How Poor Sleep Impacts Unstable Blood Glucose Levels: Unlocking the Secrets

Sleep is often overlooked when it comes to its benefits to optimal health.

It’s extremely common for those with autoimmunity to express altered sleep either before, during, or after diagnosis, as well (1, 2).

As a result, you may be doing everything “right” with your blood sugar control but not seeing the results you seek.

If this is your experience, sleep may be one of the missing links!

In this post, you’re going to learn:

How poor sleep may impair many, different hormone (endocrine) functions
How these dysfunctional hormones may snowball collectively to produce the chaos of unstable blood sugars

Let’s jump right in!

How Poor Sleep Causes Hormone Imbalances Leading to Blood Sugar Instability

Insulin

Sleep is an essential pillar of our health, intertwined with how our body manages blood sugar control.

Insulin is the hormone responsible for helping your body transfer glucose from your bloodstream to your body cells for use.

A minimum of 7 hours of uninterrupted sleep helps to ensure that our cells respond to insulin effectively, aka increased insulin sensitivity (3, 4).

However, when we’re deprived of sufficient sleep or its quality diminishes, a problem normally arises.

The cells start becoming less responsive to insulin, even when it’s present in adequate amounts.

When your body cells don’t absorb sugar as well as before, this is known as insulin resistance.

As a result of this impaired response to insulin, glucose builds up in our bloodstream, leading to elevated blood sugar levels.

As a result, your body tries to produce more insulin, hoping to encourage your cells to take in the sugar.

If poor sleep continues over the long term, this resistance to insulin becomes more problematic, laying the foundation for health issues, most notably in type 2 diabetes.

However, insulin resistance can be seen among type 1 diabetics, as well, leading to troubled blood sugar management (5).

Not only that, but one of your hunger hormones, called grehlin, also becomes elevated, which is why late-night meals are common among those who are sleep-deprived (6).

Hopefully, you can see the conflict of interest between late-night eating and accurate insulin dosing for optimal blood sugars.

Melatonin

Click image to enlarge

Melatonin is a hormone that is naturally produced by the pineal gland in the brain and plays a crucial role in regulating the sleep-wake cycle, also known as the circadian rhythm.

This hormone’s production is influenced by the body’s internal clock, which responds to external cues such as light and darkness.

Melatonin levels typically rise in the evening as it gets darker, helping to promote feelings of sleepiness and prepare the body for rest.

It may be easier to think of melatonin as the “night hormone.”

Poor sleep can have quite a negative impact on melatonin, which can affect overall health.

How Does Poor Sleep Influence Melatonin?

Disrupted Circadian Rhythm

Irregular sleep patterns, staying up late, or frequent changes in sleep schedule can disrupt the natural circadian rhythm.

This disruption can lead to an altered release of melatonin, causing difficulty falling asleep at the desired time and contributing to sleep disturbances.

Late-night shift work (aka “Graveyard shifts”), commonly seen among hospital staff and others who work throughout the night, can heavily influence disrupted melatonin production (7).

As a result, late-night shift workers are more likely to be at risk for obesity and diabetes (8).

Reduced Melatonin Production

Insufficient sleep can lead to reduced melatonin production.

When the body does not get the required amount of rest, the pineal gland may produce less melatonin, leading to difficulties in falling asleep and staying asleep.

It’s been noted that when melatonin is impaired, insulin function may be altered, as well (9).

Think of it this way:

Delayed Melatonin Release

Exposure to artificial light, especially blue light emitted by electronic devices like smartphones and computers, can suppress the release of melatonin and delay its onset.

This can result in difficulty falling asleep even when it’s nighttime, as the body’s natural cues for sleep are disrupted.

Altered Sleep Quality

Poor sleep quality, characterized by frequent awakenings during the night or not reaching deep stages of sleep, can also impact melatonin levels.

Quality sleep is essential for allowing melatonin to work effectively in promoting restorative sleep.

Stress and Anxiety

Chronic stress and anxiety, often associated with poor sleep, can interfere with the body’s ability to produce melatonin.

High levels of stress hormones, like cortisol, can disrupt the balance between wakefulness and sleepiness, affecting melatonin release.

Cortisol and melatonin levels can become mismatched at inappropriate times throughout the day and further enable the chaos of disruptive sleep.

I’ll be going over more info on cortisol shortly for this to make more sense.

Aging

Melatonin production tends to decrease with age.

Poor sleep can worsen this decline, leading to even lower levels of melatonin in older adults.

This can contribute to age-related sleep difficulties such as insomnia, waking up frequently during the night, advanced sleep phase syndrome, or sleep apnea (10).

Should You Take Melatonin Supplements?

It’s important to note that while melatonin supplements are available over-the-counter and can be helpful for some individuals with sleep issues, they should be used under the guidance of a healthcare professional.

Using melatonin supplements without proper guidance can lead to side effects or further disruptions in the body’s natural sleep-wake cycle.

Not only that but improper melatonin supplementation may also worsen blood sugar stability (11).

How is Impaired Melatonin Associated with Unstable Blood Glucose Levels?

Insulin Secretion

Your pancreas has melatonin receptors (12).

As a result, these receptors appear to be able to regulate a couple of pathways that, both, directly increase and decrease the release of insulin as needed (13).

Indirect effects on impaired insulin secretion is likely traced back to if one’s sleep-wake cycle (circadian rhythm) is disrupted, altering melatonin and affecting insulin function, as well.

Interesting to note is that another study suggests that at the cellular level, melatonin helps pancreatic beta cells (where insulin is produced) survive and function better (14)!

Insulin Resistance

There is a ton of research noting how quickly insulin resistance will appear as result of poor sleep.

In fact, just one night of partial sleep has been shown to activate insulin resistance to levels of a type 2 diabetic in a healthy, nondiabetic (15)!

There are many different and inconclusive ways that insulin resistance may occur under the conversation of sleep loss.

In relation to melatonin levels, one study found low levels of melatonin were independently associated with elevated insulin resistance risk (16).

While another study found that the higher melatonin was at night, the more insulin sensitive the tested subjects were (17).

Although, evidence is clear that poor sleep can disrupt blood sugar stability, the exact mechanisms to how this occurs remains definitively uncertain.

Cortisol

Deep sleep affects our body’s stress responses, particularly in relation to cortisol.

Under normal circumstances, cortisol levels rise in the morning to energize us and taper off in the evening to promote rest.

Contrary to melatonin, it may be easier to think of cortisol as the “day hormone.”

However, inadequate sleep has a tendency to disrupt this natural circadian rhythm.

When our sleep is compromised, the body tends to produce more cortisol, especially in the evening.

This delayed increase of cortisol can make falling asleep even more challenging, creating a counterproductive loop where poor sleep leads to higher cortisol, which then further disturbs adequate sleep (18).

Over time, if this cycle persists, consistently elevated cortisol levels can result in a range of health problems, including:

a weakened immune system (19)
weight gain (20)
worse insulin resistance (21)
mood disturbances (22)

Also note that because cortisol is a stress hormone, upon its release insulin production goes down because the body isn’t thinking about eating during a stressful fight-or-flight scenario.

Regardless if there is a stressful even present, elevated cortisol will signal and prepare your body to receive this energy demand in the form of glucose from your glycogen stores found in your liver (23).

The reason this occurs is that your body interprets cortisol release as a fight-or-flight response.

The need to “fight” or “flee” ensures glucose to provide your body the interpretted and immediate need for energy to respond appropriately, even if you’re not actually fighting or fleeing from anything!

In a healthy, non-diabetic, this isn’t a problem because insulin will eventually lower their blood sugar levels.

But in a type 1 diabetic, because cortisol naturally enables elevated glucose in the blood, it has a tendency to raise blood sugars, which can throw off current insulin dosing leading to hyperglycemia.

However, should long-term (chronic) stress continue, this inevitably will reflect in the body’s poor response to insulin by reducing insulin signaling pathways and impairing how the body responds to insulin.

This will result in further insulin resistance and blood sugar instability risk (24).

As stated previously, the body’s circadian rhythm will also likely become misaligned, making hormonal imbalances even worse!

Growth Hormone

Similar to melatonin, growth hormone typically is at maximum release during the early hours of sleep or between 50 – 70% of its daily secretion (25).

Metabolic activity of growth hormone can be seen among multiple tissues, including the liver, muscle, fat, and pancreas.

Growth hormone is essential for (26):

cell and tissue repair
muscle building
child growth

However, growth hormone is also closely tied to our sleep patterns.

It is normally released while you’re asleep but if you are constantly not getting enough rest, altered release of growth hormone will likely occur, impairing its function, along with other important hormones we’ve already discussed.

Besides direct growth and repair functions, growth hormone also plays a pivotal role in how our metabolism operates, particularly in fat and sugar processing.

Other growth hormone functions include (27):

Direct Effects on Blood Sugar Balance

enables proper glucose and triglyceride breakdown
encourages glucose production (gluconeogenesis) in the liver when blood sugars drop
when the body detects the presence of insulin, growth hormone reduces the muscle’s and fat’s ability to utilize it, causing glucose to remain in the blood for the organs to absorb and use

Indirect Effects on Blood Sugar Balance

promotes insulin-like growth factor (IGF-1) release in the liver, which has blood sugar lowering effects similar to insulin

Simply put, when growth hormone isn’t functioning properly, it may increase fat storage and blood glucose instability risk (28, 29).