And yet the sinus continues to fill with infection. Say it's the infected tooth and the release valve is to fill the sinus. We take the tooth out, we repair the sinus, we use stem cells to repair the sinus floor. 

‍

Wow. 

‍

And the infection never returns.

‍

Ugh. 

‍

So, so many times in these scenarios, we're diving right into mepe, sars, vivos appliances, all of these things not bigger, where we're not stopping and saying, is there just an infection here that we take care of first? Could that be enough? And a lot of times we take care of the infection. We also do something called night lace, which is a laser procedure that shrinks up that swollen tissue.

‍

'cause once the tissue's swollen, I tell people, it's like if you lost a hundred pounds, yeah, you may have lost the weight. 'cause. So we take out tooth, the infect, the inflammation goes down, but the tissue's still there and flabby. So we use a procedure called night lace where we shrink up that flabby tissue.

‍

A lot of times we just take out an infected tooth, we shrink up the tissue with night lace. You don't need to do any appliance at all. You're breathing better again, all of a sudden because we've just removed all the stuff that's filling the driveway. So it really is so important that you step back and say, what is influencing the airway?

‍

It's not the airway that's the problem. What is routing into the airway and making it impossible for you to get enough air so that you can't sleep and breathe at the same time? What are the potential factors going into this? 

‍

Whew. Oh my goodness. So are you of the thinking that you would like to see a future where everyone is using this cone beam scan?

‍

Just bare minimum to begin, and we're starting there so we can see, because once, if we get that particular scan, we can see so many of those things that you're speaking to. Is that correct or do you still need that trained eye to know what to look for? 

‍

Well, you do need a trained eye. So you need the cone beam to look at the train, you know, the trained eye.

‍

Okay, so 

‍

take the first step. Point is the scan 

‍

Okay? 

‍

Absolutely. Is the scan go on. Like I said, the directories yes knows what they're looking at on here. That is the entry point because Okay. I mean I am all for sleep hacks and I talk to people all the time about mouth taping. Alright. And about like nasal cones and nasal strips and you know, all of these things about magnesium.

‍

You know why magnesium in a spray bottle on my bathroom counter that I use on my I do too. Yeah. Exactly. Yeah. I mean I'm all about all of these things. Yes. And they're all super, is super important. But what I'm always so sad about, I'll, I mean I remember this patient, he was a, um, he was a rancher, but he drove truck as a, a part of his job.

‍

He has a huge, huge operation and, but he was really responsible for getting a lot of things to and from me. He was driving truck, he had such bad sleep apnea, he was afraid he was gonna crash on the road and kill himself and somebody else. Wow. He was just tears like this big old manly man in my office, just in tears, just crying and saying, what can I do?

‍

And we looked in, his mouth was super, super teeny, tiny. But he had tried everything. He had tried every sleep hack known of 

‍

course 

‍

to fan. 

‍

Yeah. 

‍

And they had helped some, do you know what I mean? They're not, it's not like they're not useful. Yeah. But they honestly, it, it's kind of like, you know, you're, you're throwing, I liken it to, you're trying to fill a bucket that has a hole in the bottom.

‍

Yes. 

‍

It's never gonna stay filled. Even though they all help and they fill up the bucket a little, but then it's gonna drain again. You need the code beam CT to scan, scan to say, structurally, where is the hole? Like, is the hole, what is the hole in the bottom of the bucket? Is there a hole? Because if there is, if we can plug that hole, all of the things you are recommending are going to be more effective.

‍

Every sleep hack known demand is gonna work better if there's not a hole in the bottom of the bucket. Totally. So demonstrating, totally identify the hole in the bottom of the bucket. 

‍

Yeah. And to clarify, over here we're all about the holistic, like, you know, scanning out. I love 

‍

talking to you. 

‍

Yeah. Right.

‍

Ensure that we get that in our modern society. To your point of, I love your reference of Western Price and going back, we're certainly of the estimation that so much of this. Was sort of handled years in our past from an ancestral perspective. Some of these things just sort of worked because we lived in alignment with nature, whether it's from a circadian rhythm perspective, in Fian rhythm, the foods we ate, the relationships we were a part of.

‍

Just a, a big, big topic. And that skillset has just whittled away. And yet, so now it's like, you know, we've siloed off. Dentistry is over here and the ENT is, you know, burning up the inside of the nose and doing all these things where you're, you're over here screaming. Hello. Like what you're missing.

‍

Exactly. Exactly. So I just so appreciate that there's humans like yourself that are educating and I'm so grateful. And to be respectful of your time, definitely very excited to hear how you're managing your own sleep, given that you've thought deeply about these different topics. But before we get into those, just four quick questions.

‍

Any kind of closing thoughts on this huge topic. And you can clearly see your passion and education and knowledge and wisdom on this big, big topic. But any kind of closing words on this? On this piece? 

‍

No. There's just a lot of sometimes overwhelm. In every world, in every topic that we're talking about from a health standpoint, from a wellness standpoint, my personal mission is to help people live well so that you can live your personal mission.

‍

So actually, I just had a book released in May, and this is the entire topic. Everything you just said Yes. Is there. We talk about ice, we talk about returning to the earth. We talk about returning to the traditional methods that kept us well for centuries to our grandma's knowledge and our grandma's wisdom, and the ways that we can actually cut through the clutter and the confusion and get to a starting point.

‍

So in the book, there's what I call a symptoms assessment, and you plug your symptoms in because symptoms are not the problem. Even your lack of sleep is not the problem. The problem the there, the symptom is the sign. It's all that your body can tell you. It's how your body's telling you something's wrong.

‍

So in the book, there's a symptoms assessment where you plug in your symptoms and it tells you. Which cells need help first, where do you start with your health journey? And it really clarifies and simplifies so much of what we all struggle with and are challenged with. So if you wanna find some deeper answers, some bigger answers, some more inclusive, holistic answers, please go check out the book.

‍

You can get it on Amazon Barn and Noble, wherever it might be. But also, if you go to living well book.com, what you're gonna find is you can also go and get the book there, but then you're gonna get the free resources, the digital version of the seasons assessment. My first steps guide, where I say you test it to be in a seasons of spring.

‍

That means deliver gallbladder needs help. This is what you're gonna do right now. So it's give you the step, step-by-step, basically way to break through the clutter and the confusion and the overwhelm in the world's day, because that to me is actually the biggest problem that we face, is this.

‍

Unbelievable just amount of knowledge, which is fabulous, but it leaves us also confused and a confused person cannot move forward. 

‍

Oh, 

‍

so we have to get through the confusion. 

‍

Cannot not agree more. That's amazing. Congratulations and so exciting. And I love how you've set it up in such a way that it's not just moving people into the world of more information, it's the education and action which bravo.

‍

So that's fantastic. So we'll be sure to leave that information in the show notes and help support people in taking that step to get into that conversation with you. And then I'm very excited to hear how you're managing your own sleep. You've thought deeply about this topic and have your own journey along the way with the Mercury and all of it.

‍

So the first question is, what is your nightly sleep routine looking like right now? 

‍

Fall bed? No, I do. I do do the magnesium spray on my feet most nights. I actually, it's interesting 'cause going to sleep is not my problem. My problem is numbness in my hands, and that's a residual leftover from mercury.

‍

And the more inflammation that I have, the worse it becomes. So I wake up in the middle of the night and my hands are completely gone. Dead hurt, painful, and they don't. They don't wake up very easily. So this was one of my biggest symptoms that I had. It was sleeping issues, but it wasn't because I didn't have room to breathe.

‍

It was because my hands were so inflamed from the mercury overload in my body. So what I found is I have to be intentional about my sleep long before I get to bed. I have to be very careful about inflammatory foods because if I eat foods that inflame my system, I will have more numbness and I will wake up at night.

‍

So I just have to be very, very careful about the foods that I'm eating during the day. And, you know, sometimes I'll, I'll not follow my own rules and I'll, I'll be sad for it in the middle of the night. 

‍

I understand 

‍

humanity, inflammatory foods, that's my prep for, for sleep as inflammatory. 

‍

Ugh. Beautiful.

‍

Love that. I mean, of course for those with sleep disorders and sleep apnea and upper resistant syndrome. So wise, what you're speaking to, 'cause we can help reduce that severity with taking those steps too. Beautiful. And then the second question would be, what does your morning sleep routine with the idea that how we start our day can impact our sleep?

‍

Mm-hmm. And so that's gonna go back to the inflammation as well. But I also really start my day with a lot of intention. So before my eyes are even open, just when my brain is open, I call it when my brain opens, you know, when my brain opens and I'm awake, but my eyes aren't quite open yet, I ask, the first thing I ask every morning is, how can I help the world live?

‍

Well say, what can I do? 

‍

Oh, I 

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love that. And I usually get a lot of information. And what that does is it powers me up to get out of bed and I go, I read scripture, I go make notes on what I just gathered from whatever was given to me. And honestly, it powers me through my day because there's so much that I can do to help other people.

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And that's what jazzes me, that's what gets me excited. So before my eyes open, when my brain opens, that's what I ask and that's what helps me to do. 

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I love that. I love that. 'cause you know, we asked this question of everyone and we've got, I don't know, over 250 episodes or something recorded. So many people respond in different ways, but I love that starting your day with that mission, that purpose, that passion.

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'cause you know, good luck sleeping well if you don't have a reason to get outta bed in the morning, you know? So love that. That's beautiful. And then our third question would be, what might we see on your nightstand or in your environment? 

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So I have a notepad on my nightstand so that I can write down anything that comes to me for six in the morning.

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Love that 

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downloads random books. I'm a book reader, so I have me too random books, but oftentimes I like fall asleep reading those books. So I have really, really strange books. There's always a really weird variety of things living on mine, on my nightstand at all times. 

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That is amazing. I love that. Okay, so then the last question would be, so far to date, what would you say has made the biggest change to the management of your sleep?

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Or said another way? Biggest aha moment in managing your sleep. 

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It was the inflammation a hundred percent. I was sleeping in carpal tunnel braces every night and then, then it led to a fungal, a thing on my hand, like it was just a nightmare. And everybody said it was structural. And once I fixed my diet, the inflammation went away.

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The numbness went away. So it's really understanding the connection of inflammation and how I can influence it in my own life. 

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Wow. What type of diet did you end up finding to move to that made that difference? Or is it a much more in depth conversation? 

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Largely removing. I mean, you can look up inflammatory diets and it's largely removing gluten containing grains, so everybody super sad about that one, but it is, I know what it is.

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Yes, dairy, you know, a lot of dairy products the same. And then a lot of people talk about nightshades, and I found this to be true for me as well. That's potatoes, tomatoes, eggplants, they actually create inflammation. Now do I do salsa? Of course, you know, but it's just. It's not gonna be my main source. And actually in my book I talk about how to handle foods properly.

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Okay. To decrease the inflammation. I actually have a sleep, well, a sleep well survey to take in the book as well. So a lot of these things kind of tie in together. Okay. But, um, it's the gluten containing grains and the dairy were two biggie for me. 

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Amazing. So great. And I know you mentioned of course, the book, so very exciting.

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So we'll certainly leave ways for people to access that. Any additional calls around the book, where to follow you, steps to take, how to be in your world. 

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Just everything is gonna be found at Living Well with Dr. Michelle. That's where my website is. That's, I have so much free content on there. Go check it out.

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Yes. The YouTube channel, all of my social channels, so much free content there and social channels people really enjoy. I have a lot of, uh, stories and I show c CT scans. This is what people love to see. I show the c CT scans, I show what we found. I tell what we did and how it, you know, what it did for people's lives and health and things.

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So there's a lot of good, there's a lot of good info on there. Go check it out. 

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Oh, that's amazing. Well, thank you for the work you do and for taking the time to be here. It really means a lot. 

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Thank you. 

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You've been listening to The Sleep As A Skill Podcast, the top podcast for people who wanna take their sleep skills to the next level.

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