If you’re one of these women aged 40
and over who find it difficult to sleep, you are not alone. Many women
wake up every night between 12 midnight and 4 am and start prowling
around the house. It is now clear that inability to sleep affects not
only men but women as well.
There now exists in medicine a faculty
that deals with sleep medicine due to the increase in a number of people
being affected. In frustration you may begin pacing the house,
cleaning the kitchen floor, surfing the Internet or watching CNN or
movies on late night TV.
Getting a good night’s sleep becomes
more and more difficult as we age, but women in menopause find it
particularly difficult to sleep well at night. In many cases, this
inability to sleep is as a result of too much oestrogen in your system
that is not balanced by progesterone.
Before menopause, oestrogen is the
dominant hormone for about the first two weeks in the menstrual cycle
and progesterone is dominant in the last two weeks of the cycle. When
menopause occurs naturally these hormones should continue to balance
each other, but if you are a woman in menopause leading a stressful
lifestyle, you may find that your production of progesterone is
suppressed and or converted to stress hormones and you will have a
dominance of estrogen in your system leading to sleeplessness and other
unpleasant menopausal symptoms.
Using a little progesterone cream made
from natural bio-identical plant sources may help you easily to solve
this problem. The right way to use progesterone cream or oil is to use
about one eighth to a quarter of a teaspoon daily for three weeks out of
the month, with a week of each month to maintain the sensitivity of the
progesterone receptors. Natural progesterone cream made from
bio-identical plant sources is not the same as the synthetic hormone
progestin, which is made from animal sources.
I know some women who have not slept for
longer than four hours since they started menopause. When they were
given some progesterone cream they reported that they were able to sleep
for eight hours. This was a major turning point in their recovery from a
long list of menopausal and health problems.
If it’s not hormones, what is it?
If after taking progesterone cream you
still cannot sleep, then you need to look for other causes. Another very
common cause of sleeplessness is food intolerance or allergies. Most
people will have a high spike in blood sugar levels after eating or
drinking something sweet. This is fine during the day, but eating sugary
foods at bedtime will lead to a hypoglycemic episode 90 minutes later
that will result in a surge of adrenaline and keep you awake for several
hours. Eating cheese close to the time of going to bed may also keep
some people awake. Some cheese have high amounts of tyrosine, which is
used to make noradrenaline, a stimulant made by your adrenal gland.
If you suffer from chronic insomnia, it
is a good idea to keep a diary of the food you eat so that you can
correlate foods eaten and the quality of your sleep each night. This way
you can begin to have a better sense of foods that help you to sleep
and those that pump up your system to keep you tossing and turning all
night.
The liver does its job of digesting your
food between 1 am and 3 am. If you eat anything that it finds difficult
to digest then you will likely be waking up around this time. Eating
late may also cause insomnia. Try to eat no later than 6 pm so that your
food would have had time to digest before you sleep.
Drugs are not the answer
Have you noticed that when you have a
cold or a cough and you take cold and allergy medications at night you
are unable to sleep? Many of these drugs can cause insomnia even when
they claim to be nighttime brands, with a sleeping aid designed to help
you sleep. Many prescription and over-the-counter drugs can also cause
sleeplessness.
These include antidepressants, asthma
medications, painkillers, some of the heart drugs and thyroid
medication. You need these medications, and you can change the time you
take them. Try taking these medications in the morning and early
afternoon and see if that helps you to sleep better.
If you have high blood pressure and you
have been put on diuretic drugs two times a day, you might be up and
down all night to urinate. Reducing the dose and changing the dosage
times to avoid taking it in the evening might also help you
considerably.
If you’re tossing and turning at night,
visit your pharmacist and ask for the information inserts for any drugs
you’re taking, buy a magnifying glass and read them. If insomnia is
listed as a possible side effect, talk to your doctor and don’t accept a
sleeping pill as a solution. Taking the drug at a different time during
the day, or taking a lower dose, will often solve the problem.
Taking sleeping pills bought over the
counter or from a doctor on prescription and other anti-anxiety drugs
will make you develop an unhealthy dependency on the drugs, and make you
feel woozy and tired during the day. Taking sleeping pills is almost
never the answer to insomnia. If you must take them make sure they are
taken only temporarily and are a stopgap measure. The best thing to do
is to find out what is causing you sleepless nights.
Treating the side effect of a drug with
another drug can start a vicious cycle of side effects and interactions
that can land you in the hospital or even kill you. They create more
problems than they solve, sometimes with life-threatening consequences.
Remember the sad case of Heath Ledger, a promising actor in the film The Dark Knight.
Heath apparently had problems sleeping. He claimed he could not sleep
for more than two hours at a time. He began to take many sleeping pills
and is rumoured to have died taking an overdose of a combination of
prescription and over- the- counter sleeping pills.
Source: Punch Newspaper
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