162: Why You Wake Too Early And How To Fix It

We unpack why early waking hits so hard, then show how to find your root causes and fix them with targeted testing, the 5R method, and a motorsports-ready sleep protocol. The goal is simple: stable nights, sharper days, and recovery you can trust.

• quality sleep outweighs total hours in bed
• five causes of early waking: nervous system, inflammation, electrolytes, blood sugar, cortisol
• how travel, chemicals, and erratic meals disrupt sleep cycles
• why saliva hormone testing reveals true cortisol patterns
• stress, mood, and metabolism test components and value
• the 5R method: reveal, remove, replace, rebalance, retain
• portable routines for travel-heavy schedules
• practical steps to stabilize glucose and minerals
• strategies to calm the nervous system at night
• building a sustainable protocol for the full season

Take our free High Performance Health Assessment at victorylanewellness.com and schedule your complimentary performance consultation. That link is in the show notes and in our bio.

Chapters

• 0:00 The Problem With Early Waking
• 0:40 High Performance Health For NASCAR
• 2:35 Why Quality Sleep Beats Quantity
• 4:18 Motorsports Lifestyle Disruptors
• 5:38 Top Five Causes Of Early Waking
• 8:26 Testing For Clarity, Not Guessing
• 10:34 The 5R Method Explained
• 13:15 The Ultimate Sleep Help Protocol
• 15:08 Imagine Consistent, Restorative Sleep
• 15:40 Next Steps And How To Start

Transcript

SPEAKER_00: 0:00

Ever snap awake at 3 a.m. with your mind racing in your body begging for sleep that won't come, it chips away at your mood, your clarity, your health, and you feel it every single day. Millions are stuck in this cycle wondering why their sleep feels broken and what's really going on beneath the surface. If this is you and you're ready for real answers and a safe natural solution, stay tuned. This episode is for you. Hello, I'm Jeffrey Morta. If you're like most in NASCAR's top tiers, drivers, crews, owners, or executives, while you're busy chasing podiums, have you fully considered who's taking care of you? Right here, you're about to start transforming your mind and body for peak race day performance with high performance health, designed exclusively for the demands of NASCAR. As a certified high performance health coach and consulting hypnotist, I've coached elite entrepreneurs and athletes to higher energy, sharper focus, and greater resilience. Naturally, safely, and backed by science. And right now, I'm bringing that same engineered approach to the best in motorsports. Here you'll find no wasted time, just a unique blend of integrative health, mental conditioning, and proven recovery strategies delivered in plain language that you can use right away. Imagine a season without burnout, brain fog, or the costly crash of your health. Because the truth is the real race starts within. I'm grateful you're here. Yes, always grateful for you joining us. Welcome back to the program. And today we are diving into the top five reasons you're waking up before you're ready and what you can safely do about it. Now take a deep breath with me. Now imagine this. You open your eyes from sleeping and instantly know that it's too early. You feel the exhaustion before you even look at the clock. Your brain is foggy, your patience is already low, and your emotions are on edge. And you haven't even sat up yet. Waking before you're ready isn't just annoying, it's emotional, and it's draining, and it messes with your mood, your motivation, your recovery, your relationships, your performance, both on and off the track. And when it happens night after night, it becomes chronic sleep deprivation. And chronic sleep deprivation becomes chronic stress. And chronic stress becomes burnout, irritability, impulsiveness, poor focus, sugar cravings, slower reaction times, and eventually system-wide dysfunction. If you're waking up early and feeling defeated before the day begins, you're not broken. But your body's systems are trying to tell you something. Let's talk about a few statistics here and kind of bring this problem to light. The truth is that most people won't admit publicly, but one in three American adults don't get enough sleep. And nearly 70% report poor sleep quality. Yet here's the real kicker quality matters more than quantity. You can be in bed for eight hours and still wake up exhausted if your cortisol, your stress hormone is elevated, if your blood sugar is unstable, if your nervous system never ever shuts down, and if your body isn't completing sleep cycles or your inflammation is too high. This is especially true in motorsports. A world of late nights, early flights, adrenaline spikes, hotel beds, noise, chemicals, screens, constant movement. If you work in NASCAR, you're basically living the perfect storm of sleep disruption. Now here's the twist. This is why your lifestyle makes this worse. In this sport, everything pushes your nervous system towards imbalance. Talking about travel fatigue, the different beds, the different time zones, the inconsistent schedules, and the exhaust fumes and shop chemicals. These trigger inflammation and oxidative stress that disrupts sleep cycles. What about the night before adrenaline? Your brain might stay wired even when you want to power down and then add in erratic eating times. What happens here is the blood sugar swings can actually wake you up between 2 and 4 a.m. And then, of course, those high stress weeks cause the cortisol curve, your stress hormone again, to become flat or even inversed or reversed. And then, of course, dehydration and electrolyte loss causes things like restless leg and nights, uh, night sweats and early waking as well. So if you're in motorsports, you're living inside a high pressure bubble where poor sleep becomes normal, but it should never be normal just because it's common. So let's get into the top five reasons you're waking up before you're ready, and then we'll talk about what you can safely do about it. So we're gonna work backwards here. Number five, nervous system dysregulation. You finish the day physically tired but neurologically wired. This is the classic tired but wired pattern. It's emotional exhaustion mixed with physiological stimulation. If you've ever said, my brain just won't shut off, well then this is you. Number four, inflammation and toxic load. These go hand in hand. Talking about exposure to fumes, paints, rubber solvents, um jet fuel residue, environmental toxins, track compounds, these all create internal stress, and that disrupts sleep cycles. Every driver, every pit crew member, tire tech, or shop mechanic experiences this, whether they know it or not. Number three, electrolyte depletion, talking about low magnesium, low potassium, low sodium, but those have to be balanced. This can cause restlessness, it can cause cramps, it can cause micro wakings and racing thoughts. And your thoughts shouldn't be racing. You're the only one that should be on the track in that car racing. And this is the NASCAR lifestyle. Electrolyte depletion is practically guaranteed. However, just taking a simple electrolyte powder mix or a sports energy drink is not going to fix the problem. Number two, blood sugar instability. We talked about this a little bit earlier. If your glucose, your blood sugar, crashes at night, your body releases adrenaline to actually keep you alive. And that adrenaline is what wakes you up, or more um also commonly known as norepinephrine. This happens to crew members and executives who grab quick carbs or late-night meals on the road. And the number one reason why you're waking up before you're ready is cortisol spikes. This is the stress hormone that is misfiring. This is the number one cause. Your cortisol should be lowest at night and highest in the morning. But when it's too high, especially at night, you bolt awake between 3 and 5 a.m. and stay absolutely wired. Now, drivers and crews experience this constantly due to travel, adrenaline, environmental tension, and so many more reasons. So there you have it. Those are the five reasons. Now, you might be wondering how do we dial in on the real reasons and what's happening? Well, here's where guessing ends and clarity begins. We have a simple test that you can do. It's a it's a game changer. It's called the stress mood and metabolism test. There's actually no other functional lab test on the market like this. And what it does is it measures your cortisol curve across the entire day. And it does that through saliva. So there's four tubes. You uh actually put some saliva, you spit in this tube upon waking, before lunch, before dinner, and before bed. And it actually will measure your cortisol curve across the entire day. But your nighttime cortisol is probably the most important. And this is the reason why you could be waking early. Uh the test also measures thyroid markers, not just TSH, like your doctor might run, um, which isn't even a thyroid hormone. It's a hormone produced by the pituitary gland to signal the thyroid. Uh, but this stress mood metabolism test looks at more important markers like free T4, Free T3, and TPO antibodies in addition to the TSH. It also looks at female or male hormones. So talking about estrogen, progesterone, which are still important in men, by the way, testosterone, which is also important for women, by the way, and DHEA, which is a precursor to those sex hormones as well. And this test also looks at blood sugar and insulin regulation and vitamin D levels and sleep-influencing neurotransmitter patterns. And it's all done. Here's the beauty of it: it is all done at home, or you can even do this test at the track. Like I said, it's a saliva sample and a simple dried blood spot sample. So that's just a lancet, prick the finger, a couple of drops of blood on a card, and that will give you your uh fat soluble vitamins and your thyroid hormones uh for the blood spot. And then, of course, the saliva, we're looking at hormones. And why saliva? Why not blood for hormones, you might be wondering? When hormones are measured in the blood, they're bound to a protein, and that is not what is available to the body for utilization. So that is inaccurate information when we're looking at hormones. When we look at hormones through saliva, that is what is actually bioavailable, unbound to the body, and ready for use. And that is the most important information. And most primary care physicians, if any at all, uh, will not look at saliva for hormones. They typically run blood work because, well, that's what conventional medicine uh does for some reason. Now, drivers love this test because it shows the invisible factors that blood work misses entirely. Now, let's get into the solution. You've heard me talk about it before, the 5R method. What is that? This is our proven system that covers reveal, remove, replace, rebalance, and retain. So let's go through these one by one. What are we revealing? We're revealing, we're using functional testing to uncover the exact reason why you're waking early or having all kinds of other chronic health issues uh when it comes to some other lab tests as well that we do. There's no guessing. We are revealing the underlying root cause. And number two, what are we removing? We're eliminating the stressors and the toxicities that are keeping your body wired at night. I said number three was replace. What are we replacing? We're restoring mineral balance, we're restoring nutrients, vitamins, and hormones that your body needs for a deep sleep. Now, no, we're not using hormone replacement therapy. We're giving the body the building blocks it needs to naturally create its own hormones. That is actually step number one. Hormone replacement therapy. You know, if you're a male or a female that's over, say, 60 or 65 years of age, then that might be the time and the place for hormone therapy. But when doctors are recommending HRT hormone replacement therapy for men and women that are in their 30s and 40s, that's just doing them a complete disservice. And oftentimes we see those people after the wheels have come off and there's a lot more work to do because they miss the first steps of giving the body what it actually needs to create hormones on its own. Number four, rebalance. We recalibrate your central nervous system and your cortisol curve so that your body knows exactly how long to stay asleep for optimizing your performance. And then number five, retain. We give you a sustainable sleep strategy so that your results last, even through travel, through race weekends, and chaotic schedules. This is the same method we use with high-level drivers, executives, pit crew members, and teams. Now, what comes next? This is something we call the ultimate sleep help protocol. We have actually two versions. One's a sleep help, and the other is the ultimate sleep help protocol. These are backed by clinical science and optimized for motorsports professionals. These protocols calm the central nervous system, they smooth out the cortisol pattern, they improve uh sleep depth and REM cycles, they reduce nighttime waking, uh, support neurotransmitter balance. Uh, so these are the chemical messages in the body that help to uh regulate the nervous system. They enhance next morning energy and create resilience through the entire racing season. And people using these protocols report more sustained energy, less irritability, no more 3 a.m. wakeups, better reaction time, fewer cravings, higher emotional stability, and this is what sleep is supposed to feel like. Now imagine this: you close your eyes, you fall asleep easily, you stay asleep the entire night, and you wake up at the right time, rested, clear, calm, strong, no more early waking, no frustration, no heaviness, no dragging yourself through the day, no relying on caffeine or energy drinks as a crutch. Just clarity, focus, emotional balance, and the energy to perform at your absolute best, no matter what age you are. Whether you're behind the wheel, in the shop, on pit road, or leading your organization, this is what happens when your systems work the way they're supposed to. And yes, it is possible for you. It works every single week in our practice. So if you're waking up early and you know something isn't right, if you're tired of feeling exhausted before your day even starts, and if you're the kind of person who wants to understand and fix the real reasons behind your sleep struggles, you can do a couple of things. You can take our free high performance health assessment over at victorylanewellness.com or it's right here in the show notes, and schedule your complimentary performance consultation. That's also uh right here in the show notes, and also the link in our bio. And you can find that link at victory lanewellness.com. We'll reveal your root causes, show you the data, and give you a personalized sleep restoration plan and a high performance optimization plan. Because champions don't just train harder, they recover smarter. And your sleep is the foundation of your success. Let's give it a tune up.