Your Zombie Mornings Explained
Episode 242
Ever wake up feeling groggy, unmotivated, and just plain "zombie-like"? In this episode of Integrative You Radio, we dive deep into the science of "zombie mornings" and why so many of us struggle to shake off that brain fog. From sleep cycles to morning habits, our discussion unpacks the hidden culprits behind sluggish starts and offers actionable tips to transform your mornings into productive, energized beginnings. Tune in as we explore strategies to hack your routine, optimize your energy, and reclaim your mornings. Whether you're battling bad sleep habits, stress, or just can't seem to wake up on the right side of the bed, this episode will equip you with the knowledge to conquer your day. Don't miss out on this eye-opening discussion that could change the way you wake up forever! What you’ll learn: Understanding "Zombie Mornings": Morning grogginess often stems from disrupted sleep cycles or inconsistent sleep patterns, leaving your brain stuck in a sluggish state. Morning Routine Hacks: Simple changes like exposure to natural light, hydration, and avoiding your phone first thing can dramatically improve morning energy levels. Long-Term Solutions: Prioritizing sleep quality and consistency is key to eliminating brain fog and creating sustainable, energized mornings. Quotes: "Your morning sets the tone for your entire day—if you wake up in a fog, it’s not just about the first hour; it can ripple into everything you do." - Dr. Nicole "A great morning routine isn’t rigid; it’s adaptable and works with your lifestyle, not against it." - Dr. Nicole Find Integrative You Radio On: Website Youtube Apple Spotify Curious about Integrative You? Dive into Integrative You Radio with Dr. Nicole Rivera, where she explores the intersections of holistic health, personal growth, and living in alignment with your core values. Each episode provides insights and practical advice to help you achieve a more fulfilling and energized life. Links: Website: Integrative You Instagram: Dr.
Topics: morning, sleep, zombie, mornings, brain, integrative, wake, radio
Key takeaways from this episode
- ## Your Zombie Mornings Explained
- Sleep Cycle Disruption:** Understand how inconsistent sleep and the timing of your wake-up can leave your brain in a disoriented state.
- Morning Routine Impact:** Discover simple, actionable hacks like bright light exposure and hydration that can significantly boost morning alertness.
- The Power of Consistency:** Learn why prioritizing quality and consistent sleep is the foundation for eliminating morning grogginess long-term.
- Mindful Morning Habits:** Explore how avoiding immediate digital stimulation and incorporating gentle movement can set a healthier tone for your day.
Pull quotes
This is the place where you become limitless. **Unknown:** We are covering the latest and greatest topics, of course, in a disruptive fashion, around integrative medicine, mental health, and human behavior.
We will be sprinkling in some truth bombs for our healthpreneurs so they can join us in our mission to evolve healthcare.
If you are health curious and growth focused, you are in the right place. **Unknown:** But buckle up because this is real, this is raw, and this is disruptive.
Transcript
**Unknown:** Welcome to Integrative U Radio, hosted by Dr. Nick Carruthers and yours truly, Dr. Nicole Rivera. This is the place where you become limitless.
**Unknown:** We are covering the latest and greatest topics, of course, in a disruptive fashion, around integrative medicine, mental health, and human behavior. We are also covering how those topics affect the human and family dynamics. We will be sprinkling in some truth bombs for our healthpreneurs so they can join us in our mission to evolve healthcare. If you are health curious and growth focused, you are in the right place.
**Unknown:** But buckle up because this is real, this is raw, and this is disruptive. This is Integrative U Radio. Hey everyone. Welcome back to another episode of Integrative U Radio.
**Unknown:** You have Dr. Nicole here, and I am going to help you understand why you feel like a fucking zombie in the morning. So for those of you that are like, "What do you mean by a zombie?" Let's just gonna break this down so you can see if you wanna stick around for this podcast, because unfortunately, a lot of people have what I am about to describe. And more interesting than that, most people have just classified it as their normal.
**Unknown:** They have classified it as a lack of caffeine. They have classified it as a form of aging, as many things. So if you are a person that wakes up in the morning and you feel like a zombie, that your brain is not really firing on all cylinders, and you need to be up and about or have a cup of coffee before you feel like the, the cobwebs, you know, go away and you can now function, use your brain, and go about your day. In addition to that, you might also have a low-grade headache when you wake up in the morning that is also improved by the consumption of caffeine or just improved by being up in a vertical position walking around for at least twenty minutes to a half an hour.
**Unknown:** You also might have a, I was gonna say congestion, but this is really not just about the morning. You might have congestion in your sinuses when you sleep, and you also might find yourself with a little bit of congestion when you wake up in the morning and needing to blow your nose in order to remove that congestion or eliminate that inflammation. In addition, you might also have s- a little bit of inflammation in your face. You might find that you have bags under your eyes and again, that starts to get better after being up in a vertical position awake for at least twenty to thirty minutes, and it also can improve with coffee.
**Unknown:** And so the coffee thing and the m- primary compound that's in coffee being caffeine, this is gonna make a lot of sense as I talk more about it. But the reason why you might have those symptoms in the morning, again, you feel like a zombie, your brain doesn't function for a while, you have bags under your eyes, you have low-grade sinus congestion or a low-grade headache specifically in the forehead, this is because of lack of brain detoxification. So a really interesting fact is that melatonin is the master detoxifier of your brain. Melatonin, as most of us know, is something that helps with sleep.
**Unknown:** So the body being extremely, extremely intelligent, you have your melatonin start to go up at night in order to make you sleepy. But as we sleep and our melatonin remains high through the night, it is also having a dual function of helping with neurological detoxification. So the problem that happens is that many of us have hindered detoxification pathways, and we're gonna get into what does that look like that could be causing the symptoms that we talked about originally. But I wanna just take a quick step back here because you might be thinking like, "What the heck is stressing my brain or str- causing toxins in my brain?" So one, you have something called a blood-brain barrier, and that barrier is supposed to block out anything that could be toxic or harmful to the brain.
**Unknown:** But the problem is, is that most of us have a leaky blood-brain barrier. If you're ever looking for a test to measure this, Vibrant America, Vibrant Wellness, they have a test, it's called the Neural Zoomer, where you can actually test the permeability, AKA is your b- blood-brain barrier leaky? Is it permeable? And in the hundreds of times that I've done that test, there is a large majority of people that have a leaky blood-brain barrier.
**Unknown:** And part of the reason why they have a leaky blood-brain barrier is because there is a direct correlation to the permeability and the barrier of the gut lining. So if you have a leaky gutWhich that is definitely a hot topic and it's been for many years, then you are going to be more likely to develop a leaky blood-brain barrier. In addition to that, if you've had a lot of head injuries, you've had concussions, and I always laugh when I ask this question, especially to my male clients, and they're like, "No, no, no. No, I don't-- I haven't had any head injuries.
**Unknown:** No, I haven't. I, I haven't had any concussions." I'm like, "What sports did you play?" "Hockey." "Oh, yeah. Uh-huh. Yeah, you, you have head injuries." Like, you can't, you can't swing it any other way.
**Unknown:** If you've played any type of impact sport, you have had damage to your blood-brain barrier. If you have skied or snowboarded and taken some falls, you have damage to your blood-brain barrier from injury. Like, listen, I have snowboarded and knocked my head and it's... I wasn't concussed, but the, the s- the most minor hit to the head, the most minor, uh, car accidents can create soft tissue damage and create damage to the blood-brain barrier.
**Unknown:** So if you've played an impact sport, you already have damage from that perspective, let alone if you also have gut issues. Okay, so now that you understand that, the other aspect is, well, what the heck is getting into my brain? If the blood-brain barrier is damaged, what's getting into my brain? I have many, many, many, many podcasts on this topic, but the way that I keep it simple is we are all under assault from a toxicity perspective on a day-to-day basis.
**Unknown:** If you really got into the ingredients that are on your personal care products, from your lotions and your shampoos, to the h- um, fast fashion and the polyester and the really, really poor quality materials that are in clothing, to the perfumes that we spray, the makeup we put on, the food that we eat, there is a extremely high exposure to toxins. It's in our water. If you drink filtered water, fantastic. If you don't have a filter on your shower, you're getting exposed in that way.
**Unknown:** You're getting exposed from swimming in bodies of water that are next to power plants, or they are getting runoff from farms and industrial farming. So at the end of the day, we're all being exposed. No one is excluded from that statement. And it's just a matter of understanding that, yes, our bodies are very intelligent, and yes, our bodies have all of these inborn mechanisms to get rid of toxins, but it's like the pool filter or the vacuum filter that no one has emptied.
**Unknown:** Your body is gonna get to a certain point in time, unfortunately, this is happening younger and younger, that it can't filter properly anymore because the filters like your liver and your, um, kidneys and your lymphatic system are just so burdened and overloaded that they can't do their job properly. And so when we talk about this topic today of the zombie mornings, and the low-grade headaches, and the brain fog in the morning, we're gonna be talking more specifically about the lymphatic system because this is a huge factor that is playing a role in why you're not detoxifying, your brain is not detoxifying properly. So let's just do a quick recap here. So we're talking about waking up, your brain not functioning properly, maybe having even a low-grade headache, maybe having sinus congestion.
**Unknown:** And now we're talking about the fact that this can be contributed to having a leaky blood-brain barrier, which can be connected to a leaky gut, and the fact that certain toxins are getting into the brain or into the cerebral spinal fluid, which is now creating issues. So as you remember from when I was talking about melatonin, is that melatonin is the detoxifier. So if you're having decent quality sleep, you know, logically it would make sense that, oh, well, the melatonin's doing its job and it's detoxing all the shit out of my brain. Yes.
**Unknown:** Under normal circumstances, that would be true. But there's a couple of variables here that can compromise melatonin doing its job, and some of that is going to be chronic sinus infections, uh, chronic inflammation in the sinuses, deviated septums, or scar tissue from having broken nose, having plastic surgery on your face. Then we also have different things going on with the ears, if it's chronic ear infections from childhood, if you've had ruptured eardrums and there's scar tissue in the ears from that, if you're even prone to having ear pain or tinnitus now. Then there's people that have dealt with chronic throat issues, uh, constantly having that be their weak point.
**Unknown:** So maybe you had a lot of strep as a kid, maybe you had your tonsils taken out, but maybe that's just your weak point, so when you do get sick or you're under the weather, you're gonna feel it in your throat. Maybe you also have a lot of neck pain and you press on the sides of your neck, like below your, uh, earlobe, and it's really tender when you press in there. That's actually not always muscular. Usually, that's a sign that there is a lot of issues, inflammation and toxins living in the lymph nodes.
**Unknown:** If you were to google lymph nodes of the neck, you have a ton of lymph nodes running along the muscle called your SCM, which is literally the sides of your neck.And maybe you also have a lot of scar tissue in your neck because you had whiplash, you've had car accidents, you were an avid athlete or skier or snowboarder or gymnast, and all of those things contributed. Maybe you've had neck surgeries. Maybe you have plates in your neck, and you have scar tissue from that, and that's adhering your lymphatic system from draining properly. Then we also have dental, and it's because dental things will affect all the things I just talked about.
**Unknown:** Dental will cascade into your sinuses. It can cascade into your, uh, ears and your eustachian tube. It can cascade into your glands and your lymph nodes. It can cascade into all of those areas.
**Unknown:** So if you've had a per-- if you're a person who's had a lot of root canals, you've had teeth pulled, extractions, you had abscesses, your gums bleed, you have gingivitis, you have receding gum lines, all of that is rooted in infection. That's rooted in a poor microbiome. And even more interesting is your mouth is the first, uh, the... I don't wanna say the first part.
**Unknown:** That doesn't make logical sense, but it is part of your digestive system. It's, it's essentially the start of your digestive system. And so if you have a shitty gut microbiome, you're going to have poor oral health. And so dentists aren't talking to you about this 'cause they're not nutritionists, and they're not gastroenterologists.
**Unknown:** But at the end of the day, your mouth is a reflection of your gastrointestinal system because it is part of your gastrointestinal system. And there are many people that I've worked with that I have found chronic sinus infections that are directly correlated to a root canal gone bad, created an abscess, an infection that penetrated into the jawbone and actually penetrated all the way through into the sinus. And so you could see this on X-ray when you see dark bubbles, uh, things that look like black. That is going to show you that there are, is a probability of abscesses that are either in the jawbone or in, um, the sinuses.
**Unknown:** These are called cavitations, by the way, for those of you that are dorks like me. So there's, it-- the point that I'm making here is there is a lot of opportunity to create stress for your brain and to create toxins to spill into your brain. And so if all of these things are going on, or one of them is going on, you're going to have a lot of issues. Literally, it's, it's like barriers that are not allowing your brain to detoxify, especially when you're laying down in a horizontal position when you're sleeping.
**Unknown:** So this is kind of an interesting story. I used to have horrible bags under my eyes in the morning, brain wouldn't function, low grade headache. Chronic sinusitis as a kid, um, my whole family, honestly. Part of it was because I lived in mold most of my life, which I'll get into shortly.
**Unknown:** But this is something that it just kept getting worse and worse as I got older. And of course, I bought every cream on the market in order to, um, you know, get rid of the bags under my eyes, self-conscious about it, etc. Uh, coffee was a must-have because coffee helped, and part of that was because coffee helped with the blood flow to my brain. So fast-forward, I am just started my life as an entrepreneur, so being tired was, uh, pretty common.
**Unknown:** But when we were leaving work, uh, in the early days, you know, we left work at a reasonable time, six o'clock, six thirty, seven, which, uh, later down the line, you know, that became nine PM. Um, life is very different now as we have, uh, gained much wisdom. But at that time, it w-- the point that I'm making is it wasn't late. And, uh, at that time, my husband and I, we would-- we just took one car to work because we were on the same schedule.
**Unknown:** So often he would drive home, and I would fall asleep, but I would fall asleep to the capacity that he would either have to shake me to get me-- to wake me up to bring me in the house, or sometimes he would have to carry me into the house. And I thought I was just a really good sleeper. I could sleep anywhere and, you know, I slept like a rock. I didn't hear anything.
**Unknown:** So then we were in our exploratory phase of working with different lab companies, um, to get, you know, different types of analysis, and one of the companies was offering neurotransmitter testing. Neurotransmitter, serotonin, melatonin, dopamine. So they gave me a free kit, and I decided, "Oh, let's do it." Uh, I did my saliva test. I sent it in.
**Unknown:** And when I got the results back, my melatonin was through the roof. And I was like, "Wow, what the heck is this about?" And I didn't know what I know now. So with the melatonin, I was like, "Hmm, I wonder if this is why I fall asleep the way that I do." And so fast-forward, I am, you know, continuing to learn and grow as a practitioner, and I then learn that melatonin is the master detoxifier. And in between that timeframe, I did a heavy metal test, and it turned out that I had massive, massive amounts of mercury in my system.
**Unknown:** Part of that was from... I was a pescatarian for ten years. All I ate was fish, and I didn't know anything about farmed fish or, um, canned tuna, and I was exposing myself to very, very high amounts of mercury over that decade of being a pescatarian. And so essentially what was happening is my brain was toxic from a variety of things, mercury being one, but mercury is neurotoxic.
**Unknown:** It is specifically toxic to your neurological system.And my melatonin was going up in order to detoxify my brain successfully. But as my me-melatonin went up, I was having these episodes of falling asleep. And this is something in the cases that I've worked with of narcolepsy I've found very, very similar circumstances. And so my body was doing what it was supposed to do.
**Unknown:** It was producing excessive amounts of that melatonin to detoxify my brain. But the other layer to it was that I had inflammation in my sinuses from chronic sinusitis as a kid that I never knew how to fix. I also had a horrible, horrible head injury and neck injury from snowboarding, where I had severe whiplash. I had thirteen staples put into the back of my head and severe concussion.
**Unknown:** So I had a tremendous amount of instability in my neck, but I also had scar tissue from the staples that were put in and from the whiplash. So I was having major issues. So my, my body was producing the melatonin, trying to detoxify the mercury. And the way that it works is that the brain is going to dump all of the toxins down into the lymphatic system of the head and neck.
**Unknown:** So it's gonna move down into the tonsils. If you don't have tonsils, it's gonna move directly down into your lymphatic chain, again on the sides of the neck. And if there is issues in the neck because of scar tissue adhesions, clogged lymph nodes because of chronic strep when you were young or other infections, dental issues, now you're gonna have everything get backed up, and it's gonna get backed up into your venous system. And this is what is called CCSVI, chronic cerebrospinal fluid venous insufficiency.
**Unknown:** And what's kind of wild about this is that they have connected CCSVI to the things that we're talking about, but it's also been connected to people that have had mold exposure, that the mold has infiltrated the veins of the body, but also the head and neck. And they have found that mold specifically is connected to Alzheimer's and multiple sclerosis. And then they also found the connection of, uh, algae that has embedded itself in the epithelial lining of the venous system, and algae being the correlation to ALS, so amyotrophic lateral sclerosis, which most of us know is a pretty extreme disease. And so these tests were done, uh, by Dr.
**Unknown:** Zamboni. This is not something that, um, is just, you know, random made up. So the reason why I wanted to bring this podcast to you guys is that, one, I want you to be aware of how to fix these symptoms that you might have, but I also want you to have the ability to be proactive in not developing a serious neurodegenerative disease down the line. And I say that because it might seem like no big deal, "Oh, I have brain fog in the morning.
**Unknown:** Everybody does. Oh, I just need a cup of coffee, and I'm good to go." But if you are young, you're a teen, you're in your twenties, and you're already experiencing this, the compounding effect of years and decades, you are going to be more inclined to, one, have more toxic load in your brain, and you're more inclined to start having memory loss. You're more inclined to have development of other neurodegenerative diseases like Parkinson's and multiple sclerosis and Alzheimer's and dementia and ALS. So these are things not to be taken lightly and think, "Oh, I just need another cup of coffee," because this is a feedback mechanism telling you that there is something going wrong that is not allowing your brain to detoxify properly.
**Unknown:** So this is a key factor in being able to be proactive. So the thing is, is that we talked about a lot of things on this podcast. So in order for you to really know where the hell do I start in order to improve this is, one, listen to this again and, oh, I have had chronic s-sinus infections at this phase of life. I did have really bad strep throat and tonsil issues as a kid.
**Unknown:** I did have a lot of, you know, head injuries, and I was an athlete, and I've had concussions, et cetera. So you need to break down like what do you think is the catalyst? What do you think is potentially problematic? But you also really need to have someone on your team that gets it, that is able to help you navigate what is the one domino that we can w-we can cascade in order to have the maximum benefit.
**Unknown:** Because if you're like, "Oh my gosh, I've had all those things. I've had head injuries, I've had sinus issues, I've had tonsil issues, I have neck problems," et cetera, then it doesn't mean that you need to address every single one in the same capacity and the same magnitude. It's usually there is one thing that will be the first domino that will createThe ripple effect into the other areas. And sometimes that is dental, and sometimes that is, uh, lymphatic drainage work, and sometimes that is detoxification protocol.
**Unknown:** But it's really a matter of understanding more about your system and getting highly specific so you're not wasting time, you're not wasting money, you're not wasting effort. Because, again, the bigger part of this picture is, yeah, wake up and feel good. Wake up and not need to rely on coffee. Drink it if you like it.
**Unknown:** Wake up and not, you know, be thinking you need plastic surgery because you have, you know, puffy face or you have a double chin, and you have bags under your eyes. You know, that's another thing is, like, the inflammation, the longer it goes on, it will cascade into your neck as well. You know, people are gonna be like, "Oh, I have a fat neck," and you don't have a fat neck. You have inflammation in your neck 'cause of all of these things that we're talking about.
**Unknown:** So, you know, plastic surgery is a lot more expensive than going and actually dealing with the root cause, which is also going to help you decrease the likelihood of having, you know, more serious neurological issues down the line. The, the statistics on dementia and Alzheimer's right now, they're going up by the day, and we have to sit back and say, "Why? Why is this happening?" And it's not just one thing. It could be a multitude of things, hence what we've covered here today.
**Unknown:** So don't forget, one, if you're like, "Holy shit, I never knew any of this. Oh my God," it's not your fault. You have never been taught any of this, number one. Number two is we are living in an era where there is so much mixed information, so much information on the internet, we don't even know what to do, we don't know where to start.
**Unknown:** And also, this is something that you usually... If you're to this point that you're relating to all of this, you need someone to help you. You can't just change your diet and think all the toxins are gonna flush out of your system. You can't just, you know, do a nasal spray like Afrin and think, "Oh, you know, my sinuses are gonna heal, and my bags under my eyes are gonna go away." There are s- there are ways to go about this in an extremely economical and effective way.
**Unknown:** But we always have to ask ourselves, you know, what is the cost of doing nothing? You know? People always, "Oh, you know, I want my insurance to cover everything," and this and that, and, "This sounds like a lot of work." I'm like, "Yeah, but what's the cost of doing nothing?" Like, literally living the rest of your life feeling like fucking shit. You know how many people feel like shit?
**Unknown:** And they're, they're not even acknowledging how it affects their kids, their family, their wealth. It affects everything. It affects every minute of your life. It affects your energy.
**Unknown:** It affects your, your economic wellbeing. It affects everything. So if you don't have health, you don't have anything. You know, I used to think people were dramatic when they said that, but I realize that I've been able to accomplish half the things that I've accomplished in my life because I haven't had those major roadblocks of feeling like shit, not being able to think, waking up like a zombie every day, not being able to remember things.
**Unknown:** Like, I've always had the tools for my health, and I realize I'm, I'm so far ahead of other entrepreneurs in my wisdom and in my goal achievement, and it's because my health has allowed me to do that. So if you want an unstoppable, limitless life, one, you're in the right place, and two, just understand you're in the driver's seat. Everything and anything is fixable. It's figureoutable.
**Unknown:** Totally stole that from Marie Forleo. Love her. But your body, it's complicated but not, if that makes any sense. Your body is so fucking resilient, it just needs the right tools.
**Unknown:** And unfortunately, a lot of doctors are fucking incompetent, so I hate to say it. I'm not putting myself on a pedestal by any means, I just... I figured out a system. Me and my husband figured out a system, and we figured out a system that allows people to get results, and that's really all it comes down to.
**Unknown:** It's not that I'm super fucking smart, I'm just... I'm a junkie for data, I'm a junkie for learning, and I'm a junkie for common sense. Because guess what? A lot of the things that I learned through school never made sense, and I just challenged it.
**Unknown:** Most people thought I was crazy, and I just challenged it. And I was ostracized, voodoo doctor, oh my God, some of the reviews that still live online are fucking hilarious. Like, but it's just I, I did it for the sake of innovation, and, and that's what I'm all about. I'm gonna blow shit up for the rest of my life for the sake of innovation and helping you.
**Unknown:** All right, love you guys. We thank you so much for being an avid listener of Integrative U Radio, formerly known as Integrative Wellness Radio. We appreciate all of your support. We love your comments.
**Unknown:** Please visit us on social media as well as our website to see all of the fun things happening behind the scenes and the new amazing content and courses that is being rolled out on a monthly basis. We hope to see you there.
Related episodes
About Integrative You Radio
Integrative You Radio is a root cause medicine and integrative medicine podcast hosted by Dr. Nicole Rivera and Dr. Nick Carruthers — two integrative doctors who build personalized wellness protocols from your DNA, minerals, hormones, gut, and nervous system rather than from a population template. Looking for an integrative doctor who reads your labs together instead of in isolation? This is the show.
Further reading
Listen and read the full episode →