Insomnia in perimenopausal women

Y’all know I have battled with perimenopause since 2018. Drives me nuts that according to the internet, this word doesn’t even exist. I started reading a book called “Hot & Bothered” by Jancee Dunn and it’s giving me life. According to Dunn, the word perimenopause wasn’t even coined until the mid 70’s, and first published in The New York Times in the 90’s. Such little research has been conducted in this area for females, yet 6,000 women enter this life-changing phase of their life every day.

Fortunately for me I’ve not yet had the joy of having severe hot flashes and night sweats. I’ve only had a handful of hot flashes in the last 12 months, but nothing like Dunn writes about. However my debilitating insomnia has pretty much ruined my life. I’ve been keeping a health journal on and off since being diagnosed with Graves disease in May 2017. From there, it was hard to discern which was causing what. Because Graves disease (the autoimmune version of hypothyroidism, where your thyroid speeds up, not slows down) side effects mimic perimenopause so much, it was always challenging to figure out what was what.

The long of the short of it is that I’ve spent thousands of dollars on endocrinologists, GP’s, OBGYN’s and HRT clinics. It wasn’t until I started working with my most recent functional medicine doctor that I heard my progesterone should be sitting at 15ml. My doctor said there are a lot of different “thought leaders” in this space, but the man he follows claims 15ml for women of my age bracket (35-55) should be such. What’s most interesting was I was paying a HRT (hormone replacement therapy) clinic every month here in Las Vegas to have no one say my measurement of 1ml could potentially be the number one reason I wasn’t sleeping.

To date, I’m taking a double dose of my 100mg pill of progesterone and seemingly have been sleeping better. I still have the 1 odd night here and there where I’m wired at night and don’t sleep more than 2-3 hours, but generally speaking, so far it’s improved dramatically.

If I hadn’t dicked around for so long, I would have blogged about my experience over the last few months with doing an autoimmune protocol for diet. For 2 months I followed this protocol with nothing jumping off the page in regards to results, but that might also have something to do with it. Because I’ve spent the last 8 years building www.grrrl.com I’ve truly slacked on sharing about my experience with my health outside of instagram where I often post story posts of myself crying at 3am lol.

Anyway, hope this helps someone out there!