How are you sleeping?

Like, how well, but also HOW? It's a community thread!

FIRST, AN ANNOUNCEMENT:

If you're going through a big change, on the edge of a big change, or feeling stuck in a transitional space and worried your life will feel like this forever: 

Holly Whitaker

and I are offering our first-ever Zoom workshop on Sunday, June 16th (replay will be available if you can’t make it live).

It’s called THE END and it's about endings: how to navigate them in a way that's generative and expansive, honors where you've been and where you're headed, and marking them with ritual. This is the first in a series of workshops designed to help you live into the deep, shitty middle of transitions—because there’s no manual for how to be lost.

All the info & registration is here. Join us!

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Hi everybody,

For the last 2.5 months, I hosted a weekly Zoom group for paid subscribers who were doing the 100-Day Project, which ended last Tuesday. Along the way, it sort of morphed into a come-as-you-are, creative support group (which I was 100% here for) and people loved it so much that they’re continuing to meet without me! This experience really got me thinking about the community aspect of this newsletter.

Basically, the more I learn about you all, the more I love you—and the more I want to help facilitate your getting to know each other. You are brilliant and interesting and cool, and many of you are dealing with (or have dealt with) a lot of the same things, so I want to see what happens when I open up a regular hive-mind comment space for paid subscribers to connect and share our wisdom, experiences, suggestions, vents, hacks, etc. It’s been heartwarming to watch actual friendships form in our Zoom group, and I want that for more of us.

My new job as a consultant/coach means I’m on Zoom a LOT these days, and it’s been giving me nasty headaches, so I’ve also been thinking about Zoom-free ways to help foster community here. In addition to discussion threads…

OK. Changing gears to today’s topic.

The last 8 years of perimenopause (and now menopause, as of last month!)¹ have absolutely wrecked me, sleep-wise. I had a couple of years where my night sweats were so bad, I’d soak through 4 t-shirts in a night, sleeping on a towel that I also had to change out. (I came super close to buying those wicking “sport sheets” but I couldn’t make myself do it, if you own these please share about them!) There was a perpetual stack of shirts and towels next to my bed that rivaled my pile of unread New Yorkers.

I stopped wearing my Oura ring last year because it told me I slept like garbage every single morning, and I felt judged by it. I would argue with its smug little alerts in my head: “yeah ring, I KNOW I need to pay attention to my sleep. I walked 8 miles today, I keep my room at 65 degrees, I wear those amber glasses that make me look like Jack Nicholson, and I have a two-hour sleep routine. All I do is pay attention to my frickin’ sleep, so STFU.”

I can’t take hormone therapy due to my meningioma, and changes I’ve made to my diet/life since 2018 have reduced all my other perimenopause symptoms by about 90%, but sleep is the one thing that never responded to any of those changes (as in, it’s dancing in the corner with two middle fingers in the air).

At this point, I’m only having about one hot flash a night and the drenching sweats seem to be behind me (thank God), but sleep, if anything, has gotten more elusive. These days, my body refuses to sleep without the following six-part system of potions, drugs, and accessories:

—Trazodone, a prescription via my wonderful menopause care OB/GYN, which I take every night in a low dose. Trazodone is a very old antidepressant that doesn’t work all that well for treating depression, but it works great as a non-addictive sleep aid, so these days it’s most often prescribed off-label for sleep issues, particularly in menopause. The dosage for sleep is also often lower than the lowest therapeutic dose for depression. After I spent six months last year being unable to sleep more than 4 hours a night, Trazodone was ultimately what helped get me back in business. And by business I mean unconscious. (DISCLAIMER! I’m not a doctor and this isn’t medical advice. I am a person sharing my own personal experience and a bit of factual context.)

—Liposomal melatonin, which after having tried 142 kinds of melatonin, I believe is superior to the others (and also more expensive, and sadly much less delicious than those Olli gummies my partner

Daniel Wakefield Pasley

calls “sleep candy,” which don’t do shit for me sleep-wise).

—Stress-Relax Tranquil Sleep Chewables, which taste like Sweet-Tarts and also have more melatonin in them which is probably not great for me, but I like them?

—ASMR. For the uninitiated, ASMR stands for “autonomic sensory meridian response,” which is a feeling of relaxation, or the sensation of tingling in your scalp, triggered by hearing certain kinds of sounds or voices. Some people get it when they hear whispering or tapping (like the clicking of typing on a keyboard). Mine is very specific to certain kinds of soft-spoken voices talking about basically anything, the more boring the better. My personal faves are Jeannie B and Gentle Whispering (mostly not whispering); Maria from Gentle Whispering is an OG person in this space and I’ve been listening to her for 13 years. Some of my favorite videos are when she demonstrates how to fold towels in different ways. (I told you it was boring!)

—A white noise machine, which for some reason we call “the sound hat.”

—A fan, pointed just enough at my face to be able to feel it, but not so much that I feel like I’m on a ferry.

—Three extremely specific pillows.

I know what you might be thinking, and you’re right: all of this DOES make traveling very easy and chill!

The good news is this sleep-assistance ecosystem actually works pretty well for me; I’m thrilled to report I’m only rarely awake at 4am these days (and if I am, I fall back asleep pretty quickly), but it took about a year of experimentation to dial it all in. I’m very much hoping that as my body settles into its postmenopausal self, I’ll regain my ability to sleep in a lower-maintenance way. (is this delusional???)

Everything on the above Sleeping Requirements list came to me as a suggestion from my doctor, my friends, or the internet. So in the spirit of crowdsourced wisdom: let’s talk about sleep in the comments.

How are you sleeping? Like, how well, but also literally how?

What’s your routine like? Do you have a fan that fits in a carry-on? How do you deal with a partner who snores? How do you deal with yourself snoring?

Everyone says to take magnesium and I did, for a long time, but I noticed zero difference between taking it and not taking it. Does it work for you? Have you tried the spray kind? I tried it and it just made my feet sticky. GIVE US SPECIFICS!

*PS: If/when talking about hormone therapy, please remember there’s no one right way: some people love it, some can’t take it, some don’t want to take it. Please share your own experiences, but please don’t try to change anyone’s mind about, or judge, their choice. XO

*PPS: My comments are limited to paid subscribers because trolls are such a thing. I left comments open on my first Substack post, and because I’m a woman on the internet, within 30 minutes there were random men in there telling me I was ugly and a terrible writer (sorry to generalize, but it’s always men). After so many years of managing trolls on social, I’m done spending time and energy deleting and blocking.

A paid subscription gives you access to the comments, post archives, more personal posts about my health, and special things I do for/with the paid community here — and it also contributes to my income, so thank you!

ON TO THE SLEEP DISCUSSION! Go!

1. There is a long post and possibly multiple posts coming about this; my brain really got excited about doing a whole menopause series and a podcast last year (and tbh, it’s been on my mind since 2021, when Em & Friends published menopause cards and a journal/tracker) but then my body said IT IS NOT TIME TO DO NEW PROJECTS, so I put it down. But yes, it’s been over a year since my last period and I’m now officially in menopause. Bring on the crone era, I’m here for it.