Menopause and Insomnia Connection Discovered

If you are a woman in your middle age and you suspect your sleep has gotten worse. . .

Or as a husband, the woman in your life suddenly drives you crazy with her inability to sleep. . .

. . .a new study now explains why this happens and how to deal with it.

It is sometimes hard for women to avoid the conclusion that they have gotten a raw deal in life compared to men, and this sleep issue is another fact to add to the long list of why that may be true.

When women pass from their reproductive to their post-reproductive years, they go through a period during which their ovaries produce gradually decreasing amounts of the hormones estrogen, progesterone, and testosterone.

During this time, the levels of these hormones fluctuate wildly, giving rise to all the unpleasant menopausal symptoms with which we women are familiar.

Dr. Colleen Ciano presented a study on the relationship between menopause and sleep at the 2016 annual meeting of the North American Menopause Society.

At this stage it has not yet been published, but it does follow up on a similar, but less detailed, study she presented at the same venue in 2015.

She was interested not only in the rate and severity of insomnia during this period, but also in the impact that different menopausal stages have on insomnia.

Like other medical scientists, she divided the whole experience into perimenopause and menopause.

Perimenopause refers to the period leading up to the last menstrual period and the 12 months subsequent to it; menopause is the stage that begins 12 months after the last menstrual period.

Dr. Ciano analyzed 10 years of data collected from the Study of Women’s Health Across the Nation (SWAN) and found the following:

1. Overall, 31 to 42 percent of women experience insomnia symptoms during perimenopause and menopause. These include difficulty falling asleep, problems staying asleep, and poor sleep quality.

2. The later the stage, the greater the risk you will sleep poorly. In the earliest stage of perimenopause, women are 0.82 times less likely to suffer from insomnia than those in late menopause or post-menopause.

3. The risk of insomnia is the greatest in women whose menopause is brought about by surgery. They are 0.7 times more likely to sleep poorly than those who naturally progress from early perimenopause to menopause.

This is important not only because it provides another reason why surgery should be a last resort, but also so that women can know what to expect as they progress through the whole experience, and so that physicians can know how to guide them through it.

In addition, earlier this year we reported on two studies performed at the University of California at Los Angeles that show that, when combined with insomnia, menopause speeds up the rate at which women’s biological clock ticks, literally aging them faster.

One of these studies found that postmenopausal insomniacs were biologically about two years older than good sleepers of the same age.

The new study is further confirmation that you must deal with the worsening insomnia as you proceed through the stages of your menopause.

Here is a simple technique that helps almost everyone to fall into a deep sleep in 10 minutes…

If you’re a woman approaching or going through menopause, you absolutely must take action to keep your health and strength throughout the process (and beyond it). Here are the exact steps that I successfully took…