Every week I talk to someone struggling with their sleep.
Interestingly enough, it’s another manifestation of heart and kidney balance.
This time it’s best described using the elements of the heart and kidney.
The heart goes with fire and the kidney goes with water.
Heart fire symptoms are insomnia, anxiety, panic attacks and these show up when the kidney energy, the adrenal glands and fight or flight nervous system and your hormone shop in the end stages of perimenopause into menopause isn’t keeping up with life’s demands for hormones and stress balance.
Simply put, there’s not enough water to put out the fire in the body.
In these situations, the key to figuring out the insomnia is determining what is keeping the body from making adequate “water” aka neurochemicals (serotonin, dopamine), hormones, and melatonin to put out the symptom of fire aka insomnia.
I just had a client “Cindy” who told me she had been waking up at 3 am for the last few weeks.
It started after she stopped taking her progesterone drops because of thinking it was bothering her throat.
She was feeling more agitated, irritable and grumpy during the day.
If she could escape to an island by herself she would be totally cool with that.
The key here was the mood and desire to escape after stopping progesterone.
Those are progesterone deficient signs, we needed to her back on that progesterone.
We did and for the next 2 nights she woke up at 3 am but was able to get back to sleep.
As far as I know she’s sleeping well now.
“Sonja”, another one of my clients would wake up after an hour of going to sleep and again between 3-5 am with intense hot flashes.
She was agitated, struggled with allergies and itching.
Every time she started on hormones she would be good for a while then get spotting so increasing hormone dosages became tricky as we determined she was a slow hormone detoxer from a urine hormone metabolism test.
Turns out the itching and allergies has something to do with insomnia.
Histamines were the common denominator.
We used nettles, quercetin, DAO to block the histamines and they worked with varying success.
It wasn’t till we worked on blood sugar and candida aka “yeast” in the body did she get some success with the insomnia.
What does blood sugar, yeast/candida and histamines have to do with hormones?
Progesterone stabilizes the mast cells in the body that produce histamine.
Dips in estradiol push us to crave carbs.
She was a cracker and chips kind of gal.
For her it contributed to yeast overgrowth, another organism in the gut that kicks off a lot of histamines.
Progesterone was adjusted with working on increasing protein, especially at dinner and carb intake was lowered to help with blood sugar balance.
Hot flashes reduced to a manageable level the last time we talked and she’s now sleeping better.
Sometimes insomnia shows up 1-5 am with anxiety and thoughts of all the worst case scenarios of everything that’s going on in your life.
That’s often cortisol at play and I’ve used Integrative Therapeutic’s Cortisol Manager and extra magnesium glycinate for this for years.
When it’s hard to go to sleep and you’re feeling wired and tired ashwagandha or holy basil with L-theanine 200-800 mg are great to calm the nervous system.
If your predominant mood is down, apathetic and you’re tired but you still aren’t sleeping well it’s could be estradiol that’s needed or you may need tryptophan.
Insomnia between 1-5a with lack of motivation to workout or do anything, perhaps also feeling more on the down side may need a combo of L-tyrosine 500-1500 mg withL- tryptophan 500-1500 mg to help the body with amino acid balance.
Mood is a really good guide when it comes to deciphering which pattern of insomnia you’re dealing with.
Choose your intervention based on your predominant mood and if there’s not a mood tied to it and you’re just waking up then progesterone with some magnesium may be the place to start.
Insomnia is tricky, I’ve had my fair share of fails in this department.
The key is to be open to experimenting and give the hormones at least a month to know if they are working for you before ditching them.
In many cases you may need a little more or to pair them with adaptogenic herbs, histamine balancers, magnesium or amino acids.
And sometimes you may need a bit of a protein boost to balance blood sugar, or a gut microbiome reset if there’s a bit of yeast or parasites causing trouble.
Stay curious, track progress and trust your intuition!
Here’s to sleuthing out your sleep,
Dr. J
PS: If you need assurance your insomnia &/or brain fog are not something more serious look at the Montreal Cognitive Assessment online at mocacognition.com
