Sleep

Sleep is the symptom that makes every other symptom worse. Waking at 3 a.m. soaked, then lying awake, then dragging through the next day is the single most common reason women look for help during perimenopause, and the one that is easiest to dismiss as “just stress.”

This hub is about what is actually going on at night and what has reasonable evidence behind it. Night sweats and sleep are tangled together, but they are not the same problem: some women sleep badly without sweating, and some sweat without waking. The posts here separate the two so you can tell which one you are dealing with.

We lean on sleep research that was done with menopausal women specifically, including the MsFLASH trials and the cognitive behavioral therapy for insomnia studies, rather than general sleep hygiene lists. Where a tip is folklore, we say so.

A useful habit while you read: for two weeks, note roughly when you went to bed, when you woke for good, how many times you woke in between, and whether a night sweat was involved. That record is worth more to a clinician than any single bad night, and it is exactly what Tidewell’s morning check-in collects.