Sleep is a hard thing. Good sleep is even harder.The complexity of our network of systems makes it even harder to isolate the keys to getting a great night’s sleep when literally anything and everything can disturb our sleep. While occasional sleep disturbances can be normal for sure, long term sleep disruption is not. Our work IN this week is changing the way we look at the complex puzzle of sleep from a nice to have to a non negotiable priority in our health.

Today we are talking about sleep and hot flashes. For the past few weeks we’ve been talking about how menopause and perimenopause affects our bones, our muscles, our pelvic floor, our gut, our brain, our metabolism and more and perhaps you’ve already noticed some of the connections between all of these areas. Sleep is one of those integral connections. How we sleep no matter what season of life we’re in is the canary in the coal mine. If we don’t sleep well we don’t function well and it’s an indicator that we aren’t functioning well. In perimenopause and menopause it’s the number one complaint for women. Not that we can’t get to sleep but that we can’t stay asleep. And the culprit is often the dreaded hot flash. What is going on here and what can we do about it? That’s the question for today’s Work IN.

We know there’s more to being healthy than what western medicine would have us believe. A lot more. Particularly for women. We are far more complex physically, mentally and emotionally.

The fact is that health isn’t the absence of disease just like pain doesn’t always equal injury or illness. And the natural aging process is not a disease.

Our modern culture has stripped women of the sacredness of our bodies. Cut us off (sometimes literally) from our intuition. We are hyper sexualized from a young age and then shamed for our sexuality. Modern feminism has masculinized womanhood in the workplace and stripped all honor and reverence away from motherhood at home.

Is it any wonder that women feel exhausted trying to please everyone and have forgotten how to please themselves?

If there’s one thing that every woman I know complains about, it's sleep deprivation. There’s a reason they use it for torture, oops I mean enhanced interrogation. Sleep disturbance every once in a while, a night or 2 here and there, is not a problem. More than 3 nights a week might be. Now I thought it was just me but apparently waking between 2 and 4 AM every night like clock work is pretty common for women in perimenopause and menopause. So today we’re going to take a look at why that happens and what you do about it.

Ideally we would all get everything our body needs to function optimally from real, whole food. Theoretically if we did that then we wouldn’t need to count calories. Or even watch portion sizes because the body has built in on and off switches for our appetite and is brilliantly designed to find the perfect energy balance. Sadly I think we can all agree that the standard American diet is deficient on many levels.

Our modern life of convenient hyper palatable food consumption has disrupted that delicate balance and led to food addiction, gut dysfunction and metabolic disease. Today, the lack of nutrition awareness and just basic general activity in modern life and you see most people deficient in many micro nutrients, using food as therapy on some level and desperate for a quick fix to fill in the gaps. That’s where supplements come in.

Today kicks off a 4 part series on reclaiming your health. Movement, nutrition, sleep and connection, each of these are levers, access points and communication pathways into the nervous system and each of them can and will affect your nervous system whether you know it or not in both positive and negative ways. Today, I want to kick off our series by looking at sleep. I like to think of sleep as the canary in the coal mine. Often (not always) it’s the first thing we notice when we’re stressed. It’s an easy thing to gauge. How well do you sleep on a regular, consistent basis?