You’re up all night. Maybe you have night sweats. Maybe you’re just stressed out about work or the kids or grandma’s health. Maybe you’re PMSing, experiencing perimenopause, or actually going through menopause. Whatever the reason, insomnia totally sucks.
Lack of sleep affects our entire day, week and life. We all know it’s hard to function and complete the most minimal tasks while being tired, but when you have chronic fatigue, things are a lot worse than just feeling like you’re in a fog. When you’re tired, your body has to work in overdrive to keep going. It’s diverting more energy to the vital things, like making sure your heart is pumping, and ignoring some of the “less important” processes, like hormone balancing.
To make things really interesting, what if it’s your hormonal imbalance that’s screwing everything up in the first place? That means your imbalanced hormones are making you tired, so your body works harder to function and gives balancing your hormones a back seat, so your hormones get more imbalanced….
See the pattern? It’s a bad deal.
First, we have to figure out what’s up with your hormones. Hormones never get out of whack on their own, there is usually a reason, and that reason is almost always called stress. I know, you’re thinking, “That doesn’t surprise me…” and you’d be right. Stress comes in all forms—emotional, dietary, and pain and hidden inflammation—and women experience a certain amount of stress on a regular basis. It’s when your body decides it can’t handle that stress that things get messy.
The two main female hormones are progesterone and estrogen. Insomnia often occurs when progesterone is low and estrogen is high. This is known as
estrogen dominance.
Progesterone is the calming female hormone, and an excess of estrogen causes irritability, tension, and anxiety. So if you have estrogen dominance, chances are you’re not going to enjoy your weekly yoga class very much, and you may even find it kind of annoying. On the flip side, high five for trying!
Yoga classes aside, you probably need some help in figuring out this hormone imbalance/insomnia situation. There are some things you can try at home like eating better, developing good sleep hygiene, and exercising, but if you don’t know the root of your issue, you are only helping at a surface level.
We already figured stress is the likely culprit. The stress hormone, cortisol, is kind of a bully. When you’re stressed, cortisol is going to push around progesterone (who is like the whimpy kid on the playground), and estrogen is going to seize the opportunity and rise to the top of the hill ready to reign. Sounds like a scary day at school? It is. Except it’s your daily life.
We have to take a look at your life and figure out what is causing that stress. Is it work or grandma’s health (i.e. emotional stress)? Is it gluten or dairy (i.e. dietary stress)? Is it that old knee injury acting up again (i.e. inflammation)? Is it something going on with your gastrointestinal health or microbiome (i.e. hidden inflammation)? Or is it the body’s natural process of menopause or early menopause when everything just gets messed up.
We also need to run some, dare I say it, tests. “I feel fine,” you say. “I just have a hard time sleeping at night.” Newsflash: that means something is not fine and we need to figure out what. And that involves testing. We’ll get a baseline of your hormone levels for estrogen, progesterone, testosterone, DHEA, cortisol, and thyroid.
This will give us a good idea of what we need to focus on inside the body.
Once we have a few conversations about your current lifestyle, and we get the test results, we’ll develop a plan of action that might look a little something like this:
- New diet – low carb, fewer processed foods and refined sugars. Unique to your bio individual needs.
- Fewer stimulants in the form of coffee (gasp!), alcohol and other caffeinated drinks.
- Introduce a good combination of exercise and relaxation. Here’s where the yoga class comes in!
- Develop better sleep hygiene
- Support your adrenal glands (where the hormones come from) using supplements to balance hormones specific to your body’s needs.
- Balance your HPA Axis (hypothalamus pituitary adrenal axis - because these guys run the endocrine show).
- Heal you gut because the gastrointestinal tract is the hub or health.
This plan includes some pretty obvious steps, and you might feel like you can do it on your own, but life is best done with people, and so is health. Do you really think you can give up coffee without the support of friends and family?
Bottom line—if insomnia is taking its toll on you, do something about it. Don’t let estrogen boss around progesterone on the playground. Get it under control, and get your life back in balance again.