Not sleeping well in Menopause?

Help! I'm so tired - why am I sleeping so badly in menopause!??!

Sleep problems in Menopause explained!

What do you think about when you are lying awake at 2am, or 3am or 4am? Do you plan your day ahead or are you just despairing because night after night you aren't sleeping and you can feel your energy being sucked out of you?

You know that the day ahead is another busy one and your brain will be fuzzy and fatigued. You won't be functioning at your best will you?

If you feel like this, then you aren't alone (all though it most definitely feels like it at 2am) but it's not your fault and there are ways to sleep again.

What you may not realize is that wakefulness, light sleeping and insomnia (not being able to get back to sleep), is linked to your changing reproductive hormones during menopause as well as a number of other factors, such as low Vitamin D, low iron, and even low calcium intake.

But perhaps of more concern, is that the longer you lie awake night after night, the more your symptoms and/or weight gain and immune health may become worse over time too.

We need to learn how to change our lifestyle to allow our body to adapt to midlife hormonal changes, or sleep problems can stay around.  

Why it's so important to conquer sleep in Menopause

Scientists divide sleep into two major types: REM (rapid eye movement) sleep or dreaming sleep, and non-REM or quiet, healing sleep. Sleep specialists have called non-REM sleep “an idling brain in a movable body.”

During this phase, thinking and most bodily functions slow down, but movement can still occur, and a person often shifts position while sinking into deeper stages of sleep. When we go to bed and start to fall asleep, both phases last around 4 hours or more.

After your REM sleep, you come your deeper sleep, or your non-REM sleep. This is characterized by slow brain waves called delta waves . When your brain slows down, you allow your body to enter deep sleep and breathing becomes more regular.

Blood pressure falls, and the pulse slows to about 20% to 30% below the waking rate. The brain is less responsive to external stimuli, making it difficult to wake up. But if blood pressure doesn't fall, then many women may wake up to hot flashes/flushes at this time of night.

That's why it's important to reduce blood pressure before bedtime. It helps you to fall into a deeper sleep and it's this deep sleep that is really important for us to have during menopause because this is the time that your body heals, and cells and tissues both repair and renew. 

But there's more to the sleep story during menopause. We need to have deep sleep in order to activate our immune system.

If you are doing lots of higher intensity exercise or heavy weight training, then you have to be sleeping well. Menopause insomnia not only causes your performance to drop, but your muscles and joints may remain sore for longer and you don't recover sufficiently before the next training session. 

Just as deep sleep restores your body, scientists also know that REM or dreaming sleep restores your mind, perhaps in part by helping clear out irrelevant information.

When we get this deep, restorative sleep (between 2-4am), blood flow is directed less toward your brain, which cools measurably. At the beginning of this stage, the pituitary gland releases a pulse of growth hormone that stimulates tissue growth and muscle repair. If we are lying awake between 2 and 4am, then this release of growth hormone does not reach the threshold it needs to for healing and repairing our body. 

A full night's sleep helps you build and retain muscle. It is also necessary for weight management too.

When we aren't sleeping well and growth hormone is low, and insulin remains high. So too, does our chronic stress hormone called cortisol.

This powerful combination of high insulin and high cortisol competes with your sleep hormone, called melatonin which is already low not only due to changing levels of estrogen in menopause, but because we are aging!

The lower that melatonin is before you go to bed and the lower it stays overnight, the more awake you feel . The more awake you feel, the busier your brain and the more hot flushes you have…. night after night, it happens… and over time, your brain and your hormones are now reading this as your 'new normal'.

As many of you already know – the result is daily fatigue, exhaustion, irritability and with your insulin levels all mixed up overnight, the weight starts to increase around our belly too.

Without this precious sleep, your body doesn't burn fat. 

The importance of our Circadian Rhythm is paramount so it's essential to learn how to adjust to it and maintain it. But our changing menopause hormones cause disruption to our normal circadian rhythms, so as we transition into or through menopause, then it's really important to restore this biological rhythm and make adjustments to get us back sleeping all night. If we don't, then over time, our brain and body start to read this 2-3am 'awake' period as 'normal'.

The term 'Circadian' means “about a day” so our circadian rhythms are daily fluctuations in our biology that can become messed up as we transition through menopause. This internal clock, which gradually becomes established during the first months of life, controls the daily ups and downs of biological patterns, including body temperature, blood pressure, and the release of hormones.

Circadian rhythms make people's desire for sleep strongest between midnight and dawn, and to a lesser extent in mid-afternoon.

But here's the thing – because hormones in the body all work in harmony with each other, when your reproductive hormones change as you go into menopause, your other hormones start to adjust to re-balance the body. Especially hormones that control your blood pressure, heat regulation, stress levels and moods - and there in lies the problem with getting a good night's sleep.

Join my sleep workshop or contact me for 1:1 sleep coaching.