How To Cure Your Hot Flashes

How Aging and Insomnia Interact
Both men and women experience less-restful sleep after age 50 within the five stages of sleep, stage one, transitional sleep, and stage two, light sleep, are known as non rapid eye movement, or NREM sleep.

Stages three and four, deep sleep or Delta sleep, are the most restful. Rapid Eye Movement or REM sleep, stage five, when dreaming occurs, occupies about 20 percent of sleep time.
As we age, particularly as we reach 50, we spend more time in sleep stages one and two, which means we tend to sleep lighter and are more prone to wake up prematurely. This has a knock on effect which makes us get tired earlier at night, and wake earlier in the morning. But we still have many options for improving our sleep.

First task on the list to figure out where we are having problems and what is causing the disruption to our sleep process. Do you have difficulty falling asleep, or do you drift off easily only to wake up soon afterwards. Are you continually wakening during the night, or just wake to early in the morning? Are the hot flashes causing you to wake suddenly, or do you experience one almost immediately you awaken?

Can Natural Herbal Remedies Help
While there are some very specific herbs for menopause, not all herbal remedies are everything they claim to be - so tread carefully. Over the counter sleeping medications can help for a while, but these should be viewed as a short term solution to help you start sleeping properly again. Your aim is to create a new sleep pattern (like your original one when you slept right through the night), rather then rely on drugs to make you sleep.

How To Cure Your Hot Flashes
When hot flashes start to disrupt your sleep, the first thing you need to do is stop worrying about it, and look to what is causing them - find the triggers. Some women find that when they dream, that triggers a hot flash. By finding out what is triggering them, you are now in a much better position to deal with them - rather than taking sleeping medications to make you sleep through it.

You have to find out what your body needs and work with it to get back into your normal routine.
Sometimes all it takes is changing your routine or diet. Spending a half hour in a darkened, cool room increases sleep hormones like melatonin in the body. Avoid stimulating activities before you go to bed. That hot shower at night can trigger hot flashes. Exercising late in the day might spike adrenaline, making sleep difficult.

Diet is also very important - what we eat has a huge impact on how our body works. Some speciality teas for example can induce hot flashes, so choose carefully and do a bit of research. Believe it or not, carbohydrates also increase your sleep hormones, so if you're on a low carb diet you may want to make a few exceptions in the evening. And warm milk can be a great help to induce sleep, but I'd recommend a non-dairy alternative like soy milk.

Are Hot Flashes Causing You Sleeping Problems

As well as being a frustrating symptom of menopause, hot flashes can have some unpleasant side effects of their own - insomnia being one of the more physically debilitating ones. Experiencing a hot flash during the night not only affects how you feel, it interrupts your sleep patterns and has a longer term impact on your health.

My grandma was the first person I can remember who used to suffer with insomnia brought on by her hot flashes - she'd explain all the details to us, describing herself as having "eyes like saucers" - which I now understand meant she was wide awake.
It seems that hot flashes, and insomnia in particular have plagued us for a very long time - as even the great Shakespeare wrote about it in Macbeth when he employs a physician to deal with his wife's insomnia: " Pluck from the memory a rooted sorrow, Race out the written troubles of the brain; And with-some sweet oblivious antidote cleanse the stuft bosom of that perilous stuff which weighs upon the heart." Well, at least that's what it sounds like to me.

How HRT Has Impacted Insomnia
So we know insomnia and hot flashes have been with is for centuries, but it seems to have escalated dramatically just recently during the last few years. Many people believe it to be related to the HRT scare that was publicized a few years back - where the clinical trials suggested that the risks of using hormone replacement therapy greatly outnumbered the benefits.

A lot of women are now going through a whole heap of menopause symptoms again, that they had once thought gone for good. But the good news is that there are other solutions to the age old condition, and many of these are now showing to be very effective at not only treating the symptoms, but in protecting our health as well.

Even though insomnia is a fairly common experience for post menopausal women, there isn't a "one size fits all" solution. As with every other symptom of menopause, you need to determine how it's affecting you, and what the best cause of action will be. Don't simply start popping sleeping pills to get through - they only offer short term solutions at best.
The best place to start is by consulting your doctor or health care professional, and discussing all possible options and potential side effects. Believe it or not, some form of hormone replacement therapy could still offer the best short term solution.