How to Beat Stress & Anxiety for a Good Night’s Sleep

Keep calm and sleep more with these safe, natural remedies for stress and anxiety.

Ever have those nights when you lie down in bed exhausted and your mind starts racing with worries, regrets, or a hundred different thoughts? Or maybe you start worrying long before your head ever gets the chance to hit the pillow. Either way, you are far from alone. In the United States, 1 in 3 adults have trouble sleeping or insomnia, while 1 in 6 struggle with anxiety, the most common mental health challenge we face today.

With our busy lifestyles, it’s easy to downplay these issues and not seek out the help we need to overcome them. But did you know sleep deprivation puts you at an increased risk for Type 2 Diabetes? And anxiety increases your risk of developing an abnormal heart rhythm?

Ease your stress and anxiety and sleep soundly by addressing an overlooked hormone “heist” and replacing a missing master mineral.

Is Your Body Stealing This Hormone?

When you start your day running late for work and then skip lunch to make up the missed time so you can get to your child’s ball game, then pick something up quick on the way home for dinner and your night’s still not done, your adrenal glands are working overtime trying to pump out enough stress hormones to keep you going. Your adrenal glands are small, triangle-shaped glands that sit on top of your kidneys and make hormones you can’t live without, including stress and sex hormones. These hormones are part of essential functions like regulating your metabolism, immune system, blood pressure, and stress response.

When you are under any kind of stress, your body burns through stress hormones like cortisol and epinephrine at a rapid rate. If the stress lasts, eventually the supply runs low and the adrenals can’t keep up with production demands. The body will do anything and everything to keep stress hormone levels up, so your adrenals “steal” progesterone, which is a sex hormone in both men and women. This hormone heist is called the “pregnenolone steal” or the “cortisol steal” and doesn’t just stop with progesterone; DHEA, estrogen, and testosterone are all fair game if your supply of progesterone drops, causing hormone havoc.

Two of the most common symptoms of low progesterone are anxiety and insomnia. Others include low stress tolerance, hair loss, hot flashes, abdominal weight gain (“muffin top”), irritability, and fatigue. If you don’t want to go by symptoms alone, you can order an Adrenal Stress Panel to confirm you are robbing yourself of this essential hormone. Even one elevated saliva cortisol level on this test is an indication you are experiencing the cortisol “steal.”

The first step in reversing the cortisol steal is to supplement with progesterone and get those levels back up where they need to be. In as short as a few days, anxiety and insomnia can become a thing of the past. Here at UNI KEY, we created ProgestaKey, an effective, all-natural cream sourced from wild yam that you simply rub on the skin to help restore your levels. (If you prefer a pill, Pregnenolone is a good choice, but will take longer to restore progesterone levels because it is simply a building block for a variety of hormones.)

Once your progesterone tank is full, it’s time to look at the source of the problem – stress. Stress is unavoidable in this hectic, fast-paced world. We all have to learn how to manage it and not let it take over our lives and harm our health. Walking, meditation, breathing exercises, yoga, and other mind-body techniques all help tame the stress. Vitamin C and pantothenic acid are essential vitamins when you are in the thick of things, so make sure to nourish your adrenals when you’ve been under stress for any length of time.

Ease Your Worried Mind with This Essential Mineral

Magnesium has been called the “Master Mineral” and for good reason. It’s involved in over 350 of the body’s critical functions, and yet over 80% of Americans are thought to be deficient in this superstar, primarily because it takes 54 molecules of magnesium to process just one molecule of sugar. Magnesium helps with stress relief, energy production, sleep, blood pressure, blood sugar balance, digestion, muscle relaxation, bone health, and so much more.

Anxiety and insomnia are two of the most common warning signs of low magnesium. Others include fatigue, muscle cramps and spasms, and high blood pressure or heart arrhythmias. Supplementing with just two capsules per day of Mag-Key, a highly absorbable form of magnesium, may be all you need to sleep soundly and calm your anxious mind.

If your stress levels and lifestyle choices have left you tired, anxious and depleted, and you want to know what more you can do for your body, consider a Salivary Hormone Test to find out how much your hormone levels have been affected by stress and the hormone heist, as well as a TMA (Tissue Mineral Analysis) to measure your essential and toxic mineral levels.