Symptom 8 - Trouble sleeping

This picture could not be more true! The clock appears to be on 2 am ish and I have lost count of the amount of times that I have seen that time!

Trouble sleeping, for me as a perimenopause woman, comes in many varieties from not being able to get to sleep when you are absolutely shattered to falling asleep quite happily but then waking up anytime after midnight and clock watching for maybe hours or being in a vicious cycle of waking, falling asleep then waking again and falling asleep. I don't remember my sleep pattern being disturbed as much during pregnancy or even with having small children waking in the night because they'd lost their dummy out of the cot, they needed the toilet or because they were ill!

Like many of the perimenopausal symptoms that I get this one does not affect me all month; it only strikes in the week to ten days before my period starts. I also get other symptoms at this time but I'll blog them separately. Now for someone who currently has an average cycle of twenty-four days that is quite a lot but I hold on to the fact that for at least fourteen days a month I do sleep 'fairly' normally!

I found this image on the National Sleep Foundation website looking at how much sleep was good for us. As an adult between the age of 25 and 64 I should be having a seven to nine hours sleep; I definitely get this on the other fourteen days of the month but that ten days before my period starts well that is a totally different matter. I'd like to be generous and say that the minimum that I can get is four hours sleep and maybe I can get seven on a 'good' night. The problem with this is that this sleep is disturbed so it is never a 'good' night's sleep. Like many of my perimenopause symptoms I have been experiencing this for over two years now.

Lack of sleep makes me irritable! Really?! Yes, it's true! 

About six months ago I started looking at alternative remedies as I am loath to go to the doctors and ask about HRT; I'd very much like to be able to find something else to help get me through. One of the things I have tried I will blog about separately and it may have to be a video blog as writing may not do it justice! I have shared my experiences with two friends who had somehow missed out on this 'trial' over the last couple of days and the laughs we have had have been amazing! One of those Tessa moments!!!!

Anyway, where was I?! Having done a bit of research I decided that I needed to take a magnesium supplement. The supplement that I bought was called We Support Magnesium-OK; it is a food supplement that also has other 'things' included in it. Like everything related to perimenopause you will never get a 'quick' fix (I wish!). I was really good and took it for approximately six weeks; once a day at my evening meal. It appeared to work, I did not experience the insomnia that I usually do so t was a good thing. The problem that I had was that I kept forgetting to take it!

This month the insomnia has been really bad. I have a stock pile of magnesium supplements; 120 tablets to be precise which is approximately five monthly cycles for me! I am going to start taking them again to see if that one month was a fluke or that it was having a placebo effect on me. I just need to set myself a reminder to take them . . . oh that's Symptom 17 - Faulty Memory!! Ha ha welcome to another one!