Marriage and Menopause Podcast Episode 27: Perimenopause Sleep Issues

Sleep and menopause is the thing nobody warned us about. For two years Judy woke up at three in the morning. Not most nights. Every single night. And falling asleep got hard first, an hour or more of lying there waiting, before the 3am waking ever started.

Ask any woman in perimenopause what time she wakes up and she'll tell you three. It's the same hour for all of us and nobody has ever explained why. You'll notice Bella in Judy's lap for this entire episode. Her brother Red hurt his foot and he's on medication, and she wouldn't leave Judy's side the whole time we recorded. Which felt about right for an episode on the years nobody in this house slept.

In this episode we talk about perimenopause insomnia and what it actually did to our marriage. Judy took it to a doctor and got told it was stress and to try to relax. She told her OB she hadn't slept in over a year and got told to do Kegels at night. Not one doctor said the word hormones. The part almost nobody talks about is that David wasn't sleeping either.

His testosterone was dropping at the same time Judy's hormones were falling apart. Two people in one bed, both hormonal, both privately deciding it was just age.

Menopause sleep problems and low testosterone in men landed in the same bedroom at the same time and neither of us connected it. We talk about what two years of no sleep costs.

Judy can't point to a single bad morning, because it all ran together. She didn't lose the nights. She lost the days.

And we talk about the fix, which was the opposite of what we expected. Judy was taking seven things every single night to sleep. Mood gummies, ashwagandha, melatonin, CBD, magnesium, and two allergy meds. She started wondering whether the pile itself was the problem, went and researched it, and the research backed her up. We stripped it down to three things and started working out. Better sleep within days after two years of nothing working.

This is not medical advice and Judy is not your doctor. Take your list to a physician and ask whether less might work better than more.

That's the question nobody asked for us.

If you're a woman over 40 reading this at three in the morning, you're not the only one awake, and it was never stress.

The Couples Operating System is nineteen dollars a month for both of you with a free trial at marriageandmenopausepodcast.com


If this episode hit home, act on it. Share it with your spouse. Sit down. Talk. Lead the change inside your own home.

This show is for couples who refuse to drift. Who refuse to lose a strong marriage to hormones. Who are willing to learn new rules when the old ones stop working.

Stronger marriages.
Direct conversations.
No avoidance.

We Deserve Better.