The Big Sleep🧘♀️🌿💊😴
Solving The Mystery of What Does & Does Not Work for Sleep In Peri/Menopause
Fellow Empresses,
How the hell are you?
One thing peri/menopause does a real number on is your SLEEP—from the torrential night sweats to the creepy crawly critter-like body itch that no one warns you about to UTIs keeping you up to plain old anxiety.
You would give anything for eight uninterrupted hours of sweet oblivion.
When I don't get sleep… big, bad, terrible things happen.
I end up in meetings in front of people who regard themselves as tres important... with my dress on inside-out.
I’m there clicking through my PowerPoint, and the guys in suits suddenly notice that holy shit, I've just noticed a tag where there shouldn’t be one, and it's ridiculous because it's all due to the fact that I can't sleep. And of course, there's no graceful exit where I can duck out and do a quick switcheroo, so there I am... in hell.
(To be fair, it was a black dress that my very sweet husband had gone out and gotten me as a surprise and it was tricky to tell which side was what with the French seams and all. He had the BEST TASTE, that guy, but I digress...)
But it's more than just publicly embarrassing myself or doing dumb things like leaving my car keys in the toaster or forgetting that dishwasher is a real word... no, for me, lack of sleep can be downright deadly. Once, my lack of it resulted in a full-on seizure in the coffee aisle of the grocery store—with dire consequences—so this is something I had to solve.
Sorting out my HRT helped a great deal, but I still struggled. It seemed there were three schools of thought when it came to solving sleep issues: behavioral, herbal, and pharmaceutical. I'm going to give you my unvarnished “truth” for all three.
So strap in! This one's meaty.
The Behavioral
Many of us are familiar with the behavioral sleep hygiene basics, which follow the 10 3 2 1 rules for sleep:
10 hours before bed: No more caffeine – not a problem.
3 hours before bed: No more food or alcohol – Hello?? If I do this, I get hungry so my answer is either a Bossabar or a tablespoon of peanut butter, as needed. Alcohol, I found, is a trickster that makes you sleepy at 9:30 PM but then you end up WIDE AWAKE at 3:00 AM and miserable at 6:30 AM because your day is shot, so see my post about reevaluating your relationship to it, as it may offer some perspective and alternatives.
2 hours before bed: No more work – Sadly, I often still have work, or as a writer, an idea just comes when it comes, so this is unrealistic.
1 hour before bed: No more screen time (shut off all phones, TVs, and computers). – Again, unrealistic given my love of Midsomer Murders. You have to love a show that kills people with cheese.
As for all the whispery/sexy ASMR videos and calm-voice-meditation-dudes or trying to drift off to the swoon-worthy sounds of BBC4 weather announcers, that didn’t work either. There's something about my brain that just wants to grab at the words and construct some micro-narrative. I'm not so much lulled to sleep as I am annoyed to sleep. Think mosquito in your ear. It’s like I’m being Archie Bunker’ed into unconsciousness. Instead of a restful drifting off, it’s plagued with scowling. I realized I was actually going to wake up needing heaps of Botox if I kept on with it.
What has helped on the behavioral front:
Even on a day when I am crazy busy, the one thing that has helped is snack walks.
I spend so much time staring at the damn computer screen that by the end of the day, I am so fried awake, I'm like crispy bacon.
So, just getting up and going outside for five minutes at a time may interrupt my workflow slightly, but it ultimately helps me sleep by the end of the day... Especially on those days when I can't get to yoga or the gym or my marvelous two-mile treks in the park with my gaggle of trusty crones. These little snack walks inject sanity, grace, and sunlight back into my person. I’m telling you… snack walks.
The Herbal
Now, I tried all the Z-quil, melatonin, herbal teas, tinctures, and adaptogen drinks, and while they made me drowsy, none of them helped me sleep through the night. So, we're going straight to the CBD/THC solutions. I tested a bunch for you:
Camino
I confess I wanted these cute little blueberry gummies to work. I loved the branding so, but the damned things just gave me the wiggly sleeps—meaning I slept, but it wasn't restful. I woke up grouchy, going... What the fuck was that? That didn't feel like SLEEP. That felt like eight hours of straight meetings where I had to explain my life to strangers, and I couldn't get comfortable in my chair. Gaaaaahhh!!!
KANHA
My girlfriend's idiot stoner son insisted I try these others by Kanha. They were even worse. Yes, they knocked me out for about two hours, but THEN I was right back up WIDE AWAKE with an uncontrollable yearning for NIGHT CHEESE and COOKIES ...not exactly advisable for a woman trying to fight off a stubborn middle-aged middle. Unless they’ve changed their formula, which cannabis startups often do, I’d give them a miss for now.
ABX Sleepy Time
These made me throw up—repeatedly. Zero sleep. A complete waste of $33. And they looked so darn medicinal and serious. Sigh. Hard pass.
LIGHTS OUT
The next LIGHTS OUT came recommended by a girlfriend who was a connoisseur of all things weed and right in the middle of perimenopause herself and this may have been THE BEST SLEEP I have ever had in my entire life. I woke up so refreshed, so rested, so alive, and ready to go... I can't even tell you!
The kicker is... shortly after I discovered LIGHTS OUT, I took a job with a university program with the strictest random drug testing policy. Total anti-cannabis. So, there I was, stuck again without sleep, which brings me to our third school of thought.
But before that... I want to mention one more I haven’t tried, but a girlfriend, who is post-menopausal and post-cancer, swears by as super effective, yet gentle, and that’s Dosist SLEEP. I am going to test-drive it when circumstances allow, so stay tuned!
DOSIST sleep
The Pharmaceutical
Of course, pharmaceuticals have been relied upon for decades and are problematic for a whole host of reasons: excess grogginess, dry mouth, reduced libido, depression, addiction, weight gain, I could go on, but I won't. Instead, I'll tell you what worked for me.
After weeks of trying all the behavioral hacks and all the over-the-counter options again, I staggered, zombie-like, into my neurologist and pleaded. I needed something, but it couldn't be so strong that it left me incapacitated the next day because I needed my brain as a writer, but I also needed to sleep because lack of it is a very real seizure trigger for me. But because of my condition, many drugs like Ambien, Xanax, and Ativan were a no-go.
So, in the end, my nightly sleep regimen is:
HRT cream (for night sweats)
One milligram of Klonopin
One 25-milligram capsule of Benadryl for my incessant allergies (Histamine issues are common during peri/menopause... Good times!)
My anti-seizure meds (obvs)
Within 30-40 minutes, I am OUT, and it is a dreamless hangover-free sleep that lasts roughly seven hours, after which I am up, functional, and able to work.
One last bit of gear I wanted to mention for those of you who have partners who snore is the MusiCozy. This is, hands down, the best sleep mask for noise cancelation I’ve found. With over 18,000 five-star reviews, it's only $20 on Amazon. Plus, it's made with high-tech cooling fabric. If you’re doing any of the above and still not sleeping, it might be worth considering.
Ok, that’s the skinny on sleep. If you missed my ridiculous tale of perimenopausal stink this week on scarymommy.com, you can read it here. Otherwise, I'll be joining the oh-so-lovely Kimberly Wilson on her podcast Tranquility du Jour, coming up on May 29th, so look for more information on that very soon. Until then.
Yours in Grandeur,
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Great piece! Most enjoyable. I've been alternating trazodone and clonazepam, and if I get an idea and cannot sleep I just get up and write the piece. Not the best work in the world but at least I can sleep after it's done. But I'm a man, so WTF do I know. lol
SO much good info! Do night sweats disappear with your sleep cocktail?