5 Steps to Better Sleep After 40
Do you feel exhausted most days?
Tired of waking up unrefreshed?
Today I’m showing you why Perimonpausal insomnia is one of the most common complaints of midlife women and HOW to shift this.
Some questions for you to think about today…
What would happen in your life if you had consistent sound, restorative sleep day after day?
What if you weren’t fighting exhaustion most afternoons?
What if you weren’t the one tossing and turning,
Or waking up in the middle of a puddle of sweat at 2:14 am?
How would this impact your sense of clarity, your connection with loved ones, and your career?
Unfortunately, in modern life, as a woman in her 40s or 50s, you’re more likely to struggle to get a good night’s sleep, and your tomorrow feels like trudging through molasses.
What does sleep loss do to you?
Insomnia - the inability to fall asleep, stay asleep, and achieve restorative sleep - gives you a worse tomorrow. You have a greater risk of feeling anxious and depressed as well as exhausted the next day.
Insomnia during Perimenopause and menopause is one of the greatest complaints of midlife women. Perimenopause is the period of time (sometimes up to 10 years) before menopause when your hormone levels fluctuate as eggs age and regular ovulation becomes harder to achieve.
During this time you typically require more sleep to feel better…
However, perhaps you are actually experiencing less sleep lately? If so, you’re not alone.
Lack of restorative sleep raises stress hormones (cortisol and epinephrine) that shrink the hippocampus. The hippocampus is the area of the brain where your sense of “self” lives.
It’s not surprising that many women feel overwhelmed, self-doubt, and anxious because they feel a lack of motivation, clarity and even have diminished memories. These things all change when hippocampal function degrades.
Too little sleep is also linked with elevated cortisol levels which can cause increased belly fat and decreased sex hormone impact.
Even if your blood and saliva levels of hormones look ‘normal’ on testing, excessive cortisol can bind into estrogen, testosterone, or progesterone receptors and block them. Leaving you feeling tired, bloated, fat, and sluggish.
No matter how many green drinks you have or if your doctor says your hormone levels are ‘fine’.
Excessive cortisol can increase an adrenal hormone called dehydroepiandrosterone, DHEA. And too much DHEA can make estrogen or testosterone levels rise.
In other words, a lack of restorative sleep can cause too much stress hormone, which can either lower or increase sex hormone signals. Just another example of why trying to use a one-size-fits-all approach simply does not work.
Sleep plays a highly important role in your psychological health as well. Sleep is a portal to help you sort out situations and circumstances that happened during the day. The REM phase of the sleep cycle allows your brain to repair itself for better mental clarity and focus.
Why you Can’t Sleep
Too Much caffeine.
Excessive caffeine consumption has now been shown to suppress the production of melatonin in pinealocytes (cells inside the pineal gland) through ‘competitive inhibition of adenosine A2 receptors.
In fact, higher lifetime coffee consumption has been shown to reduce the size of the pineal gland. This gland makes melatonin which is the hormone that helps you to fall asleep and stay asleep.
Not Enough Activity
Activity or movement improves your sleep. Adding just twenty minutes a day to get your heart pumping and blood flow circulating helps to stimulate the movement of hormones, neurotransmitters, and nutrients to the cells in your body which helps you sleep more soundly.
Too much Alcohol
Alcohol blocks REM sleep, the most restorative type of sleep, so you wake up feeling groggy. This REM sleep is particularly important for mental and psychological health
Unresolved emotions.
When you hold onto feelings of fear, regret, sadness, perfectionism, and guilt these disrupt sleep. Poor sleep reduces the cleansing effect of emotional baggage that takes place during REM sleep so it can be a vicious cycle.
Unstable Blood Sugar
If you find yourself waking up with hot flashes in the middle of the night it may be a sign that you can benefit from support to stabilize your blood sugar levels and glycogen stores in your liver.
This is because many women experience a rush of adrenaline in the middle of the night when blood sugar drops too low and this surge impacts greatly the balance of sex hormones causing hot flashes.
5 Ways to Improve Your Sleep?
1. Utilize the benefits of Progesterone
Progesterone is a brain-protective hormone that binds to GABA receptors in the brain and calms the brain to help it turn off and promote restorative sleep.
Oral progesterone is a better tool to improve sleep, most of the time, than topical because progesterone’s primary sleep-promoting metabolite, pregnenolone, is only produced if progesterone is taken when swallowed. Progesterone goes from the gut into the liver (called first hepatic pass) where liver cells convert the progesterone into sleep-promoting pregnenolone.
2. Less Caffeine.
As discussed above caffeine has been shown to suppress melatonin production in the pineal gland. There is a lot of disparity in the amount of caffeine that you may be sensitive to. In general, women tend to metabolize caffeine much more slowly than men.
3. Increase Magnesium.
Whether in the form of foods containing magnesium or with supplementation, magnesium is known as ‘Nature’s Valium.’ It relaxes your body and mind.
Magnesium lives inside the center of the chlorophyll molecule that gives veggies their green color. Diets high in green vegetables are a must to support healthy levels of magnesium.
In addition, it can be difficult to maintain healthy levels of magnesium inside your red blood cells because it is constantly being “rinsed out” of the body during times of stress.
4. L-Theanine.
This is an amino acid which increases levels of various calming neurotransmitters including GABA, serotonin, and dopamine. These neurotransmitters regulate emotions, mood, concentration, energy and sleep.
5. Limit Screens.
Blue light from screens (such as TV screens, phones, and computers) mimics the light of full daylight. This may disrupt your circadian rhythm and make it difficult for your brain to wind down at night.
Removing exposure to blue light for 40-60 minutes before bed is shown to have a calming effect and support higher amounts of restful sleep.
Ok, so now it’s your turn. Do you struggle with feeling well-rested?
Take this free Hormone Assessment in our Hormone Health Kit today.
Discover if you are currently experiencing symptoms of hormone imbalance that are affecting your sleep so you can take control of your health and start utilizing targeted solutions for your unique body.
Are you not sure how you’d create a step-by-step plan to improve this hormone imbalance or what’s next? This is exactly what we do in our programs: we help women to balance their hormones naturally.
Our support is why they get to increase their energy 3 hours every day and release weight so they can have their confidence back.
Are you curious about what that would be like for you?
It starts here by taking the hormone assessment today.