Menopause and Sleep
For over 60% of women who are approaching or in the midst of menopause, insomnia is one of the most common symptoms. A combination of hot flushes and increased anxiety lead to women finding that they are being woken each night and then struggle to get back to sleep. Once you start to wake regularly you will find that it becomes a habit to lie in bed, wide awake and feeling frustrated at another wasted night of poor sleep.
In my experience as an Insomnia Specialist for the NHS and as Founder of The Insomnia Clinic, I have worked with lots of women who report this exact same story. Previously good sleepers, they have simply lost the ability to get any good quality sleep which leaves them feeling exhausted, low in motivation, anxious and often pretty low in mood too.
As a result of increasingly seeing these women in clinic, I have developed the Sleep Well, Live Better Course during Menopause, designed specifically for women who have found that menopause has affected their sleep.
How can the course help me if menopausal symptoms are waking me up?
Although the CBT-i programme cannot specifically stop you from waking what it can do is minimise the effects. This is how the cycle of insomnia is created; we wake up (maybe a hot flush) and for whatever reason we can’t get back to sleep. Then we look at the clock and our minds start to race about how little time we have left to sleep. The next day we feel tired so we go to bed earlier or worry more about getting a good sleep. Over time, we end up spending more and more time in bed, awake and creating an association between bed and wakefulness. We teach our body clock to wake regularly and it becomes part of a strong pattern which we much break in order to get deep, quality sleep. So, you can see that although menopause may trigger insomnia, there is still lots that we can do ourselves to stop the problem from becoming longer term.
I have anxiety which stops me from sleeping well
Sleep anxiety is really common and especially in women during menopause as anxiety levels can increase. The good news is that although poor sleep can exacerbate worry, improving your sleep can have a positive effect on your anxiety so managing your sleep is a great place to start.
What is CBT for insomnia?
CBT-i is a course of treatment designed to help your body to ‘re-learn’ how to sleep well again. By undoing bad habits and creating new connections you can teach your body how to sleep well. You will learn how to increase your drive to fall asleep faster, wake less and achieve better quality sleep using tried and tested, step by step, NHS recommended techniques.
Sleep Well, Live Better Course for use during menopause.
I designed this course as I could see how many women were struggling yet many of them didn’t need therapy, they simply needed to understand their own bodies and learn the techniques they could implement themselves to improve sleep.
In this course you will learn:
How to create a much stronger drive to sleep so that you are less likely to be woken- and will find it easier to get back to sleep- even after a hot flush.
What to do when you are woken in the night to ensure that you don’t make a connection between your bed and anxiety/panic symptoms
How to manage your racing mind during the night so you are less likely to wake and feel anxious.
In this video above, I talk about how menopause affects sleep and how you can start to use the techniques, even if menopause was the original trigger.