The math she does at 3am

There’s a specific kind of loneliness that happens when you’re awake in the middle of the night, and everyone else in your house is asleep.

I want to tell you about Jane.

Jane is a composite — she’s pieces of real women I’ve worked with, anonymized and blended — but I promise you, if you’ve been living with perimenopause sleep problems, you will recognize her immediately.

It is 3:17 am. Jane is staring at the ceiling. The sheets are damp on her side. Her husband is breathing steadily next to her, and she has never felt more alone in a room with another person in her life. She starts doing the math. She always does the math. If she falls asleep in the next twenty minutes — which she won’t — she can get maybe three more hours. She has a 7 am call. A presentation. A permission slip that needs to be signed. A husband who asked twice this week if she was okay, and both times she said yes in a way that closed the conversation.

She has been researching at 3 am because that is when she is awake.

She keeps finding the same things. Hot flash tips. Herbal supplements. Lists of foods to avoid. None of it explains why this is happening to her body, and none of it fits into the life she is actually living.

Here is what I want her — and you — to know.

That early morning wake-up is not insomnia in the traditional sense. It’s a cortisol problem, and it’s directly connected to the shifts in estrogen and progesterone. Estrogen helps regulate cortisol rhythm. When estrogen fluctuates, cortisol can surge too early in the morning — pulling you out of sleep at 3 am with your heart beating a little faster than it should, your mind already calculating the day ahead, no ability to drift back under.

A 2021 study published in Menopause found that sleep disturbances affect over 47 percent of perimenopausal women, and that hormonal variability — not just hot flashes — is the primary driver.

That number keeps me thinking about all the women sitting in morning meetings, holding it together, and nobody in that room knowing what their night looked like.

The thing I want you to take away from this is simple, even though the solution isn’t.

Your sleep problems are not a character flaw. They are not stress management failures. They are a physiological shift that requires a physiological response — and that response looks different than generic sleep hygiene advice.

It involves how you’re eating in the hours before bed. It involves what kind of training you’re doing and when. It involves understanding what your nervous system needs to feel safe enough to stay asleep.

I wrote the full breakdown because I kept having the same conversation over and over with women who were exhausted and being told to try chamomile tea.

You deserve more than chamomile tea.

Read the full post here — and if it sounds like your 3 am, come find me.