I went through a sleep search specific to the audio transcripts and found the following. Seems a common issue so hopefully will help others.
If you need more context, click the link about the quote and search for sleep
Ray Peat on Sleep
Uses Of Urea - KMUD, 2015-02-20
RP: The blood sugar is always a problem at night. The effect of daylight is to maintain efficient oxidative metabolism, and just 15 minutes of darkness is enough to lower the efficiency of mitochondrial respiration. And so keeping very bright lights right up until bedtime will minimize the fall of blood sugar, but having a carbohydrate meal late in the afternoon or before bed, a glass of orange juice or milk with honey. Sometimes just the dose of sugar is enough to put you to sleep for an hour and a half or two hours. And it takes time for the liver to start storing glycogen, so it's good to have another glass ready for when you wake up or have another dose of orange juice or milk and sugar. And salty things, salty snacks at bedtime help to stabilize the blood sugar and energy production, so like a milk and maybe salty tortilla chips or puffed pork rinds something a salty snack as well as…
——
The Heart 1, KMUD, 2013
RP: Another way of looking at that reflex system is insomnia: many doctors think that thyroid is a stimulant that will make you stay awake; but when you think of the brain as having exactly the same process of excitation and relaxation as your heart muscle or your leg muscle, when the brain is fatigued, if it’s somewhat hypothyroid, it gets the equivalent of a growing pain, or a cramp. And it can’t relax fully. And that amounts to insomnia. And so, if you can energize the brain cells, you can get sleep to come on quickly. And the active thyroid hormone, and magnesium, and sugar, are the things that most quickly will restore energy to your brain, or your muscles, heart, and so on
——
Learned Helplessness, KMUD, 2013
HD: Right. So that's the parasympathetic nervous system. It's all about what happens after you eat a meal for example: You relax. You take it easy. You digest your food. Everything is being produced by the glands, that are secreting enzymes into the intestine or the stomach to digest your food. The heart rate slows down.
I always think the parasympathetic is fairly peaceful and wet, if you like.
RP: And it tends to take over at night. It helps the person go to sleep by slowing the heart rate. At least it should slow things down during the night; but with problems such as diabetes, or hypoglycemia, or various metabolic disorders, it can get overactive and instead of just calming things down, slowing the metabolism, lowering blood sugar, because you don't need so much, it can cause too much insulin secretion and other glandular secretions. For example, causing too much mucus formation. And the increased insulin can lower your blood sugar too much. Then, that can lead to intensified activity of the nerves, intensifying both contraction and relaxation where it shouldn't be happening.
——
Buteyko Breathing - Bud Weiss, 2008-09-15
RP: Yes, and there is a drug called acetazolamide, the brand name is Diamox. It used to be considered a diuretic, but it became popular to prevent altitude sickness because it causes you to retain carbon dioxide. And hyperventilators are people who are susceptible to altitude sickness. So taking this acetazolamide makes you retain your carbon dioxide by inhibiting the carbonic anhydrase enzyme, and prevents altitude sickness, but it also prevents overbreathing and alkalosis at night. People who have sleep disordered breathing, it is found that acetazolamide will usually cure that. And it is very effective in treating asthma which is one of the pretty direct ways to show that carbon dioxide deficiency is so closely related to asthma and other breathing disorders. Epilepsy is another thing that can be prevented with acetazolamide or anything that raises your carbon dioxide. Neurologists used to demonstrate an epileptic brain wave just by having a person hyperventilate.
——
Hashimoto’s, Antibodies, Temperature and Pulse KMUD, 2013
RP: The first time I’ve started noticing that was a friend who, twice a year, alternated episodes of extreme depression and mania. And, in the periods when she was giving up sleep, sleeping only 2 or 3 hours a night, her morning temperatures were extremely high. But then, after eating something, 2 or 3 hours later, they would fall several degrees. And that was during the time when she tended to be manic, and under the influence of too much adrenalin and other excitatory things. So, I suggested that she take enough thyroid to get her pulse and temperature to be steadier during the day. And, within a few days, she had stabilized, so that her morning temperature was a couple of degrees lower, and that increased after eating, instead of decreasing. And since doing that, she stopped having her annual up and down cycles.
———
Hashimoto’s, Antibodies, Temperature and Pulse KMUD, 2013
RP: Yeah. And, some people wake up cyclically during the night. When I was counseling dieters, there were some very fat people who would wake up: one of them woke up every hour during the night. The other one, I think, was sleeping an hour and a half, or so. And I got them to set an alarm clock to wake themselves up about 5 or 10 minutes before their expected waking, and eat anything with carbohydrates (milk, or juice, or even a cracker or something), and to do that every hour. And, within a week, they were sleeping through the night, and then they were able to start losing weight. Those stress hormones that raise your temperature and pulse rate around dawn were also increasing the blood sugar ( in diabetics, they call it the dawn phenomenon). But it’s the result of the stress hormones that rise during the night. The darkness itself is causing stress, activating hormones. So, in the winter, people are more likely to have disturbed sleep, because of long nights. And getting extra carbohydrates late in the day can help you sleep longer without these episodes of…usually, its nightmares waking people up with a pounding heart.
HD: That’s the adrenalin, right ?
RP: Yeah.
——
Hashimoto’s, Antibodies, Temperature and Pulse KMUD, 2013
Caller: I have temperature problems. I’m a light sleeper, and I’ve recently heard that valerian tincture improves one’s ability to relax, fall asleep, and stay asleep through the night. I’ve taken it, and have been astounded how helpful it was ( and for my brother too, who has trouble falling asleep). I wanted to ask if one can develop dependency, and if there are any contra-indications ?
HD: No. Valerian works on Gaba channels. But, in very rare occasions, some people get very stimulated by it. The majority of people do find a good benefit from it, and it does shut off that internal dialogue that keeps people awake when they sit and talk to themselves, and especially if people wake in the early hours. But I know Dr Peat’s interpretation of any kind of insomnia would generally be down to high adrenalin, preventing people from entering a deep, restful sleep.
RP: Valeriane’s Gaba mechanism is very good; it’s a very safe drug. But I think that using a drug of that sort is protective. But it is potentially habit forming. And besides my own experience, when I took thyroid, being able to relax and sleep soundly… on one of my trips, talking to doctors and such, I’ve ran into a doctor who looked horrible, said he hadn’t slept for three nights. And I mentioned my experience with thyroid, and gave him 10mcg of cytomel. And the next night of my talk, he pulled me aside before introducing me, and said: “That stuff’s better than morphine!”.
———
The Thyroid, 1996, Gary Null Radio Show
PEAT: It's very common for pre-puberty people to have leg pains that they call growing pains, and those people are typically a little bit low thyroid, and the textbooks used to show little kids with horribly swollen calf muscles that looked like they were muscle bound; but it was the accumulation of muco-polysaccharides swelling the muscle up causing great pain, cramping and so on, and in old people who are hypothyroid, something very similar happens, but it includes degeneration of the blood vessels to some extent, and you mentioned the chelation plus magnesium.
When you take thyroid, it energizes your cells to make ATP, and it happens that ATP binds magnesium, so you don't really take up magnesium into the cell very efficiently unless you have adequate thyroid. And when you are low in thyroid, you tend to lose magnesium during stress, and chronically that leads to a crampy, inefficient condition where you waste oxygen, producing your energy, but you can't retain it because of the lack of magnesium.
So in many situations, magnesium imitates thyroid function, but the two together really are simply energizing the tissue; and you can go from crampy legs, or many old people get "jumpy legs" -- a funny sensation that makes their legs kick when they try to go to sleep -- you can go from that hyperactivity of the legs to many other conditions including heart rhythm problems, insomnia, muscle pains in general, many states that are considered degenerative diseases, but are simply low thyroid/low magnesium states that prevent efficient energy production.
[and more]
And this high adrenaline state creates a terrible amount of confusion among doctors and patients both, because as an adaptation, it makes people feel like they're on speed sometimes, to have this adaptive, extreme overproduction of adrenaline. And at night, it's normal for adrenaline and cortisone to rise, even in young people, because it's a sort of a fasting state, and they're not eating, and so they maintain these sugar producing hormones during the night.
But in old age, these are higher, in general, because of the low thyroid. So that if your thyroid is low, or you're old and have low thyroid (that's a more or less natural thing), nighttime, with the rising adrenaline and cortisone, becomes more and more stressful, and insomnia becomes more and more common. It's very usual for people in their 70's and 80's to wake up after 5 or 6 hours of sleep and just get up early because they know they aren't going to be able to get back to sleep.
Some of the current publicity that is used to promote the fact that melatonin is used to make you go to sleep, it happens to be also a thing that goes up during hibernation, and its function is to lower the body temperature, and remember the hospitalized patients -- the ones who had the lowest temperatures were the least likely to survive, because as the thyroid goes down and your body temperature falls, you lose a lot of your immune functions and tissue repair capacity. So lowering your body temperature does make you hibernate and it does make you sleep, but you don't want to use something out of context to force that.
The studies that have been used to advocate melatonin's possibly anti-aging effect were done on mice and rats, and it turns out that they are very opposite to human beings and pigs, because they work at night in general and sleep in the daytime, and so melatonin for them has exactly the opposite meaning that it does for people and pigs. And for example, in humans and rats, melatonin raises prolactin, but in humans, prolactin knocks out progesterone production and causes infertility and stress and osteoperosis for example.
———
Weight Loss, KMUD Herb Doctors, 2013
Int: So given a person is consuming enough sugar to stock their liver for the night time fast…or I know you’re an advocate of ice cream before sleep or sipping on a little oj when they awake is it still possible to have foamy urine?
RP: Yeah the stress always occurs, but if you’re sleeping soundly and deeply there is less intense damage from the stress, so if you stay awake in the dark you would probably have super foamy urine in the morning.
And
RP: For some people taking a warm foot bath at bed time and then putting on socks and a warm cap sleep better.
————
KMUD Longevity, transcribed, verified and reposted 4/12/14
HD: So cascara would be pretty for improving bowel motility and excretion?
RP: Yeah and some of the so-called soluble fibres, even pectin for example from fruit can greatly increase the production of serotonin and disturb the sleep.
-----
Health And Diet - One Radio Network 4 Dec 2013
Q: When we breathe through mouth rather than nose at night, this can get rid of too much CO2 and this is a problem.
RP: yes the medical analysis is that people don’t breathe enough at night, but when you look at the blood chemistry the usual thing is that they hyperventilate during the night, because as their blood sugar is pushed down to sleep, their adrenaline comes up periodically and this makes them have in effect higher estrogen, higher inflammatory hormones which drives hyperventilation and blows off too much Carbon Dioxide. Then they don’t breathe for a while so they wake up feeling like they have died or have not been breathing enough . The best chemical for this is Diamox (Acetazolamide ) that causes the body to retain more carbon dioxide, it prevents the body from losing too much carbon dioxide which keeps it in the blood.
It’s well established as a cure for sleep Apnea, also used by skiers to prevent altitude sickness, because altitude sickness is a lack of CO2 not oxygen.
Q: is it more of a treatment than cure?
RP: Sometimes 2-3 days of a thyroid supplement is all a person needs, and their own gland will take over. Same with sleep apnea, sometimes they can get out of the stress, and reset. Usually though you have to work on finding why the hormones are going bad, especially at night, and get your blood sugar stabilized, get a good diet of enough protein and fruit and supplement the Thyroid as long as it’s needed.
Q: speaking of sleep, insomnia is an epidemic. Are there any particular foods that you have seen to help?
RP: Very practical thing is warm milk with 1 or 2 ounces of sugar or honey in it. The milk makes the sugar or honey absorb more slowly. The sugar lowers your adrenaline. The older a person gets, the more problem a person has with sleep hyperglycemia causing increased adrenaline and blood sugar problems. Old people who are told to take a blood pressure drug will often get worse insomnia as their blood sugar falls and their adrenaline goes up and sometimes just by eating enough sugar and salt during the day and a little extra at bedtime, sometime they can not only cure their insomnia but sometimes also their blood sugar is corrected enough that their blood pressure issues clears up. Milk keeps sugar in the blood for longer, or ice cream too.
If you need more context, click the link about the quote and search for sleep
Ray Peat on Sleep
Uses Of Urea - KMUD, 2015-02-20
RP: The blood sugar is always a problem at night. The effect of daylight is to maintain efficient oxidative metabolism, and just 15 minutes of darkness is enough to lower the efficiency of mitochondrial respiration. And so keeping very bright lights right up until bedtime will minimize the fall of blood sugar, but having a carbohydrate meal late in the afternoon or before bed, a glass of orange juice or milk with honey. Sometimes just the dose of sugar is enough to put you to sleep for an hour and a half or two hours. And it takes time for the liver to start storing glycogen, so it's good to have another glass ready for when you wake up or have another dose of orange juice or milk and sugar. And salty things, salty snacks at bedtime help to stabilize the blood sugar and energy production, so like a milk and maybe salty tortilla chips or puffed pork rinds something a salty snack as well as…
——
The Heart 1, KMUD, 2013
RP: Another way of looking at that reflex system is insomnia: many doctors think that thyroid is a stimulant that will make you stay awake; but when you think of the brain as having exactly the same process of excitation and relaxation as your heart muscle or your leg muscle, when the brain is fatigued, if it’s somewhat hypothyroid, it gets the equivalent of a growing pain, or a cramp. And it can’t relax fully. And that amounts to insomnia. And so, if you can energize the brain cells, you can get sleep to come on quickly. And the active thyroid hormone, and magnesium, and sugar, are the things that most quickly will restore energy to your brain, or your muscles, heart, and so on
——
Learned Helplessness, KMUD, 2013
HD: Right. So that's the parasympathetic nervous system. It's all about what happens after you eat a meal for example: You relax. You take it easy. You digest your food. Everything is being produced by the glands, that are secreting enzymes into the intestine or the stomach to digest your food. The heart rate slows down.
I always think the parasympathetic is fairly peaceful and wet, if you like.
RP: And it tends to take over at night. It helps the person go to sleep by slowing the heart rate. At least it should slow things down during the night; but with problems such as diabetes, or hypoglycemia, or various metabolic disorders, it can get overactive and instead of just calming things down, slowing the metabolism, lowering blood sugar, because you don't need so much, it can cause too much insulin secretion and other glandular secretions. For example, causing too much mucus formation. And the increased insulin can lower your blood sugar too much. Then, that can lead to intensified activity of the nerves, intensifying both contraction and relaxation where it shouldn't be happening.
——
Buteyko Breathing - Bud Weiss, 2008-09-15
RP: Yes, and there is a drug called acetazolamide, the brand name is Diamox. It used to be considered a diuretic, but it became popular to prevent altitude sickness because it causes you to retain carbon dioxide. And hyperventilators are people who are susceptible to altitude sickness. So taking this acetazolamide makes you retain your carbon dioxide by inhibiting the carbonic anhydrase enzyme, and prevents altitude sickness, but it also prevents overbreathing and alkalosis at night. People who have sleep disordered breathing, it is found that acetazolamide will usually cure that. And it is very effective in treating asthma which is one of the pretty direct ways to show that carbon dioxide deficiency is so closely related to asthma and other breathing disorders. Epilepsy is another thing that can be prevented with acetazolamide or anything that raises your carbon dioxide. Neurologists used to demonstrate an epileptic brain wave just by having a person hyperventilate.
——
Hashimoto’s, Antibodies, Temperature and Pulse KMUD, 2013
RP: The first time I’ve started noticing that was a friend who, twice a year, alternated episodes of extreme depression and mania. And, in the periods when she was giving up sleep, sleeping only 2 or 3 hours a night, her morning temperatures were extremely high. But then, after eating something, 2 or 3 hours later, they would fall several degrees. And that was during the time when she tended to be manic, and under the influence of too much adrenalin and other excitatory things. So, I suggested that she take enough thyroid to get her pulse and temperature to be steadier during the day. And, within a few days, she had stabilized, so that her morning temperature was a couple of degrees lower, and that increased after eating, instead of decreasing. And since doing that, she stopped having her annual up and down cycles.
———
Hashimoto’s, Antibodies, Temperature and Pulse KMUD, 2013
RP: Yeah. And, some people wake up cyclically during the night. When I was counseling dieters, there were some very fat people who would wake up: one of them woke up every hour during the night. The other one, I think, was sleeping an hour and a half, or so. And I got them to set an alarm clock to wake themselves up about 5 or 10 minutes before their expected waking, and eat anything with carbohydrates (milk, or juice, or even a cracker or something), and to do that every hour. And, within a week, they were sleeping through the night, and then they were able to start losing weight. Those stress hormones that raise your temperature and pulse rate around dawn were also increasing the blood sugar ( in diabetics, they call it the dawn phenomenon). But it’s the result of the stress hormones that rise during the night. The darkness itself is causing stress, activating hormones. So, in the winter, people are more likely to have disturbed sleep, because of long nights. And getting extra carbohydrates late in the day can help you sleep longer without these episodes of…usually, its nightmares waking people up with a pounding heart.
HD: That’s the adrenalin, right ?
RP: Yeah.
——
Hashimoto’s, Antibodies, Temperature and Pulse KMUD, 2013
Caller: I have temperature problems. I’m a light sleeper, and I’ve recently heard that valerian tincture improves one’s ability to relax, fall asleep, and stay asleep through the night. I’ve taken it, and have been astounded how helpful it was ( and for my brother too, who has trouble falling asleep). I wanted to ask if one can develop dependency, and if there are any contra-indications ?
HD: No. Valerian works on Gaba channels. But, in very rare occasions, some people get very stimulated by it. The majority of people do find a good benefit from it, and it does shut off that internal dialogue that keeps people awake when they sit and talk to themselves, and especially if people wake in the early hours. But I know Dr Peat’s interpretation of any kind of insomnia would generally be down to high adrenalin, preventing people from entering a deep, restful sleep.
RP: Valeriane’s Gaba mechanism is very good; it’s a very safe drug. But I think that using a drug of that sort is protective. But it is potentially habit forming. And besides my own experience, when I took thyroid, being able to relax and sleep soundly… on one of my trips, talking to doctors and such, I’ve ran into a doctor who looked horrible, said he hadn’t slept for three nights. And I mentioned my experience with thyroid, and gave him 10mcg of cytomel. And the next night of my talk, he pulled me aside before introducing me, and said: “That stuff’s better than morphine!”.
———
The Thyroid, 1996, Gary Null Radio Show
PEAT: It's very common for pre-puberty people to have leg pains that they call growing pains, and those people are typically a little bit low thyroid, and the textbooks used to show little kids with horribly swollen calf muscles that looked like they were muscle bound; but it was the accumulation of muco-polysaccharides swelling the muscle up causing great pain, cramping and so on, and in old people who are hypothyroid, something very similar happens, but it includes degeneration of the blood vessels to some extent, and you mentioned the chelation plus magnesium.
When you take thyroid, it energizes your cells to make ATP, and it happens that ATP binds magnesium, so you don't really take up magnesium into the cell very efficiently unless you have adequate thyroid. And when you are low in thyroid, you tend to lose magnesium during stress, and chronically that leads to a crampy, inefficient condition where you waste oxygen, producing your energy, but you can't retain it because of the lack of magnesium.
So in many situations, magnesium imitates thyroid function, but the two together really are simply energizing the tissue; and you can go from crampy legs, or many old people get "jumpy legs" -- a funny sensation that makes their legs kick when they try to go to sleep -- you can go from that hyperactivity of the legs to many other conditions including heart rhythm problems, insomnia, muscle pains in general, many states that are considered degenerative diseases, but are simply low thyroid/low magnesium states that prevent efficient energy production.
[and more]
And this high adrenaline state creates a terrible amount of confusion among doctors and patients both, because as an adaptation, it makes people feel like they're on speed sometimes, to have this adaptive, extreme overproduction of adrenaline. And at night, it's normal for adrenaline and cortisone to rise, even in young people, because it's a sort of a fasting state, and they're not eating, and so they maintain these sugar producing hormones during the night.
But in old age, these are higher, in general, because of the low thyroid. So that if your thyroid is low, or you're old and have low thyroid (that's a more or less natural thing), nighttime, with the rising adrenaline and cortisone, becomes more and more stressful, and insomnia becomes more and more common. It's very usual for people in their 70's and 80's to wake up after 5 or 6 hours of sleep and just get up early because they know they aren't going to be able to get back to sleep.
Some of the current publicity that is used to promote the fact that melatonin is used to make you go to sleep, it happens to be also a thing that goes up during hibernation, and its function is to lower the body temperature, and remember the hospitalized patients -- the ones who had the lowest temperatures were the least likely to survive, because as the thyroid goes down and your body temperature falls, you lose a lot of your immune functions and tissue repair capacity. So lowering your body temperature does make you hibernate and it does make you sleep, but you don't want to use something out of context to force that.
The studies that have been used to advocate melatonin's possibly anti-aging effect were done on mice and rats, and it turns out that they are very opposite to human beings and pigs, because they work at night in general and sleep in the daytime, and so melatonin for them has exactly the opposite meaning that it does for people and pigs. And for example, in humans and rats, melatonin raises prolactin, but in humans, prolactin knocks out progesterone production and causes infertility and stress and osteoperosis for example.
———
Weight Loss, KMUD Herb Doctors, 2013
Int: So given a person is consuming enough sugar to stock their liver for the night time fast…or I know you’re an advocate of ice cream before sleep or sipping on a little oj when they awake is it still possible to have foamy urine?
RP: Yeah the stress always occurs, but if you’re sleeping soundly and deeply there is less intense damage from the stress, so if you stay awake in the dark you would probably have super foamy urine in the morning.
And
RP: For some people taking a warm foot bath at bed time and then putting on socks and a warm cap sleep better.
————
KMUD Longevity, transcribed, verified and reposted 4/12/14
HD: So cascara would be pretty for improving bowel motility and excretion?
RP: Yeah and some of the so-called soluble fibres, even pectin for example from fruit can greatly increase the production of serotonin and disturb the sleep.
-----
Health And Diet - One Radio Network 4 Dec 2013
Q: When we breathe through mouth rather than nose at night, this can get rid of too much CO2 and this is a problem.
RP: yes the medical analysis is that people don’t breathe enough at night, but when you look at the blood chemistry the usual thing is that they hyperventilate during the night, because as their blood sugar is pushed down to sleep, their adrenaline comes up periodically and this makes them have in effect higher estrogen, higher inflammatory hormones which drives hyperventilation and blows off too much Carbon Dioxide. Then they don’t breathe for a while so they wake up feeling like they have died or have not been breathing enough . The best chemical for this is Diamox (Acetazolamide ) that causes the body to retain more carbon dioxide, it prevents the body from losing too much carbon dioxide which keeps it in the blood.
It’s well established as a cure for sleep Apnea, also used by skiers to prevent altitude sickness, because altitude sickness is a lack of CO2 not oxygen.
Q: is it more of a treatment than cure?
RP: Sometimes 2-3 days of a thyroid supplement is all a person needs, and their own gland will take over. Same with sleep apnea, sometimes they can get out of the stress, and reset. Usually though you have to work on finding why the hormones are going bad, especially at night, and get your blood sugar stabilized, get a good diet of enough protein and fruit and supplement the Thyroid as long as it’s needed.
Q: speaking of sleep, insomnia is an epidemic. Are there any particular foods that you have seen to help?
RP: Very practical thing is warm milk with 1 or 2 ounces of sugar or honey in it. The milk makes the sugar or honey absorb more slowly. The sugar lowers your adrenaline. The older a person gets, the more problem a person has with sleep hyperglycemia causing increased adrenaline and blood sugar problems. Old people who are told to take a blood pressure drug will often get worse insomnia as their blood sugar falls and their adrenaline goes up and sometimes just by eating enough sugar and salt during the day and a little extra at bedtime, sometime they can not only cure their insomnia but sometimes also their blood sugar is corrected enough that their blood pressure issues clears up. Milk keeps sugar in the blood for longer, or ice cream too.
