Menstrual Insomnia (page 2 of 3)

Premenstrual Insomnia

Premenstrual insomnia not only affects your ability to sleep, it also seems to affect the quality of your sleep.

“Normally, we start REM sleep”—the sleep in which your brain is most active—“about 90 minutes after we fall asleep,” explains Dr. Lee. “But when women ovulate and progesterone makes their temperature go up, REM sleep occurs earlier in the sleep cycle, within 60 minutes.” As a result, you skip over or significantly reduce the deep-sleep stage that usually occurs right before REM sleep.

“It’s very similar to what happens in people who are depressed or jet-lagged,” explains Dr. Lee.

Unfortunately, that deep-sleep stage is where your body’s repair mechanisms swing into play. Cells increase their production of proteins that repair damage from stress and ultraviolet radiation. The immune system powers up. Metabolic functions determine ratios of fat and muscle. “And that first deep sleep of the night is where you secrete this big bolus of growth hormone,” says Dr. Lee. “In children it triggers growth. In adults it heals.”

Intrigued with what her studies uncovered, Dr. Lee wondered how premenstrual insomnia was affecting women with PMS, who, along with insomnia, also experience anxiety, depression, irritability, food cravings, and all the other aggravations that define the condition. Would they experience less deep sleep than other women? Would deep sleep occur at a later time?

The answer was startling. When Dr. Lee finished the study and checked her data, she found that women with PMS had no deep sleep at all. None.

“It wasn’t just when they were premenstrual,” says Dr. Lee regretfully. “I wanted to find that they had had some good, normal sleep at least sometime. But I didn’t. Their sleep looked like that of the jet-lagged and the depressed—all month long.”

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Both my son and daughter-in-law are full-time college students, and don't have time or money for anything other than school. I was with them in church when the minister gave a sermon on marriage. "The three most common problems that can lead to divorce," he warned, "involve money, children and sex." At that my son whispered to his wife, "Then we should be okay. We don't have any of those."

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