If everyday hustle keeps you tense and makes your sleep restless, the holiday season is the perfect time to get back some sleep. For perimenopausal and menopausal women, good quality sleep is particularly important when it comes to optimizing hormones which helps to lose weight, have more energy, and feel more at ease and in control.
We already know that sleep is important for our overall health and everyday function, but for women transitioning into menopause, sleep is ever more important.
In reproductive years, sex hormones are mostly made by the ovaries. As women get older, the ovaries retire and they no longer make estrogen and progesterone. Instead, the adrenal glands take over and help to sustain these hormones so that estrogen-dependent organs and tissues such as the bone, heart, blood vessels, and brain can continue to function. In other words, the adrenals have more task to fulfill as women enter menopause.
Sleep deprivation exacerbates menopausal symptoms
When sleep deprivation or poor quality sleep persist, the adrenals are not getting the rest they need. The adrenals get signals that the brain wants them to work harder, to produce more stress hormone, cortisol. Normally, the adrenals produce all hormones in right proportions and keep our hormones balanced, but when the brain asks for disproportionately more cortisol, something else has the give. Progesterone gets incrementally underproduced, while estrogen(estrone) and androgens get erroneous overproduced, and this hormone imbalance adds further burden to pre-existing menopause-related hormone fluctuations.
In fact, lots of menopausal symptoms are caused by excessive cortisol. Therefore, not getting sleep is the culprit of many of those symptoms. You might be able to relate a few and if you work on getting more (7-8hrs) and better sleep this holiday, you’ll be surprised how easy your menopausal symptoms can be managed.
- Hotflashes
- Increased blood pressure
- Increased level of LDL (bad) cholesterol
- Increased level of triglycerides (fat molecules in the blood)
- Poor concentration
- Brain fog
- Fatigue
- Low blood pressure
- Dizziness
- Acne
- Facial hair
- Joint pain
- Thinning of hair
- Recurrent UTI
- Recurrent yeast infection
- Weight gain
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Calgary Menopause Wellness 