The impending certainty of hot flashes alone is not all that women face with the onset of menopause.
Menopause night sweats are well-known to women and they make for many sleepless nights.
To combat this inevitable hormonal phenomenon, you need to understand it first.
What Are Menopause Night Sweats? We awake in the night dank and damp with our hearts racing and our pajamas and bedsheets drenched in perspiration.
This isn't just a matter of sleeping in an overheated environment or wearing pajamas too thick for the temperature; it is a matter of an irrationally abrupt and severe change in body temperature causing you to perspire suddenly and profusely.
What Causes Them? Night sweats and hot flashes are basically the same thing, we just happen to experience a rush of those hot flashes while are body goes through the temperature modulation which naturally occurs while human sleep.
Hot flashes at night lead to sweating at night.
With a menopause night sweat, rapidly vacillating estrogen levels affect a chemistry reaction in a portion of our brains, known as the hypothalamus, which regulates our body temperature.
The wildly changing estrogen levels affect a brain chemical called norepinephrine which in turn confuses the hypothalamus.
Think of the hypothalamus like the thermostat on your home's heating system.
If your thermostat is getting incorrect readings of the current temperature, it may inappropriately trigger the heating mechanism and overheat your home.
A similar situation occurs with the fluctuating hormone levels that are common during menopause.
When the estrogen and norepinephrine team up to confuse the hypothalamus, it triggers a set of changes to cool you when you don't need to cool.
These changes include dilating blood vessels (which you perceive as heat) and catalyzing your sweat glands (something you experience through sweating).
Finding An Effective Treatment Treating this type of sleep hyperhidrosis can be frustrating as the first treatment often doesn't work.
Thus you end up spending days or even weeks experimenting with different ways to achieve greater comfort from your menopause night sweats.
But don't give up hope as there are a number of different treatment options.
Different treatments tend to work for different women so it may be necessary to try a few different treatment options before you find the one that works best for you.
While this may not be comforting to hear while you are suffering from disrupted sleep, it is good to know this phase is temporary.
Finding an effective way to alleviate or at least reduce your night sweats can help you get through this phase more comfortably.