Has anyone successfully stopped waking in the middle of the night and figured out how to go back to sleep?

[justanotherneighinparadise]

Last night my four year old woke me. He happily went back to sleep in his own bed when I took him but I was then wide awake. Laid there tossing and turning for hours.

I often wake myself up without any help around 4am and do the same thing. I find it worse if I get out of bed to distract myself so I won’t look at the phone or anything. I wear an eye mask so i don’t think it’s the sun coming up but I suspect it was that in the past.

I’m 45 and used to sleep well until I had children. Nowadays I hit the sack between 10pm and 11pm and probably get 6-7 hours interrupted sleep per night.

Don’t drink, on a strict low carb diet. Average weight. No medication. Grrrr.

If I wake up in the middle of the night and am completely wide awake and feeling refreshed then I'll go down stairs for an hour or 2. I tend to get a couple of jobs done then have some tea and toast and read for a while before going back to bed.

If I'm not so alert then I put the headphones in my phone, stick a podcast on and put on the timer. I'm always asleep before the timer kicks in.

OP, it's one of the dreaded symptoms of the perimenopause. I too use to sleep so deeply from 10 to 6:30 whatever stress I was under.

Then suddenly I started to struggle falling asleep but worse was the waking up at 4am totally alert and nothing able to get me back to sleep.

Its at that time that the adrenalin kicks in and the reduction in oestrogen makes it much worse. I then started to have a load of other symptoms, especially lightheadness when getting up. It got so bad I couldn't drive to work any longer.

What really helped was taking amitriptyline. Unlike a sleeping pill, it benefits later in the night rather than the start and has no addictive properties.

I'm now 2 years in the menopause and my sleep is still not great, far from what it used to be but certainly better than what it was 3 years ago.

Last night I did some HIT exercise and slept better than I have for ages. I’m going to try it again today and see if it helps.