421: Major Sleep Problems Women Face After 40 with Morgan Adams

What we really need to understand is that as we get into midlife menopause, all of those years, we are naturally going to see a decrease in our deep sleep. Hi.

I want to welcome you to Midlife Conversations. I'm Natalie Jill, your host, and I help midlife women redefine and rebrand aging. On this podcast, I do what I do best, taking complicated information and conversations around aging that are relevant to us now and breaking it all down simply with actionable steps that you can implement to level up your life, because your best years are yet to come. I also regularly interview some of the most inspiring people living in their best midlife years. On this show, I cover topics about our health, hormones, navigating weight, blood sugars, our mood, focus changes, even our relationships, career changes, beauty, and more.

Sleep is one of those really touchy subjects, especially in midlife women. We either love it and we're proud of our sleep, but more often than not, we're frustrated that we're not getting the right sleep, enough sleep, the early sleep, the late sleep, in the deep sleep, the restorative sleep that we need. And especially in midlife with hormones shifting and things happening, there's a lot of buzz around waking up in the middle of the night, 2 o', clock, 3 o', clock, not being able to fall back asleep. There's also the issues of being having delayed sleep, not being able to fall asleep at all, or even procrastinating when it's time to go to sleep. Or why does sleep become such a change for us in midlife? And is this a huge concern? Is this gonna affect our health, our metabolic health, our livelihood, our longevity? Is it gonna affect that? And is it safe to take supplements or pills to force the sleep? And how much sleep do we actually really need? Today on my Life Conversations, I've got Morgan Adams here. She is a holistic sleep coach. I've got all the questions for her. Thank you so much for being here, Morgan.

Thank you. It's great to be here with you today.

So let's back up a little bit. Let's start with what is the problem? What is changing, especially in midlife, that is creating this, the sleep problem? What do you think it is?

Yeah, well, there are a few things that are going on. Number one, our hormones are really changing at this stage of life. Like, our estrogen is declining, our progesterone is declining. And with those changes, we're seeing definite issues in our sleep quality. We've also got a situation where when we're in midlife, we are more prone to anxiety and depression and that actually leads us more vulnerable to insomnia. And then I think really the third category of reason is that as midlife women we have a lot going on. I mean, a 50 year old woman these days could potentially be having a younger child, a teenager at home, and she's having to care for that child. She may also have at the same time older, older parents who are aging and need her help. And she's also likely at the top of her career game. So all of those confounding factors really make it a situation where she's got a lot of anxiety and stress. So it's kind of this, have you heard of this term the sandwich generation? Yeah, I think, I think a lot of us are dealing with that scenario in our lives, which definitely doesn't help our sleep.

Yeah, because you're dealing with those, those, the growing older teenagers or young adults. And then you've also got your parents that are aging and all of that happening. And then I think there's more stress that sort of happens around midlife. As far as questioning like purpose and did I do enough and am I in the right career and am I the right relationship? There's a lot of questions that start coming up as we approach that midlife and bump over that hill over there that I think keep women up at night. Some of the common things that I hear frequently with women is number one, not being able to fall asleep. Let's, let's dive into that first. Like what do you think is going on? That it gets harder and harder to fall asleep without, without using alcohol or a sleep aid or supplements that help with that.

Yeah, I think one of the main reasons why people are finding it hard to fall asleep is that they are not really prioritizing a wind down routine. So a lot of women that I see are really successful and they're working late into the. And they're, let's just say they're closing their laptop at 10:30 and they're getting in the bed and they expect that they'll fall asleep. That is not the way our brains and bodies are designed to fall asleep. Like we really need this at least half hour buffer of kind of just a wind down where we're not getting stimulated by bright or blue lights. And I think that's, that's definitely a factor. I think also there's some things that we're ingesting also. I mean we could delve into this more. But like the things that we're eating for dinner, you know, are we having alcohol too late in the evening? Have we not really looked at our caffeine curfew? Are we having caffeine too late in the day? I think those are some things that are keeping us from falling asleep. Also, just when you talk about caffeine.

And alcohol, I just want to, I don't want to skip over that. When you say too late in the day, what is that cutoff time for caffeine and does it matter how much you're having earlier in the day?

Yeah. Yeah. So my general rule of thumb with caffeine is cutting it off around noon every day. So people have a different tolerance to caffeine, a different speed at which they clear it out of their systems. And it's really genetically based. And so you're not going to know if you're a fast metabolizer or a slow metabolizer unless you get that genetic test. But let's assume for this case that we're slow metabolizers of caffeine. So it's just better to cut it off around noon. Sometimes I'll hear people say, oh gosh, I can have a cup of coffee after dinner, no problem, I can fall asleep. Well, okay, maybe they can fall asleep. But if you looked at their data, if they were being tracked, if they were getting a sleep study, you would probably find that they would have less deep sleep, less restorative sleep and so just the quality suffers. So I know it's so hard though when we are going through our day and we are getting that little mid afternoon slump and we're just like, give me some Starbucks, you know, or whatever. So really if you're in that situation and you're having that like craving for a pick me up, the best thing to do is really a couple of things. Either just like go outside and just walk around and get some natural light. That is going to be a better energizer than coffee with no side effects or take a little 20 minute nap and just get, get some refreshment from that instead of reaching for some coffee.

Yeah, I know that sounds so easy to you, but I think to a lot of us women that taking an afternoon nap, unless we're on vacation, it doesn't, it doesn't always fit in. And I agree with the outside depending on the climate you live in and things like that. Although I'll argue if those of you are listening like, well that's great if you live in California or you live in Arizona or you live in Florida. But even if you live in a cold climate I think getting outside could be that, be that thing, even if it's just for a few minutes, that can help help change. Like, like you have an outside cold plunge, but not just go walk out in snow for a minute. What about alcohol? Let's talk about that for a minute. Because a lot of women use that as sort of their wind down. Like, let me shut my brain off, let me relax. Is that helping us or hurting us to fall asleep?

Well, in the initial part of our sleep phase, it's helping a little bit because it's sedating us and relaxing us so we find that we're going to get to sleep more quickly. In fact, alcohol is the most commonly used sleep aid. There's, you know, no question why. However, we pay on the back end, so there's no free lunch with this. So what we're going to find is that alcohol can cut off our REM sleep and it can also change our circadian rhythm for the worse. It can impact our liver circadian rhythm and we might find ourselves waking up quite a bit during the night. Either hot, right from the blood sugar dysregulation or we need to pee. So they did a study years ago that was showing how much sleep, sleep quality got impacted by alcohol. And they did it on a perfect glass basis. And just one glass was impacting sleep quality by like 20, 24%. I do little experiments on myself all the time with my trackers. And I recently got this Whoop tracker that I'm wearing on my wrist. And I drink right now about once a week, like one, one drink on the weekend with my husband on date night. And that's kind of like my little thing. And Whoop told me even with just that one drink a week, that it's imp. That It's a negative 7% on my recovery rate. So it's having a negative 7%. And that's just one drink. So as a whole, they were saying on the platform, most people have negative 13% in recovery drop from alcohol. Now, I'm assuming most people are going to have more than one drink and they may have their drinks later at night, but it's definitely, definitely impacting our sleep even more as we are in midlife and our bodies are just not processing the alcohol as well as we were processing it when we were younger.

I'm going to get back to Blue light in a minute because that was something you brought up. And but before I do that, I want to continue on some of the substances that we're taking because this is, I want to Sort of go down the path. And I'm guilty too of doing some of this. So for instance, cbd. I do CBD almost every night, a little bit of it. And I find it helps me fall asleep and I do track my deep and my REM sleep. So for me I feel that it's been helping. What are you seeing overall? Does this help or hurt women normally?

Yeah, I think CBD specifically, from the data that I've seen, it looks like it can be pretty helpful. You have to just be very careful about the dose and then the brand. Like you obviously want to have like an organic CBD oil. But I haven't heard any negative things about CBD in terms of like health consequences. THC is a little bit of a different animal. What I'm hearing about that is that it can impact our REM sleep over time and we can also develop dependence on it. So we might need to increase our dose. Sure. But as far as cbd, it seems to be a pretty benign sleep aid. And I think it can be especially helpful for people who have a little bit of anxiety wrapped up with their sleep issues. Yeah.

So CBD to me feels. That's good that you're saying that thc, I know when I've added even a trace amount of it, small amount you said it affects REM sleep. I notice on my tracker I actually have more REM sleep, but less deep sleep with thc. Is that what you see overall? Are you seeing something different?

Well, the data that I've seen is showing that it's impacting REM sleep, but.

I think every way where it's making it longer or shorter, actually shorter.

Yeah. Interesting. So it's decreasing that amount of REM sleep. Now this, the studies that I'm referring to, these were like longer term studies. So what you maybe saw was potentially a one off kind of thing. Because I've experienced, I've experimented a little bit too with a couple of THC gummies because companies send me like their sleep supplements, wanting to try them and I'm like, okay, sure. And yeah, I had actually the same experience with my. I had like a little bit more REM and less deep. So, you know, I think your mileage may vary just depending on you as an individual.

And for those of you listening, the deep sleep is the restorative sleep. That is what we actually want. Longer. And if you're getting less than an hour of deep sleep, that is concerning this sweet spot is, I mean, I think most people don't have four hours of deep sleep. Amazing. For you if you do. But I think sweet spot is an hour to two, two and a half even would be amazing for deep sleep. If you're getting less than that, I'd want to look at that. REM sleep however seems to be especially. I'll see a difference with a lot people that are very creative tend to have a lot more REM sleep. This is just. I'm certainly not a scientist doing my own controlled studies. This is just from Natalie's experimentation and talking with people and friends I have that are typically more creative. They'll. They tend to have a higher amount of REM sleep where I'll see more analytical people that are able to not that are not that but able to shut off their brain easier tend to have more deep sleep. I don't know if you've seen anything like that Morgan.

That's. That's good anecdotal information. I have not seen that. But I do want to add a little bit of a caveat onto the deep sleep. So a healthy adult is generally going to get about 20% of deep sleep. However, what we really need to understand is that as we get into midlife menopause all of those years, we are naturally going to see a decrease in our deep sleep. I know I've certainly seen it on my A tracker I've been tracking for four years and you can just see that, that that trend line go down. And I think that you know, we have, we have to remain positive and midlife about our sleep. But I also think we have to have realistic expectations about like what's happening on a physiological level. And maybe we don't, we don't have the expectation that we're going to get that 20 maybe like now I'm more like 15, you know and that's just really the way we're designed. So I just want everyone to kind of have that food for thought about like realistic expectations. And this is just what our bodies do over time. It doesn't mean there's anything wrong with you. It's just our nature.

Let's talk about. I talk about melatonin but I want to tie in the blue light and cortisol connection here. I noticed you're. Maybe I can just see through the screen you collect. You're wearing yellow tinted glasses so you're. You are combating some of that blue light. I am a fan of that. I'm not so great of it during the day but I do as wind down time use viva ray glasses right now where so I do block or I do counter some of that blue light. But let's, let's talk about that a minute because you brought that up earlier about cortisol and melatonin and how light is affecting our wind down and our day throughout the day. And adding on to that question, is melatonin okay to take ever to fall asleep?

Yeah. So we want to do what we can to increase our natural melatonin production. And one of the things that we can do that will help us do that is have more daylight exposure. So we make about 95% of our subcellular melatonin during the day with UV light. So getting outside I think probably an hour a day, I know that sounds like a reach for a lot of people, but it's, it's something to strive for and you may not hit it but like try to get as close as you can so that natural daylight is going to increase your melatonin subcellularly. And at night, what we really want to be mindful of is a couple hours before bed is looking at our environment that we're living in. Right. So a lot of us in these modern homes have LED lights that are really bright shining on us. Right.

I've got three right at me right now as I'm recording.

Yeah, well you're off the hook for the recording. But basically we want to cut those lights off. Right. Or dim them down. And we want to have more yellow toned lights that are closer to the floor. So floor lamps, candles or things that you want to try to work into your evening environment at home. And then with the blue blockers. Yes. I'm wearing viva rays right now. I'm wearing the daytime circadian therapy glasses. And then I don't have them with me but I have a little orange, orange ones that clip on over. So that's what I use a couple hours before bed. And there is actually a lot of evidence pointing to the fact that it's helping people with their sleep. There was a study looking at people with insomnia who were wearing the blue light blocking glasses for like two hours before bed for a week. And what they found was that there was self report, better sleep quality and also objective sleep quality improvements. And something that a lot of, a lot of people don't realize is that there's also a tie in with blood sugar management. So people, they did a study where they had someone, a bunch of people wear blue light blocking glasses at night for a month and then their glucose levels were dropping. So it helped with their blood sugar management, which is so interesting. So I think That a lot of times blue light blocking glasses get poo pooed because they're, they're not like legit. But you really have to look for the brands that are reputable, like the Viva Rays, the raw optics. Yeah.

And the difference I think with them is that they. He's not blocking blue light, he's countering it. So he's saying, so blue light is fine during the day, but it's a counter. So adding that yellow makes it more like natural light outside.

Yeah.

So that's why I like that brand.

Yes, definitely.

So when you, so if in, then if you are not using white light. And I think a lot of us are using LED lights in our, in our home, that's like. And when we were growing up, I know when I was growing up in the 70s and 80s, there was no blue, there was no, none of these LED lights. So we had the amber lights. I remember the little switch you'd turn on, on the little tabletop lamps or the bottom or. So it was more that amber light. So I don't think we had such a big issue. Now we all have these overhead LED lights. So I think it's really. And I know, Morgan, you just explained this, but I want to break it down a little bit deeper for people. So naturally, when you wake up and you've got the natural sunlight, your cortisol is going to naturally rise in the morning. That's how it should work. And then throughout the day, that starts to taper down. And then at night, we should, our body should start naturally producing melatonin. So when you're, when you don't have indoor light and you're not dealing with all this blue light, that's how your body should work. However, that's not what's happening. A lot of women, me included, I've been in the space, I'm waking up, my cortisol is not kicking in at the right time, or it's kicking in way too early or too late. It's not kicking in when it should. And then as we start winding, winding down and you have a drop in the afternoon, it's almost like there's a rebound there. And then back at night, before bedtime, cortisol starts to rise again, which is not what's supposed to be happening. So when we avoid, when we get away from this heavy amount of blue lights, that will start to sell to correct. And that's where these glasses and things come in to help with that. Tell me if I didn't explain that right, but I wanted to Go deeper.

You explained it great. I think you covered the nighttime part really well. Let's focus in a little bit on the morning time, because the morning protocol can actually kind of mitigate some of that blue light exposure at night. So if we've got that, like, just generally speaking, throughout the day, the more brightness we have from the natural light, the less impactful that blue light is going to be at night. So, for example, somebody who's a gardener or a construction worker, they're not going to have the negative consequences as much as maybe you and I would as we're sitting here, like, doing our computer work. But I really, really like to talk about the morning protocols for light because they really set the stage. So let's talk about that for a. So when we wake up, what we want to make sure we do is get outside as quickly as we can. So it depends. Now, the sun is. The sunrise is a moving target throughout the year, you know, and depending on where you live. But you can use an app. There's one that I like called my circadian app.com that really gives a deep dive into when the sunrise is happening. And then I want to kind of go into the next phase of light, but essentially getting out for about 15 minutes, exposing yourself to the natural light. You don't have to look at the sun. It doesn't matter if there's a building in front of you. The. The rays are still going to get to you. And spending that time ideally just kind of sitting there, kind of exposed to the light or moving, like, walking that way, you're kind of.

Without sunglasses, correct, Morgan?

Or. Yes, thank you. Yes. The reason why we don't want the sunglasses is because when the natural light hits our retina, it sends a signal to our suprachiasmatic nucleus, which is our circadian pacemaker. And then there's just this beautiful cascade of neurotransmitters and hormones happening. So we're going to find that residual melatonin from the night before gets shut down. Then we have a natural cortisol bump that we're looking for that you referenced earlier.

That's the problem is I take my dogs for a daily walk around sunrise, and the people that I see in my neighborhood. Good. Even if it's overcast, their sunglasses are on. And I'm just like. You're completely like. Yeah.

Missing it.

Depriving your body of those beautiful things. Okay, so then let's. Let's just explore a little bit more about what happens after the sunrise light. So we have something called UVA rise, and this is basically the period right after sunrise. It lasts for about two hours, depending on where you are in the world. And again, that that app, mycircadianapp.com will tell you when UVA Rise is happening in your geography. And so what's happening, it's actually amazing. So there are amino acids in your eyes that capture photons of UVA light and then transform into different neurotransmitters. So you have tryptophan which gets converted into serotonin, and that makes you that serotonin is sort of your happiness hormone. And serotonin gets converted later to melatonin. So you're essentially producing your melatonin for the next night during that time. And then there's a neurotransmitter called tyrosine, which gets converted into dopamine, which is for motivation. And then tyrosine also gets converted into norepinephrine, which is really helpful for concentration. So what I recommend for all my clients to do now, this may be a little bit more difficult for you, depending on the weather. But getting out, if you can't, like make it outside right at sunset, at sunrise, check the time on the app to see when the UVA rise is happening in your area and try to get outside for like 10 or 15 minutes during that part of the morning.

Now, if you can't physically get outside, is looking out a window doing anything or nothing?

It's doing minimal amounts. So what we know about the indoor light is that the lux, the measure of light lux maxes out at about 500. So what we really need for maximum metabolic functioning is about 1300 lux. And that's. And you can only get that by going outside. So you cannot get the same effect from the indoor light. And you can get some mood boosting benefits somewhat. Now, one of the alternatives you can do is open a window. Now, yes, you might freeze during this time of year, but you have the option of opening a window. And that can help some.

That makes sense.

But I did a little experiment on myself. I wasn't really intending to make it this experiment, but I started learning more about this circadian biology and all of this light science last year. And I had gained about, I don't know, a drift of 10 pounds upward over the past couple years. And I started to change a few things. And one of the things that I started changing was literally going outside. Now, keep in mind, this was spring, so it was, you know, fairly nice outside. I would literally sit outside at sunrise for like 15 minutes with my cup of coffee every morning and I lost like seven of those pounds. Wow. And I attribute that to mostly the light, because the light actually they've done studies showing that it can impact our metabolism and our weight and our thyroid signaling. So it's pretty, pretty profound.

There's three things that I think not to get too off topic. So I want to come back to melatonin and questions there. But I think there's three things that we are about to. I hope in the health world in about to see a big shift in. And I think there's three major things that have creating a lot of health issues that people just have been blaming on aging and hormones. Not that those aren't things. I mean hormones are. Shifts are real. But I think those three things are seed oils. And I think it's. Blue light is a much bigger problem than people are realizing. And then it's also our gut health. So those three things are like these three big passion projects of mine to really dive into and educate people around. But this. And I've been touching a lot on gut health and seed oils in my show recently. But blue light I've just started to sort of bring in and I just want everyone to really realize how big of a problem this is. Like, I want you to think back to literally 70s and 80s, the type of lighting that we had. Also not having cell phones, then not having laptops, not having Internet.

So the.

We had so much more minimal blue light. In fact, our TVs even. I know in the 70s my TV was black and white. So I was not getting nearly this addictive this light stuff. And you had three or four TV channels, remember? So you weren't flipping and watching all the time. I mean we, I remember watch watching TV maybe an hour or two a day. That, that and not using computers. So we. Or phones. So you think about it, we're compounding our aging and hormone shifts and all these things now with its excessive exposure to blue light and not getting natural light and then wearing sunglasses when we're outside. And then when we're stressed or overwhelmed or can't fall asleep, what do we do? We grab our cell phone or we flip on Netflix and we're now scrolling and taking in more of this light. So I think this is creating a way bigger, bigger issue women especially are aware of here.

And I want to mention a really good book I recently read called the Light Doctor and it's written by a circadian scientist and he makes. He really shows you in graphics and the data the correlation between breast Cancer and the use of bright blue light. Like you know, we, we met. You mentioned that the, even our street lights were more amber in tone. Now they're like really bright blue. So he shows this really cool map in the book of light exposure and breast cancer incidents and his real main premise is if we want to reduce our cancer rate, especially women with breast cancer, we need to double down on the blue light management.

I think you're so right. It's a real health issue and I feel passionately about it as well. Being a breast cancer survivor, I feel like there should be more emphasis on this issue at a public health level. But then not to tangent but I think where's the money to be made? They're not, you know, like how are they going to make money from that? So. Well, it's crazy.

You start researching. There's actually patents on blue light and where that's owned and all these social media sites and Google. It's. It's nuts. You can go down the whole rabbit hole.

I know.

And it's very scary. It's very scary. I know. You know, I, I've been talking about blue light for quite some time. I wear those glasses at night and my husband just started into it so he's now taking my glasses and we're replied over them. He's going to have to get his own pair.

So.

But there's apps you can put on your phone too to minimize. There's a lot of things we can do there. Let's talk about that. Nighttime melatonin. Because lots of women are taking melatonin at night versus letting their body produce their own. And the reason they're taking it is their body is not producing it. We blocked this, so they start taking it. Are you ever a fan of it? Is it okay? Sometimes. What about people that are nightly taking melatonin?

Yeah, you know, melatonin is probably the most heated debated topic in sleep right now and you've got people on one spectrum or the other. Now I tend to fall on the pro melatonin spectrum and the reason why I feel like there may be a good use case for people 50 plus is because we know our natural melatonin production goes down, we don't produce as much of it it. And so because of that I feel like there is good reason, you know, for people to supplement with a small dose of melatonin.

But we, here's where we need to be careful. And this, this is across the board for all supplements. So we need to vet our supplements in a way that's very stringent. Right. So synthetic melatonin has like 13 excipient ingredients that could be harmful for us. So we need to get like a pharmaceutical grade melatonin brand and you know, no, no shade on the, the big box brands. But please just don't get your melatonin at Costco. You know, it's just not going to be high quality. In fact, they did a study probably five years ago where they took, they went to Canadian pharmacies and grocery stores and pulled melatonin from the shelves randomly to see if the melatonin in the pill matched what was on the label. And they found wide variances.

Wow.

So some were way under and some were up to like 478% over. Right. So people were getting overdosed on melatonin. Now there's nothing really serious that could happen to you if you got too much other than perhaps you may be groggy or you may have some crazy dreams. I personally, when I take melatonin, take something called Erbatonin and it's a plant. It's a plant melatonin made with only rice, alfalfa and chlorella. And it's been proven to be infinitely more powerful as an antioxidant and anti inflammatory than synthetic melatonin. And I spoke to Dr. Deanna Minick who is the chief medical officer, chief science officer of the company Symphony Natural Health that makes it and we just had a really deep discussion on anecdotally what she's seeing for midlife women. She's a midlife woman too and she's seeing a lot of anecdotal evidence that it's helping some women with those wake ups at night. Right. Okay. So you know, your results may vary but I, I thought that her wisdom on that was pretty, pretty poignant.

I want to talk about the wake up time now, the when we wake up at 2 or 3 or 4am and when that's not because you went to bed at seven. So when that's happening, for me personally I have tracked it. Two very specific things. Actually that's not true. Three specific things. So I'm going to share those with you and then I want to get your feedback on what's going on with women in general. So when I, when I historically have woken up at that time, it was always one of three things. Either one, when I was ovulating. So the day that when I'm ovulating and I'm past that now, so that's not the case, but I would wake up for whatever reason that day. And I think that was that hormone pivot. So if, if you're still in perimenopause or you're not in even at perimenopause yet, that could be one of the variables if you notice around ovulation that you wake up, up. The second reason I really started tracking a couple years ago is blood sugar. So if my blood sugar would drop and typically that, that in most healthy people it would be because you've got higher blood sugar, maybe hitting bed and then you're having this rebound effect. But having that low blood sugar, your body will start to produce cortisol to counter that and to try to correct it. And I'm talking about non diabetics right now. So you're not, not because you're, you're insulin dependent diabetic and have low blood sugar. If you're not diabetic and you're having that drop, your body, if you're healthy, will produce cortisol to help counter that blood sugar and try to raise it. So that will also wake you up. So I found that with me was happening. The other reason is if you have something going on in your gut health, you've got parasites, something going on that is more active. Those critters are more active at 3M. They can wake you up. And I know that's when I first saw you, Morgan. As you commented on one of my posts when I was sharing about gut health, I had a snake video showing a stuffed snake waking up at 3:00am and you said, well it also could be. And you, you added in some things. So I want to talk about those three things and more. And what you're seeing is creating this wake up in the middle of the night.

Yeah, great insights. So the 3am wakeup is literally the biggest sleep challenge faced by my clients. And so I, I got inspired recently to write a free guide all about 3am wake ups. It's called Awake Again at 3am Your guide to why you're waking up and what to do about it. It can be downloaded on my site for free. But what I'm finding is that at least for my patient or my, my client population rather, is that the blood sugar issues are, are real. Right. And so a lot of times women are not having enough food. They're like eating too early and at night. Right. And so whatever.

That's probably me too by the way, because I eat it like four or five.

Yeah, I know it's, I'm just not hungry later.

Some people are, but, but I think either way could create a problem. You don't eat, you're eating too much carbohydrate rich food later, which could create that problem. So either way, you're kind of doomed there.

Yeah. So what I'm recommending for women is if they are having the wake ups at 3am, one of the ways to test to see if it's a blood sugar issue is just have like a really small snack, like an hour before bed that has, you know, some protein, some fat, like Greek yogurt with some almonds or maybe just a few bites of leftovers from dinner.

Doesn't everyone want to munch on a chicken breast before bed?

Oh yeah, that's exactly what I want.

We want ice cream. I mean, I know now.

Yeah. The snack to choose is not ice cream and cookies, by the way. That will really just regulate your blood sugar. But if you, if you do this little test and you find that, oh, that prevents the 3:00am wake ups, you know, you've got a bigger issue on your hands with blood sugar management and you probably want to invest in a CGM and like really work on getting your blood sugar balanced from the morning on. Right.

Another reason that I'm seeing the wake ups happen is because of being too hot. And it's not necessarily night sweats or hot flashes. It's just that we are overheated because that drop in estrogen can affect our internal body temperature. So in that case, if you're too hot, there's many things you can do to mitigate. You can just drop the temperature in your sleeping space by a few degrees. I have found bamboo sheets and pajamas to be helpful. And then there's interventions like cooling mattress pa. Have one. It's like a game changer. I, I love it. Like I, I get sad when I travel because I don't have it with me.

Yeah.

And then the third reason that I'm really seeing for a lot of patients, sorry, clients, I don't know. I can see Paige, is sleep breathing issues.

It.

So women are in midlife having more sleep apnea episodes, upper air wave, upper airway resistance syndrome. And what's happening with that is that like they're having these brief awakenings at night. So if you had an aura ring and you had a lot of white ticks throughout the night, to me that would be like a very telltale sign that you needed to get your sleep breathing looked at. Because women in midlife basically have their sleep apnea. Apnea incidence rate is matched to the that of their male counterparts in midlife. Okay, so 90. 90%. 90% of women with sleep apnea go undiagnosed.

Wow.

And that's just not acceptable to me. So that's a huge. On every podcast I have to call out the sleep breathing issue being. Being a real problem with women in midlife.

And what do we do about that? The breathing. If that's.

So first thing you want to do if you. If you. You suspect that you might have a sleep breathing issue is get a sleep study. Okay. So there are many ways of doing that, and one of the. One of the ways you can do it is an overnight sleep study, which, honestly, most people don't want to do. Most people don't want to spend the night in a lab, have things hooked up to them with people watching you and people watching you sleep. That's, like, not a very appealing concept.

I wouldn't be able to fall asleep just from that.

But what we have lately, and this has, like, increased dramatically since the pandemic because people couldn't go into labs, is we have home sleep studies. So you can contact your doctor to get one from your doctor, or you can do direct to consumer. You can just order them online. And so those are great because they're like less than 200, and they get shipped to your house and you get your results in like 48 hours. And then. Then it gets a little tricky.

What do you do about it if you have it?

Exactly. So what I recommend that people do is contact their doctor and say, this is what the sleep study showed. And then you kind of need to figure out how to treat it. So there's many different ways of treating it. Sleep apnea is a huge. Probably the biggest area in sleep that's getting a lot more attention and technological developments. So we think about sleep apnea and treatment with the cpap. Right. Which is the mask and the air being pushed through your nose. Yeah. And that is the gold standard. But we know that not a lot of people are. Not many people are going to want to do that. You know, I mean, they. They've come pretty far in terms of making it comfortable, lighter, less intrusive, like a Darth Vader mask. So other alternatives to CPAP for somebody who has, like, mild to moderate sleep apnea would be an oral appliance. Right. So that basically repositions your jaw. There's also something called Inspire. No, excuse me. It's called Excite osa. And it's basically like a little tongue trainer to. To kind of mimic myofunctional therapy. Right. So there are a lot of ways to deal with sleep apnea. So I just, I. What I'm running up against quite often with my clients is that they don't even want to get it looked at because they don't want to deal with it.

Yep, that's me. That's me for sure. But I'll admit it.

And, and you know, like, if you're snoring like a lot, I have a lot of clients who, whose spouses snore. Just a lot of friends whose spouses snore. And I'm always just like, just get him a sleep study. You know.

Where was I going with this? Okay. So.

That people don't want to wear the result. They don't want to know because they don't want to deal with what you.

Have to do for it. It. So the, the unintent. The consequences of not treating your sleep apnea are. Can be pretty bad. If you have sleep apnea that goes untreated for years, there's some metabolic and cardiovascular consequences that are not good. So it's something that like, we really sure need to address, you know, full on, like, you know, like grown ladies. And, and, and I'm, you know, quite frankly, I'm dealing with this too myself. I'm trying to manage some results of a sleep study and I'm trying different things. And I may need to like, get an oral appliance or I may need to get one of those tongue trainer things. And you know, you and I, we're both fit, we're not overweight, we don't have big necks. So you, you don't have to be overweight or a man to have sleep apnea. There's just this, and I think doctors get sort of this preconceived notion in their head of what sleep apnea looks like. And as have seen women who are dismissed by their doctor. Like, if a doctor looked at you, Natalie, Jill, they'd be like, you know, some doctors would be like, no way. You're thin, you're in shape, but you could very well have it. I mean, I've had clients who are in their 30s, tiny women who've had sleep apnea in moderate. So you just can't look at somebody and determine whether or not they have it.

Yeah, this is. So it's what I'm hearing from you is this is sort of a theme of pretty much every topic I bring on here is that we in midlife have to become our own health deterioration, protective. There's so many different variables. It's not as simple as I'm not sleeping well. Let me take a Valium. I'm not sleeping well. Let me take a Xanax. I'm not sleeping well. Let me drink more. Just doing a quick remedy. We need to understand why we're not sleeping well and if it's a sporadic rare thing or if it's an ongoing challenge because if we are not sleeping well, ongoing, we're going to create other health problems. We are not going to age as well as we could. We're not going to thrive. So it's really being your own health detective and if I'm hearing you correctly, Morgan too, like it's just diving down deep. It's not a simple answer, but it sounds like the overall theme, like your most important if you're to say, like if there's one thing you're going to change right now I'm assuming you're talking about blue light. Maybe I'm wrong.

I would say kind of on a broader topic is managing your light environment. So really thinking about brighter days and darker nights is just a general theme because if you think about how we were, how our ancestors were many, many years ago, that that's what they had. They did not have the option of having a light at night. Right. So we are very much going against our biology and the modern day world with, with totally flipped, flipped script for light.

And I want to share with those of you listening, I very much live by this. Now I'm not going to say every single day it's not perfect like today I, it happens to be 8am my time when I'm recording with Morgan. But this is not usual for me. This is very rare. Usually I block out and do not start my work until later in the morning because I use that morning time to get that direct light and, and literally practice what we're talking about here. And I do at night I'm very committed to wearing yellow and then orange glasses and then ultimately the red ones right before bed to be to block out. I'm committed to not scrolling, to not getting in that. So I've been really working on this and I also want to share that I really notice a difference in my level of success sleep with light alone. There's other little tricks I've done like I, there's a magnesium I love that helps with deep sleep. I definitely use some cbd. I'll do melatonin as needed. But I will tell you for me personally, this theme of light makes a huge ginormous difference in my sleep quality, my stress level, my energy all of it. So I think it's something we really, I'm really going to encourage women to, to look at and take seriously with light.

Yeah. And I, I love, I love your call out on that. And what I, what I'd also add to that is that that these are free interventions. I mean, yeah, you may invest in a pair of blue light, blue light blocking glasses, but even if you don't.

Just don't have it on, use an amber light.

Yeah. It's accessible to everyone. I mean, we do have light pollution, which really sucks people out in our world, you know, polluting us with light. But in our home, we really do have a lot of agency over our light environment. So it's free and it's accessible. And so I love your call out on that. I'm so glad that that's, that's a passion of yours. It is a passion of mine too. And I just think, you know, we need to just keep talking in our communities about this.

Totally. And, and just the undoing of it all. Because I like, I mean, I'm guilty. Me and my husband, like every house we've lived in, we replace all the lights with bright white LED lights because they last longer and they're bright and they're like sunlight. But no, that's part of this, this decline. That's part of the issue.

Yeah.

Thank you so much, Morgan. Where can people find you? Where can they reach you? Where can they learn more about what you do?

Sure. My website is morganadamswellness.com I mentioned my free guide to 3am Wake ups. You can get that there. You can schedule a consultation if you feel like you might need extra support with your sleep. And I'm always on Instagram. My handle is morganadams Wellness. DM me. Say hi. I love to chat about sleep, so don't be a stranger.

Thank you so much, Morgan. Thanks for being here today.

Thank you.

I hope you enjoyed the episode. Thanks for taking time out of your day to listen in as my guest guests. If you found this episode valuable, please share it with friends and on social media. Be sure to tag me and our guests so that we can find you and share the love. I'm Natalie Jill Fit on all social media platforms and the biggest thank you that you can give me is leaving a review and hopefully a nice one at that. This will help others find these episodes so we can help and reach more people. If you do leave me a review, please Message us@supportataliejill fitness.com with a screenshot of your view and we would love to send you a free digital download of my DSR journal as a thank you.