Welcome to Chaos to Calm, the podcast for women who want to know what's actually happening in their body during perimenopause and what to eat, drink and do about it. I'm Sarah McLachlan, The Perimenopause Naturopath. Today's episode is number 97, and it's all about sleep, how much you really need, why your bedtime matters as much as your hours, the nightcap that's quietly costing you, and what to do when you're giving yourself the hours and still not sleeping. Let's get into it. On holiday, a few weeks ago, I slept seven and a half hours a night, sometimes eight and a half, crazy. I know at home it's more like only six and a half, maybe seven if I'm lucky. And I'm a naturopath who talks about sleep every single week. The difference in me was so obvious. My brain worked better. My patience came back. I felt like a person again, even a fun mum, instead of a giant toddler running on my morning coffee. So today I want to talk about the one thing I'd ask you to try before you buy another supplement, start another protocol or blame yourself as being lazy because you're so tired. I'll show you how much sleep you actually need, how to get more of it without giving up your whole evening and the habit of mine that was quietly undoing my sleep. Look, it's not glamorous, but it's where I start with almost every woman that I work. I'm Sarah McLachlan, The Perimenopause Naturopath. Welcome to my channel. If perimenopause is kicking your butt, well, you're in the right place, friend. Step one, give yourself the chance to sleep. Let's start with something I see again and again in clinic. A woman tells me she's exhausted, she's tried magnesium, a special pillow, but when I ask her what time her alarm goes off, they're only about six hours apart. And that's not going to give you even six hours of sleep. That's just six hours in bed. Most adults need seven to nine hours of sleep, and I'd love it if you aimed for eight. To get eight hours of sleep though, you do usually need about eight and a half hours in bed because nobody falls asleep the second their head hits the pillow. Well, maybe our husbands do. And most of us wake a little through the night, though we might not realise it. We are still waking a little bit through that time. In one sleep study, healthy young adults who were kept to only six hours in bed a night for two weeks did worse and worse on attention and memory tests. They barely noticed it happening. Now, not noticing isn't the same as not being affected. So the first step isn't a new supplement, it's maths. Take the time that your alarm goes off, count back eight and a half hours. There's your bedtime. So if your alarm goes at 6.30, your bedtime is 10. Now, if that made you laugh, I get it. For a lot of us, the end of the evening feels like the only time in the day that's ours, don't take it away from me, Sarah. It's when you finally sit down, scroll, binge watch your show or just like hang out with your partner. Of course you stay up like that's not trying to sabotage yourself. You're actually just trying to help your body and your brain out. And after a full day, your tired brain wants something that feels like a reward. So I'm not going to tell you to give up your downtime. In step three, I'll show you how to give some of it back to sleep 15 minutes at a time, because hey, I'm a realist. But first, I want you to understand why sleep is worth it because everything's easier to do when you understand why. Step two, why sleep comes first. You might be thinking, Sarah, I've got bigger problems than sleep. I've got weight, heavy bleeding. I hear that, and that's exactly why sleep comes first. When you're short on sleep, your stress hormone cortisol tends to run a bit higher. That also impacts your appetite hormones so you can be hungrier than normal and also craving quick sugar and carbs and those instant energy foods. Your blood sugar control gets worse, mood gets shorter, memory gets patchier. Even pain feels worse when you haven't had enough sleep. Now put all of that on top of perimenopause when your hormones are already rollercoastering up and down, changing moment to moment. So many of the things women come to me with cravings, weight gain, PMS, snapping at kids, losing words, mid sentence, feeling overwhelmed all the time. They all get worse when you don't have enough sleep. Of course, not all of it is sleep, but all of it is harder without enough sleep. So that's why sleep is a first step for me. Not an extra, not something, you know, I'll get to it once everything else is sorted or when life calms down. No, it's never going to calm down. And if you're wondering what else might be getting in the way of your body adapting to perimenopause hormone changes, I have made a free perimenopause blockers quiz to help you with that. It just takes about two minutes and the link is in the description and it will help you work out which of the common blockers might be making your perimenopause experience crappy. So now you know why sleep matters. Let's go back to that time at the end of the evening. Step three, bring your bedtime forward. So how do you find more time for sleep when the end of the evening feels like the only part of the day that's yours? So I'm not going to ask you to find a whole extra hour tonight. It's too big a jump and hey, it's not realistic at all. I want you to just have a go at chipping away at it 15 minutes at a time, starting with what time you go to bed and then how you get there. So first, when you go to bed in my clinical experience, the hours between about 10 PM and two AM are the golden hours before cortisol starts climbing again as you head towards morning. So the more of that window that you're asleep for, the better that you tend to feel, you know, two of those or four of those hours there are worth double later on in the day, in the night, in the day. So midnight to eight isn't the same as 10 to six, even though it's the same number of hours, it's not the same number of golden hours. So if you usually turn the light off at 1130, this week, I want you to try and make it 1115 and then next week, try and make it 11. Keep going like that until you reach the bedtime that you worked out in step one. For most of us, those 15 minutes are already there at the end of the evening when we're on the phone or just watching one more episode. The scroll in the next episode certainly serve their purpose because they help support your tired brain by giving it a quick hit of dopamine. Remembering our brain is always trying to do three things. Keep us happy and safe and alive and using the least resources possible. How does it keep us happy? Dopamine friends, it's your dopamine that your brain is seeking. So it makes sense when you're tired, you've been overwhelmed, you've had a busy day, your brain is going to seek dopamine. It is a dopamine seeking machine and it will find the easiest route to that. Cause it's going to do everything that your brain does. It tries to use the least amount of resources possible. So while that does feel like self care, it's not really self care. It's more like self comfort. So it soothes you in the moment. It helps reduce that stress and that overwhelm in that moment. But what your body and brain actually need is sleep and rest. And that's the true self care there. Then there's how you get there. Most of us can't go from a busy evening straight to sleep. So turn the show off a bit earlier and give yourself an extra 10 minutes away from a screen before the light goes off. Hey, ideally it would be at least 30 minutes, if not an hour. But I told you already, I'm a realist. I am practical. I'm a mum too. And so I know that trying to get an hour screen free might be impossible for you because you're busy doing permission slips or ordering lunch orders or whatever it is that you need to be doing at that time of night. But whatever you can give yourself is going to be helpful. So if it's 10 or 15 minutes that you can get tonight, that you can turn your screen off and put it away earlier, the better off your brain and your sleep will be for it. So read a book, have a long shower, do some gentle stretching. Put your phone on the charger outside the bedroom so it isn't the last thing that you look at once you're lying in bed. Now, it also helps if the end of the night isn't the only time that's yours. So if you can have a little pocket earlier in the day that are just for you that give you a little bit of downtime, give you some dopamine hits, that's going to make it easier for you to not rely on that at the end of the night. So it might be a cup of tea, enjoyed, you know, sitting, looking out the window without your phone, maybe a call with a friend or anything else that brings you some joy. For me, it is having my coffee hot on the couch, patting my cat in the morning and I won't do anything else until I've done that. And the other thing that I like to do is go and sit in my garden in my veggie garden and pull some weeds. Really simple self care is not necessarily flashy, you know, it's not all the fancy stuff, but those little pockets of joy, those little moments of downtime that help our brain, especially in perimenopause, it's probably becoming overloaded, are really valuable for us there. Step four, anchor your wake time. Bringing your bedtime forward is half of the equation. The other half is when you get up. I want you to try and keep your wake time the same every day. Weekends to as much as real life will let you. Your wake time is the anchor for your sleep at night. It sets your body clock and when it stays put, it gets easier to feel sleepy at a sensible hour. If you need to catch up on sleep at the weekend, try to go to bed earlier rather than sleeping in. Then get some daylight early in the day. Open your back door, step outside with your cup of tea or your cup of coffee or walk the dog. Morning light tells your brain that it's daytime and that helps it know later on when it's going to be nighttime and helps with your nighttime hormone production like melatonin. So your melatonin that helps you be sleepy and want to go to sleep, that production starts in the day when we get that blue light exposure there from the sun. So coincidentally, if you want to be on your screens and doing stuff, try and get it done earlier in the day because that blue light that comes from your screens is stimulating at nighttime and tricking your brain saying that it's daytime when it, you know, it's nighttime. You want it to calm down and release melatonin. So the best time to be using your phone or screens and having exposure to blue light is the morning. But I don't want you to swap in your sun exposure or natural light exposure with screen time. Maybe go outside and look at your screen if you want to do that then. So of course you don't have to do all of this perfectly. 15 minutes this week is a real start and you want to chip away at it a little bit at a time, because of course, if you try and make sweeping changes and burn it all down and start again, that's really hard for it to stick. It's much easier to make small changes, tie them to habits, to behaviors that you're already doing and build on it from there bit by bit. There's one thing that can quietly undo an early bedtime, even when you've got everything else right. And I'll admit it's one that I'm guilty of too, even though I know it better. Step five, the nightcap trap. Now, a few weeks ago on holiday, I was enjoying a gin and tonic most nights with my husband, probably about two standard drinks. Now, while I was sleeping longer than I do at home and I was feeling better for it, I could still feel the impact of the drinks in how I woke up and I could see them in the sleep stats on my watch, my deep sleep and my dream sleep, the REM sleep. They both took a hit and that isn't great because those two are the ones that are really important for our brain health and for our memory concentration focus and repair and restoration of our brain and our body. So here's what was happening there. So alcohol makes you drowsy. So yes, you quite often I work with women who need coffee in the morning or caffeine in the morning to get them up and then alcohol in the evening to wind them down. It certainly releases your inhibitions and it helps you feel very relaxed and comfortable. But as your body processes alcohol through the night, that sedation wears off and your sleep gets lighter and more broken in the second half of the night. If someone comes to me and they're waking up at two or three AM, it's one of the most common contributing factors to it as well as things. And part of that too is because alcohol is treated like sugar in the body, it does impact your blood glucose levels too. And it also impacts your immune compounds like histamine, which give us more hot flushes and sweat. So that could be waking you up as well, but also it's stimulating. So often if you're having alcohol, especially in perimenopause or menopause, you can feel like, you know, you've been asleep, but it's like you've dozed all night. You haven't had that really deep, refreshing sleep. And that's because it impacts your deep sleep and your REM sleep stages. So, you know, I'm not here to necessarily take your wine or your drink away, uh, if sleep is your problem. That evening wine, the nightcap or the one with dinner is the first thing that I would look at. Try a few alcohol free nights a week. Um, if you're having your drinks after dinner, then try having it before dinner and just keeping it to one and notice how you sleep. Of course, that's all information, not a rule. And you can make judgements best, your best placed to make the judgements and decisions for you and your body and your life there as well. Step six, when you're giving yourself the hours and still not sleeping. Let's say you've done all of that. You're in bed earlier. Your wake time is set. You've cut back on your alcohol in the evening and you're still lying there or you still waking at 2 a.m. And you can't get back to sleep. Now that's not you necessarily doing anything wrong. Um, and if you lie awake for long stretches and like more time in bed isn't the answer for you. So don't push the eight and a half hours. In perimenopause, there are real reasons that sleep gets harder. Progesterone, your calming hormone is often is your first hormone to drop. And it has a lot to do with how easily you fall asleep and stay asleep. So, of course, with hormone changes, night sweats, hot flushes can wake you. Changing blood sugar, blood sugar dropping low, the night can wake you up. And stress that's been running high for months keeps your body on high alert, keeps your cortisol and adrenaline elevated and can really mess with your sleep. So notice which of these sounds like you, because that's where we look next. If you're waking at 3 a.m. in particular, I've written a full post on it and I've linked it in the description below. And if you snore, gasp or wake up unrefreshed, no matter how long you sleep, please raise it with your doctor. Sleep apnoea becomes more common for women around menopause and it's really worth checking. I can't tell you how common it is actually. I personally have sleep apnoea since menopause and I have one of those crazy machine. And I certainly feel the benefit of it as well, because if you do have sleep apnoea that's undiagnosed, essentially your brain is being starved of oxygen multiple times an hour, not even overnight, like more than 20 times an hour. And it's no wonder that you're then waking up unrefreshed or and feeling really tired and sluggish. It can really mess with your metabolism, your whole health, all sorts of things in your body. So please, if that's you or if your family's saying to you, gee, your snoring's really loud lately, please raise it with your doctor. You can have a free sleep study done and have a sleep specialist assess your sleep and tell you what's going on. This is the point where giving yourself the hours isn't enough on its own and it's time to look behind the symptoms at what's really going on for you. So here's what I'd love you to do this week. Work out your bedtime by counting back eight and a half hours from your alarm and then tonight take 15 minutes back from the screens and give them to your new sleep routine. That's it, super easy, small changes to remember consistently. And do tell me in the comments, what time do you actually get to bed? No judgement, of course, I'll go first on a school night. It's usually after 11. And if you're giving yourself the hours and the schedule isn't enough, we need to look behind the sleep at what else is going on for you. And that's what my program, The Chaos to Calm Method is. It's 12 weeks, one to one, where we find the blockers specific to you and build a plan to address them. I look at your symptoms, your health history, your blood test results you already have and read them against optimal ranges and build your eat, drink and do plan around all of that information to really address what's stopping your body from adapting to the changing hormones of perimenopause and menopause. It's linked in the description, and so is a free Clarity Call if you'd like to talk it through first and see what's best suited for you. Now, if you'd rather start with the foundations at your own pace, PerimenoGO is my self-paced program. It gives your body the resources it needs and addresses some of the most common perimenopause blockers like your blood sugar, inflammation and gut and liver health. That's also in the description too. If you're not sure yet what's getting in the way for you, start with my free Perimenopause Blockers quiz, sleep well, and I'll see you next time. Thanks so much for listening today. If this episode has you thinking about your own sleep, there are two places to go next and both are available in the show notes for you. My free Perimenopause Blockers quiz takes about two minutes to complete and shows you what is getting in the way of your body adapting to the perimenopause hormone changes. And if you want the foundations of what to eat, drink and do so that perimenopause isn't a sh!t show, then PerimenoGO is open for you now. You'll find the links in the show notes. Thank you so much for joining me today, friend. I will speak to you again soon.