How’s your sleep?
When you don’t get a good night’s sleep, it can make you feel awful. Though several factors can lead to insomnia, for women, one of the biggest causes is a hormonal imbalance.
When you have a hormonal imbalance that causes a lack of sleep, it can make you stressed, which in turn affects your hormones even more. If you’re someone who’s experiencing insomnia, having your hormones checked could be the solution to restoring your sleep.
There are many different hormones that can get out of balance that can trigger insomnia. When estrogen or progesterone are too low, it can disrupt your normal sleep cycle.
Estrogen and progesterone both affect alertness and being able to shut your thoughts off enough to be able to get some rest. Not only that, but if you’re a woman who’s in perimenopause or menopause, having your estrogen or progesterone out of balance can cause things like night sweats or hot flashes, which also disrupt your sleep.
Getting your hormones balanced may well take care of the insomnia. Progesterone in particular helps to soothe emotions and trigger sleep.
When progesterone is low, you can feel heightened emotions during times that you would normally be ready to fall asleep. Additionally, low estrogen can make you feel mentally and emotionally wired.
Your cortisol levels could also be the cause of your insomnia. When it’s too high, it drops your estrogen levels to the point where they’re out of balance. But that’s just one problem with unbalanced cortisol.
When it’s not right, it keeps your body, even as it’s trying to sleep, in a state of preparedness. So you end up feeling on edge and too alert to sleep. Taking care of the stress in your life is just one way to handle high cortisol levels.
To keep this hormone where it should be, you need to do things before bed that lower your stress. On the flip side of high cortisol is low cortisol. When this is lower than it should be, it’s known to cause insomnia.
Other hormonal imbalances that can cause insomnia have to do with your thyroid. If your thyroid produces too much of certain hormones, it can cause problems with your serotonin – and you need serotonin to help you sleep.
Too much thyroid hormone makes you feel wired, like you can’t rest. It also affects your alertness. If your thyroid is producing too little of a hormone, it affects your moods as well as your ability to sleep.
If you have a hormonal imbalance with your testosterone, this can cause insomnia and so can your DHEA. Low levels of this can impact your sleep just as much as low levels of the sleep hormone, melatonin.
So as you can see, pretty much any hormone imbalance can be contributing to insomnia.
Need a place to get started? Be sure to check out my DIY programs designed to help you balance your hormones and heal your gut.
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