I have a sacred nighttime ritual, and it goes a little something like this: Each evening around 10 p.m., I walk into my bedroom, slide onto my expensive and comfortable mattress and pull my silky 800-thread count duvet on top of me. I turn off the lights, and take a brief moment to enjoy the complete darkness and silence of my slumber haven. Then I gently close my eyes, calm my mind, and within seconds, I fall into a peaceful, eight-hour long snooze, only to wake up in the pre-dawn light, refreshed, rejuvenated, and restored.
Yeah, right. I’m not a man.
I’m a woman in her 50’s, which means that my sleeping experience for the past 10 years has been less bucolic slumber and more sweaty rave in a downtown warehouse that ends at 4 a.m. with either puking or tears. Sometimes both.
If you’re also a woman in her 50’s, or even her 40’s, you’re not surprised by my sleep struggles because you most likely have them, too. In fact, you’re probably reading this with bleary eyes and a giant mug of coffee in your hand because poor sleep is one of the hardest and most common struggles of perimenopause and menopause, and can affect your health in so many ways, including your risk for neurological conditions like dementia.
Hot flashes, night sweats, hormones, and increased anxiety and depression are the prevailing reasons for our midlife sleep problems. And then of course, worrying about not sleeping also leads to…not sleeping. It’s a vicious circle, just like the dark ones under my eyes.
I’d never suffered from insomnia until I hit my 40’s and found myself wide awake in the middle of the night staring at my bedroom ceiling, revisiting every life choice I’d ever made. It’s been a frustrating and awful decade of sleep. Perhaps the only good part about my midnight adventures is that most of my similar-aged friends are also awake in the wee hours, so someone usually answers my desperate texts.
Me: U Up?
Friend: It’s 3 a.m. What do you think?
“I slept like a baby last night,” my perimenopausal friend Amanda told me once. “And by that I mean I was awake and crying every hour…But the good news is that I scrolled real estate in Malta on my phone, and I think I found each of us a new house.”
I knew the solution to my problem wasn’t buying overseas real estate, no matter how tempting, so over the course of my tumultuous tossing-and-turning years, I’ve turned to various “internet experts” for help.
Here’s just some of the various “sleep better” tips floating around on the internet that I tried, and a report of how they worked:
- Avoid screens for an hour before bed.
Sorry, but my iPhone, my Kindle, and my TV are my best friends. Plus, my sons both go to school in different time zones, and what if they call to ask a laundry question?
- Make your bedroom a quiet haven.
The news didn’t quite reach my poodle and two cats that sleep on our bed and reenact Wrestlemania every night.
- Don’t drink alcohol or caffeine before bedtime.
Coffee is no problem, but I’ll give you my margarita when you take it from my cold, crepey hand.
- Relax with white noise.
By now I’ve listened to so much white noise that my year-end Spotify highlights are full of top hits such as “Rocks in Dryer” and “Beach Storm.”
- Take melatonin.
This kind of worked, but it also made me have super bizarre dreams about Vin Diesel working at an animal shelter, so no more melatonin for me.
Finally, I asked my doctor for sleep help one year at my annual check-up, but I don’t think I expressed how bad it actually was, because he mostly just shrugged. Maybe I should have texted him at 1 a.m., or emailed him the plot of my most recent Vin Diesel nightmare so he could get the full picture. But since my snooze struggle wasn’t severe enough to get a prescription sleep aid, he really didn’t have much help to offer. Now doctors are more likely to recommend menopause hormone therapy for sleep issues, and a lot of my younger friends report that it’s really helped them a lot. That’s good news.
As for me and my sleep troubles, all I could do when I was in the throes was to keep trying the internet’s suggestions and suck it up. Slowly, I started to have more sleepful nights than wide awake ones, which definitely coincides with going from perimenopausal to post-menopausal. It’s funny how that works. But still, don’t be shocked if you get a 3 a.m text from me, because you never know.