If you’re waking at 3am in perimenopause, it’s usually progesterone.
It declines before oestrogen does, and it declines sharply.
Progesterone is what keeps you asleep, so when it crashes, 3am is where you feel it first.
It starts at 3am.
You wake up, surprised.
You check the clock. Waaay too early to get up. Why am I awake?
Internal scan : do I need a wee? Maybe. So you get up and decant a thimble.
You trot back to bed, calm, and snuggle back into the duvet and the pillows and get ready to go back to sleep.
AND YOUR BODY, VERY LOUDLY, SAYS NO.
15 minutes pass. You roll over, and re-snuggle.
AND YOUR BODY, VERY LOUDLY, SAYS NO.
Half an hour later, and you’re puzzled and mildly annoyed. And you realise you don’t even feel sleepy. You sigh and reach for your phone. If you’re not sleeping, you might as well scroll, right?
And then you realise you’ve been scrolling for an hour, and you’re still not sleepy in the slightest.
Huh. You get comfy and eventually you feel yourself drifting off. And half an hour later your alarm gives you the rudest wake up call you’ve ever had.
You wake up groggy from the depths of your miniscule deep sleep, feeling like you haven’t slept at all.
You laugh when you’re less than fully functional at work and grab an extra coffee to keep going.
Days pass. Normally.
And then it happens again.
And again.
And again.
And now you’re annoyed. One bad night you can cope with, but 1, 2 or 3 a week? Hell no. You’re not a teenager anymore and your body is not built to survive this.
With every day that passes you feel more sluggish. Less alert. More fatigued. Less balanced. More forgetful. More irritable. Miserable.
You find your car keys in the fridge.
You go to Tesco and return home without half the things you normally buy.
You turn up for work meetings at the wrong time or even the wrong day.
You read emails 7 times before they make sense.
Your equilibrium has gone. And it’s not even funny anymore.
You start Googling “why am i awake at 3am” and it gives you nonsense that doesn’t apply to you. After all, you don’t feel stressed.
And my love it’s going to take a while, maybe a long while, before you realise this was your opening skirmish with perimenopause.
How common is 3am waking in perimenopause?
86% of women in peri-meno have some sort of sleep disturbance.
For most of them it’s the 3am party they didn’t RSVP to. For some it’s the night sweats. And for some, it’s both. Almost no one genuinely needs a wee when they wake up.
The more women I work with, the more I realise very few of us realise perimenopause has entered the chat until months or even years down the line.
So let me say this very clearly – if you’re waking up at 3am, you just got the memo.
Let’s do the science bit. When perimenopause begins, the first thing that happens – waaaaay before oestrogen gets disrupted – is a decline in progesterone. And it’s not a small decline, it’s a crash. And that’s why you feel it at 3am.
What progesterone does, and why sleep depends on it
Progesterone is just as important as oestrogen, but it doesn’t get its fair share of the limelight.
Why the progesterone crash wakes you at 3am
When progesterone crashes, sleep is the first place we feel it, and THIS is the main trigger for our 3am misadventures.
There are other factors too, but let’s stay with hormones for now.
If you go to the GP and get prescribed HRT, often, all you’re given is an oestrogen only patch. And guess what happens? Yeh, it unbalances things even more. You’ve now got more oestrogen in your body but still not enough progesterone. So that’s not going to fix your deepening relationship with 3am.
And if you’re under 45 – jeez, the GP isn’t even going to listen to you, because you are under when the guidelines say you can start perimenopause (even though we know it can start in the mid 30s.)
So you start Googling frantically.
You drench yourself in lavender.
You subscribe to not 1, but 3 meditation apps.
You cut down on the caffeine.
You go to a yoga class.
And none of it works.
As we enter the peri-meno years, everything that worked before stops working. Isn’t that fun? Just what we need. No rules. More chaos. Which is exactly what a menopause coach is for – working out what your body actually needs now, instead of guessing.
And so you start to drown in this half life where sleep is always broken and feeling like yourself is a long forgotten wisp of a memory.
And you lose all hope that you can ever claw your way out.
I am here to tell you sleep is fixable – even your sleep.
There are things the body needs in peri-meno that we have to learn by guesswork, The Hard Way, and by trial and error.
And luckily for you, I’ve pulled together all the ones that DO actually work and made it into a workshop.
If you’re sick of not sleeping, this is your golden ticket.
And if it’s not just sleep – if the brain fog and the exhaustion and the not-recognising-yourself have all arrived together, the Menopause MOT is a 90-minute session to work out what’s actually going on.
Or drop me a message at hello@messylifecoach.co.uk if you’d like to chat more.
Sleep is fixable.
What would you give to fix yours?