MyMTℱ Blog

If Menopause night sweats are keeping you awake, then discover why.

The email arrived in my inbox this week. Amanda had listened to my Masterclass on Menopause and reached out – “Is there anything I can do about my sweating? I sweat in the morning, I sweat at night and when I go out. I’m on all sorts of herbs to help  me.”

Night sweats are so frustrating, let alone draining!

I’m intrigued with the number of women who join me on my coaching programmes who are taking supplements for their hot flushes and/or are on menopause HRT, but they are still waking up to hot flushes and night sweats. If this is you, then there’s a reason for this – our sweat glands and our skin respond to our changing oestrogen environment too.

This means that the sweat glands don’t function as well as they used to. Our declining oestrogen messes up our body’s ability to handle heat. 

As I often say to women who come onto the MyMTℱ online programmes, hot flushes are a sign that your internal or ‘core’ temperature is higher than it should be. We all know that sweating is a natural survival cooling mechanism, but why and how does it become so disrupted as we move into mid-life? 

Sweating is your survival mechanism to help your body cope with heat that is building up internally. This might be when we have a fever or we have inflammation inside us, or we are exercising in hot environments. 

But we also sweat and experience hot flushes when we reach peri-menopause (the start of our reproductive ageing, when oestrogen and progesterone production decline). The question is why ...

Our temperature is usually a well-balanced mechanism that is directed by our pituitary gland in our brain. Normally and ideally, there is good balance between our pituitary hormones, thryoid hormones and our adrenal (stress) hormones.

However, the following factors can cause these hormones to get out of balance: 

  • When we move into menopause and the ‘master’ pituitary hormones in the brain that regulate oestrogen and progesterone are changing. 
  • When we aren’t sleeping. 
  • When we are accumulating inflammation in our joints, muscles, gut and liver as we age. 
  • When our diet doesn’t give us the nutrients we need to reduce inflammatory changes in the body. This includes magnesium, potassium, iron, Vitamin D, B12 and iodine. All of these nutrients help to regulate our blood pressure, heart rate and temperature. 

For example, if our diet doesn’t match the changes that arrive in our menopause transition (e.g. if we are low in iron, iodine, magnesium or folate), or if we have inflammation that has been building up in our joints and muscles as our joints lose the role of oestrogen, or if we are doing lots of vigorous exercise and not sleeping well, then all these factors can  impact on the regulation  of our body’s heat production causing our temperature to go into over-drive.

When our temperature builds up and we feel hot, other changes occur inside your body to try to keep the heat under control. In other words, our body tries to adjust and ‘right’ itself and the hormones that come into play to do this are our thyroid and adrenal hormones.

Sweating is your body trying to get rid of excess heat. As many of you already know, if it’s happening at night, then you wake up with the sheets of your bed soaked. Night after night. The only thing that changes is your laundry pile. 

When I was really trying to understand why I was experiencing night sweats and lots of hot flushes, I was guided by the great work of Deecher and Dories (2007). Their studies explain that when we have night sweats, there is a problem with the neural (nerve) and hormonal ‘communication’ between three areas. These are:

  1. The pituitary gland in the brain.
  2. Our thyroid gland (which requires iodine and selenium to regulate it).
  3. Our skin – which we often forget is the largest organ in the body containing millions of tiny blood vessels that go to our sweat glands. The function of sweat glands are affected by low oestrogen too. They don’t dilate as much. 

This means that to sort out your night sweats, you need to focus on these three key areas, not just the changing levels of oestrogen and progesterone, which has been the hallmark of menopause treatment for decades.

When we focus on these three areas, then we can usually un-pack why we are getting night sweats, when we never used to.

One of the first things to understand is that our core body temperature is regulated by our brain (pituitary gland) and it works to our 24 hour circadian rhythm. This is why, if you are frustrated and weary from your night sweats and lack of sleep, then the management of this begins by turning around your circadian rhythm (I have the step-by-step plan for this in the SLEEP ALL NIGHT module in both the MyMTℱ programmes. 

However, it’s not always about our sleep hormones. When we overheat and sweat at night, something is up with the nervous system and our temperature regulation too.

The normal response to over-heating is that when core body temperature goes high, this is communicated to the brain by hot and cold temperature receptors around the body. They are located in your skin (the largest organ), your gut, your thyroid, your blood vessels and your spinal cord.

Therefore, messages about your temperature regulation occur at many different sites in your body. For example, if you are experiencing changing gut health during menopause, then it’s important to sort this out too – when you do, your hot flushes and night sweats reduce as well. 

During Menopause Our Blood Vessels are Changing:

Normally, when our core body temperature goes higher than it should, our peripheral blood vessels dilate to take heat to the skin. This results in an increased blood flow to the blood vessels in our skin where our sweat glands are located. This sequence of events is regulated by our thyroid and our nervous system, which controls blood pressure and blood vessel dilation. 

But here’s the kicker, – these sites are also where you have oestrogen receptors too. Hence, during menopause, these oestrogen receptors cannot do their job properly. 

How do we manage this temperature chaos during menopause?

I want you to think about the night sweats in terms of the three areas – pituitary, thyroid and skin. All are controlled by our circadian rhythm, the way we adapt to our environment, our stress levels and the nutrients that control our thyroid and pituitary health – iodine, folate, selenium and Vitamin D. Hence, focusing on these factors is important and it’s what  women learn about on the MyMTℱ programmes. 

For those of you in the Southern Hemisphere moving into summer, it takes around 6 weeks to develop your ‘summer skin’ so get outside when you can and let your skin breathe – it’s your largest organ. Wear loose clothing, go barefoot if possible and cool your hands down by running cold water over the wrist and palms. Same with your feet. The feet and hands have numerous blood vessels which help to dissipate or reduce heat. They are an important component of our evolutionary cooling mechanism. When our feet are cool, we feel cooler inside our body. 

I have other strategies that I have researched in my programmes, and this also includes lists of foods which help to keep us cool. We also need to eat lightly at night and the timing of foods is critical to turning off night sweats.

When we eat lightly at night, the gut (which has all the temperature sensors too), doesn’t have to process and digest larger meals that we are generally used to in the evening.  This is particularly important for some proteins, which increase metabolism and are known as being ‘thermo-genic’ or heat generating. 

A word of caution though – the official term for night sweats is ‘hyper-hidrosis‘ and it is well known in medicine, that an under-lying virus can also disrupt temperature regulation.  If you aren’t getting on top of your night sweats and/or you aren’t at the right age for your menopause transition, then please see your Doctor.  

Is MyMTℱ for you? I hope so! 

If you are having problems getting on top of your sleep and want to beat the heat as well as manage other symptoms of menopause with my scientifically evidenced lifestyle solutions, then I would love you to have a look at my 12 week menopause symptom reduction programmes.  

For leaner women, I have Circuit-Breaker and for over-weight women, I have Transform Me.

There are videos on these pages for you to listen to about what you receive and how you can access them on-demand, in your own time.  

There is never a better time to start, but if you are hesitating, then I recommend you complete the MyMTℱ Symptoms Quiz, watch the MyMTℱ Masterclass on Menopause, go to the Testimonials and Success Stories on the MyMTℱ website and find someone like you to read their story. Women call the programmes ‘life-changing’. I hope you do too.

MyMTℱ 12 week programs are normally available for NZ$399 each, but please do check out the MyMT website or subscribe to our newsletter to be alerted to any promotional offers. 

I hope you can join me. 

Dr Wendy Sweet, (PhD), Member: Australasian Society of Lifestyle Medicine/MyMTℱ Founder & Coach

References:

Deecher, D. & Dorries, K. (2007). Understanding the pathophysiology of vasomotor symptoms (hot flushes and night sweats) that occur in peri-menopause, menopause and post-menopause life stages. Archives of Women’s Mental Health, 10: 247-257.

Gibson C., Thurston R., Matthews K. (2016). Cortisol dysregulation is associated with daily diary-reported hot flashes among midlife women. Clin Endocrinol (Oxf). 85(4):645-51. doi: 10.1111/cen.13076. Epub 2016 Apr 26. PMID: 27059154.

Mayo Clinic. The science behind a hot flush. Mayo Clinic Online, PDF Handout

Schoenfeld, B. & Aragon, A. (2018). How much protein can the body use in a single meal for muscle building? Implications for daily protein distribution. J. of Int Society of Sports Nutrition. 15(10), 1-6 https://doi.org/10.1186/s12970-018-0215-1

Sharma, S. & Kavuru, M. (2010). Sleep and Metabolism: An Overview. International Journal of Endocrinology, Article ID 270832, 1-12.
Related Tag: Sleeping Menopause

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