Wired but tired.
Brain fog during the day, restless at bedtime.
Waking up between 2 and 4 am every night.
Somewhere along the way, we normalized poor sleep. Restless nights became the norm, and deep rest increasingly rare.
But just because it’s common doesn’t mean it’s normal.
Your ability to fall and stay asleep is one of the clearest markers of overall health. When you consistently struggle to fall or stay asleep, it often means something in your body is out of balance.
Poor gut health, stress, depression, heart conditions, and even hidden infections like Lyme disease, can all affect the quality of your sleep.
From a functional medicine perspective, poor sleep is one of the most difficult symptoms to treat—mostly because it’s influenced by so many of the body’s systems. But once you know what to look for, the patterns in your sleep can provide essential clues to your unique imbalances. They might even be the key to finding and healing the root cause of your illness.
One hidden cause of poor sleep that most people don’t consider is mold exposure.
Most people think mold just causes sinus problems or fatigue. But mold is extremely pervasive and finds ways into all of the body’s systems, including the ones that control and influence sleep.
For those exposed to mold for a long time, symptoms can escalate into a condition called Chronic Inflammatory Response Syndrome (CIRS), where the immune system has a constant, ongoing reaction to mold toxins.
For people with CIRS, poor sleep becomes their baseline. Mold affects the circadian rhythm, the body’s ability to detox, and even the health of the brain.
If you’re experiencing consistent sleep disruptions — or if you know you have CIRS — understanding the connection between mold, the brain, and sleep could be the key to breaking the cycle and finally getting a good night’s rest.
How Mold Impacts the Brain
When you breathe in mold toxins (mycotoxins), they don’t stay in your airways. Part of what makes mold so harmful is how easily it crosses the blood-brain barrier.
What are the neurological symptoms of mold exposure?
If mold has crossed the blood-brain barrier, you might experience symptoms like:
- Headaches or migraines
- Dizziness or balance issues
- Tingling or numbness in hands/feet
- Brain fog, poor memory, slow processing
- Mood swings, anxiety, or depression
Most people’s immune systems can quickly recognize mold as harmful and start removing it from the body as quickly as possible.
However, some people’s bodies don’t respond as efficiently.
Some have genetic variations in their HLA (human leukocyte antigen) genes that prevent them from properly recognizing and clearing mold toxins. Others may struggle to deal with mold because their immune system is already overloaded with other stressors like chronic stress, nutrient deficiencies, and poor gut health.
For those people, mold lingers in your body long after most people have cleared it. The longer mold stays in the body, the greater the chance mycotoxins will trigger neuroinflammation — a type of swelling and irritation in the brain’s immune system.
Over time, neuroinflammation can lead to chemical imbalances that affect thinking, mood, and —you guessed it— sleep.
Unfortunately, mold doesn’t just cause inflammation in the brain. It also affects your HPA-axis, which is the system responsible for controlling your circadian rhythm and stress.
Why Mold Keeps You “Wired but Tired”
The HPA axis (hypothalamic–pituitary–adrenal axis) is your body’s stress-regulation system. It helps your body recognize and regulate your stress response.
When mold turns on the body’s immune system, it also turns on your stress response. The chronic inflammation is basically a message from your body to your brain telling you that it’s not safe to relax.
Your HPA axis can be turned on even when nothing obviously threatening is happening. This is part of the reason why people with mold exposure report feeling wired and tired at the same time. Your body is trying to make sense of the fact that it isn’t safe to rest even when your mind thinks it is.
The HPA axis also influences your circadian rhythm.
The circadian rhythm is the internal clock that governs your sleep cycle. It’s what makes you feel awake when the morning sun shines into your bedroom and what makes you feel sleepy at the end of a long day.
When mold interrupts the circadian rhythm, it causes:
- A lack of deep, restorative sleep (slow-wave sleep)
- Disrupted REM cycles
- Waking up often through the night
- Feeling exhausted despite 8+ hours in bed
When your circadian rhythm is off, it disrupts more than just your sleep. Every system that relies on this internal clock — including your hormones, detox pathways, digestion, mood, and inflammatory response — is thrown out of balance too.
The Vagus Nerve & Autonomic Nervous System
Mold doesn’t just affect the brain chemically. It also impacts the vagus nerve, which regulates the balance between “fight-or-flight” and “rest-and-digest.”
Ongoing neuroinflammation keeps your nervous system stuck in fight-or-flight, which can lead to:
- Anxiety and racing thoughts at night
- Elevated heart rate
- Poor sleep quality
- Morning fatigue and “hangover” feeling
Ultimately, your vagus nerve’s job is to signal safety to your body. When you’re dealing with a chronic condition like CIRS or another mold-related illness, that sense of safety is disrupted. The body stays on high alert, and the vagus nerve can’t send the “all clear” needed for deep, restorative sleep.
This pattern is what ultimately leads to insomnia.
So, can mold toxicity cause insomnia?
Absolutely yes. Mold toxicity causes systemic inflammation that disrupts your circadian rhythm and prevents you from entering the deep restorative sleep cycles which are essential to help your body heal. It also keeps you in fight-or-flight which makes it difficult for your system to fall and stay asleep.
If you’ve been exposed to mold and it has caused neuroinflammation, you could practice perfect sleep hygiene every night and still struggle to fall asleep.
Real-Life Red Flags
- Mold or CIRS could be causing your sleep problems if you notice:
- Sleep problems that don’t improve with good sleep hygiene
- Worsening brain fog after poor sleep
- Night sweats, vivid dreams, or sudden awakenings
- Symptoms that flare in specific buildings
- Disrupted breathing due to post-nasal drip or sleep apnea after moving to a new home or office building
Half the battle when it comes to fixing poor sleep is finding the root causes. If mold is one of yours, there are several ways you can support your body as you heal to make sure your sleep gets back on track.
The Functional Medicine Approach to Better Sleep After Mold
When it comes to mold exposure, the first step is always going to be removing yourself from a moldy environment. We know this can feel overwhelming—especially if the mold is in your home or workplace—but getting out of exposure is essential for your body to heal. If you need additional guidance, try Boulder Holistic Functional Medicine’s Mold Detox Protocol.
After you’ve gotten yourself out of the home or office building where mold is present, you can use these simple and easy functional medicine techniques to calm your brain and restore sleep.
You don’t have to do these strategies in this order. In fact, we recommend a little bit of everything to bring your system back into balance.
1. Reduce inflammation
Since mold causes widespread inflammation, finding ways to reduce that inflammation is going to dramatically speed up your recovery. This means adopting an anti-inflammatory diet, using targeted anti-inflammatory supplements, and finding ways to manage your stress.
2. Support vagus nerve health
Chronic conditions like CIRS keep the nervous system turned on. Part of healing from these conditions is doing work to help your nervous system turn off.
When you support your vagus nerve, you are actively helping your body feel safe to relax. You are turning off the nervous system and reentering the rest and digest state that is essential for healing.
Practices like breathwork, cold exposure, and gentle movement all help support the healing of your vagus nerve.
3. Rebuild circadian rhythm
Practicing perfect sleep hygiene alone may not help when inflammation is at its peak and your nervous system is turned on. But once you begin the process of healing and restoring sleep, making sure you support that decision with healthy sleep practices can really make a difference.
Limiting your exposure to blue light before bed, eating two hours before you fall asleep, dimming the lights– these simple tricks can really help set the mood for a good night’s rest.
4. Gentle and gradual detox
When it comes to healing from something like mold exposure, you’re not going to see results overnight. A triggered immune system takes time to calm down. With the help of an experienced professional and gentle, gradual strategies, you will regain your ability to fall and stay asleep.
How long does it take to recover from CIRS?
No one is going to recover on the same timeline. Your unique timeline will depend on your genetics, the level of mold exposure, the overall health of your nervous system, and overall inflammation.
For some people, healing takes a few months. For others, it takes longer. More important than the timeline itself is that once you know mold is responsible, recovery is possible. You can and will be able to sleep peacefully again, and that peace is worth all the time it takes to heal.
Work with Boulder Holistic Functional Medicine
If you feel wired but tired, can’t get a refreshing night’s sleep, or wake up every night between 2 and 4 am, mold might be the missing link.
Mold affects your brain, your sleep, and your overall quality of life. However, once you know mold is responsible, finding your way back to restful sleep is not only possible, but effortless.
If you’re ready to heal the brain and reset your sleep after mold exposure, set up a consultation at Boulder Holistic Functional Medicine. We’re happy to answer any and all questions about the connection between mold and sleep, and help you create a personalized healing regime to get your sleep back on track.
