Every woman “of a certain age” succumbs to the creeping inability to stay asleep all night. Some of us have such a hard time falling asleep that we stay up later and later, rationalizing it as quiet time to ourselves. The reality is that most women over 40 years-old stop sleeping normally in peri-menopause and never really sleep well for the rest of their lives. 

One study (ref. 1), cites that years before the last period of your life, bone loss and heart vessel disease starts in earnest. Jay Kaplan, PH.D., at Wake Forest University published his findings, saying “stress during youth can interfere with ovulation and reduce estrogen levels, setting the stage for heart disease later in life”.  There’s nothing more stressful than insomnia. Being exhausted all day and dreading heading for bed is about as miserable as it gets.

Peri-menopause means fluctuating levels of estrogen. Estrogen is in charge of creating (HGH) human growth hormone receptors. When reliable rhythms of estrogen are vacillating , it destroys HGH’s control on SW(slow wave) sleep, leaving you a victim of “interval waking” (See ref. 2, ref. 3, ref. 4, and ref. 5).

So, if you go to sleep at all, you wake-up at 1am and 3 am or 2:20 and 4:30am. The only other choice is to stay awake till the wee hours and get a solid 4 or 5 hours in a row. That sleep strategy will only get you to higher levels of IL6, the immunological hallmark of aging, and faster aging will get you to hot flashes sooner.

According to ref. 6, ref. 7,   85% of menopausal women reported moderate to severe hot flashes, that’s most of us…awake all night. The situation goes like this: low estrogen promotes wakefulness, which accelerates metabolic aging (ref. 8) ,which, in turn, accelerates hormonal fall-off to create menopausal symptoms like memory loss (ref. 9, ref. 10, ref. 11), depression (ref. 12), lower libido (ref. 13), IBS and other gastrointestinal disorders (ref. 14).    

The most important side-effect of sleeplessness that is the hallmark of menopause is weight gain (ref. 15, ref. 16).   And the most deadly side-effect of weight gain in mid-life is Type II Diabetes (ref. 17). Researchers know that sleep loss is a function of the breakdown of the biological clock, but they fail to see the hormonal control of that clocking system (ref. 18).

They do frankly admit that poor sleep is linked to earlier death in older adults (ref. 20).

In fact, the biggest killers, heart disease (ref.21), hypertension (ref. 22), cancer (ref. 23, ref. 24, ref. 25) and Alzheimer’s are all linked to insulin resistance (ref.26), which is a result of sleeplessness. All of this downhill spiral could be addressed with rhythmically dosed, cyclical BHRT (ref. 27, ref.28, ref. 29, ref. 30, ref. 31)