How Menopause Turned Me Into a Vampire (But Without the Cool Powers)

Here’s something they definitely left out of the menopause brochure (oh wait, THERE IS NO BROCHURE): your relationship with sleep is about to become more complicated than a soap opera love triangle.

Remember the good old days when you’d just... lie down and sleep? Like a normal human being? Yeah, those days are GONE, vanished. Evaporated like my ability to remember why I walked into a room.

What nobody tells you—and by nobody, I mean EVERY WOMAN WHO WENT THROUGH THIS BEFORE US AND DECIDED TO KEEP IT A SECRET—is that perimenopause and menopause come with a special bonus feature: the slow, torturous descent into sleeplessness. Some people call it insomnia. I call it HELL. Others might call it “a mild sleep disturbance.” Those people are liars!

Let me paint you a picture of my current sleep situation, which I like to call “The Nightmare on My Street.”

I used to be a champion sleeper. Seven to eight glorious, uninterrupted hours every single night. I’d hit the pillow and BAM—lights out until morning. I was basically a sleep Olympian. Gold medal material.

Now? Now I get two four-hour naps per night with a delightful hour-long intermission in between where I’m WIDE AWAKE, staring at the ceiling like it’s going to reveal the meaning of life. Spoiler alert: It never does. It just sits there being a ceiling, mocking me with its well-rested, horizontal smugness.

I wake up most mornings feeling like I’ve been hit by a truck driven by someone who also ran over my face with a steamroller for good measure. That lovely sinus headache from lack of sleep? It’s become my morning alarm clock. Who needs a buzzer when your own body can wake you up with pain?

But oh, the RARE days when I actually get six hours of uninterrupted sleep? I wake up feeling like a SUPERHERO. I’m talking full cape-wearing, building-leaping, world-saving energy. Six hours! That’s all it takes now for me to feel like I could bench press a car. My standards have never been lower, and yet I’ve never been more grateful.

I’ve tried EVERYTHING to fix this situation. And when I say everything, I mean I’ve basically turned into a sleep mad scientist conducting experiments on myself.

Prescription medications? Check. They worked great until I awake in a mental fog rendered useless for the whole day.

Natural remedies? You bet. I’ve rubbed so many lavender lotions and magical sleep potions on myself that I smell like a walking aromatherapy store.

On particularly terrible nights when I’ve been awake more than asleep, I find myself fantasizing about the most ridiculous thing: putting on my pajamas the second I get done with work and crawling directly into bed. No dinner. No responsibilities. Just me, my bed, and the desperate hope that THIS time will be different. It’s like dating a guy who keeps standing you up, but you keep going back because maybe tonight he’ll actually show up.

And can we talk about my new obsession? I’ve become a SLEEP TRACKER JUNKIE. I’ve essentially started running my own personal sleep study, complete with data, graphs, and enough statistics to make a scientist weep. My Oura ring tells me things I already know just by how I feel when I wake up—or more accurately, how I feel like death warmed over.

“Your sleep score is GOOD!” Translation: You got enough sleep to function like a semi-competent human today. Congratulations on meeting the bare minimum!

“Your sleep score is FAIR.” Translation: You’re going to need a lot of coffee, and maybe don’t operate any heavy machinery. Or light machinery. Actually, maybe just sit very still today.

“Your sleep score is POOR.” Translation: Welcome to hell. We have coffee, but it won’t help.

And the details! Oh, the details my little sleep warden provides: “You spent 47 minutes in deep sleep, 2 hours in REM sleep, yada yada yada...” I’ve become fluent in sleep stage terminology. I can discuss sleep architecture like I have a PhD in Counting Sheep Studies.

You know what kills me? I long for the days when my biggest problem was struggling to WAKE UP. Remember when you could sleep and sleep and SLEEP, and the hardest part of your morning was dragging yourself out of the warm embrace of your bed? When sleeping was so easy that you never even worried about whether you’d be ABLE to sleep?

Those were the days, my friends. I took them completely for granted, like a fool. A well-rested, blissfully ignorant fool.

But here’s the thing—I’m learning to make peace with my sleepless nights. Well, “make peace” might be too strong. Let’s say I’m learning to negotiate a temporary ceasefire.

I’ve discovered that those 2 a.m. wake-up calls are prime time for catching up on reading! That book that’s been sitting on my nightstand for six months? I’m tearing through it now, one middle-of-the-night chapter at a time.

I’ve also gotten surprisingly productive at 3 a.m. Need to do some boring research on the computer? Turns out insomnia is perfect for that! Your standards for “interesting content” drop significantly when you’ve been staring at the dark for an hour.

I’ve even used my wake time to pay bills—a task I absolutely HATE but somehow feels less painful when I’m already suffering anyway. It’s like, “Well, I’m already miserable from lack of sleep, might as well add financial stress to the mix!” Efficiency!

Do I have a magical solution to share with you? A silver bullet that will cure us all of our sleepless woes?

Absolutely not. I’m fresh out of miracles over here.

What I DO have is this: I try to get a decent total number of hours per night (even if they come in installments like some kind of sleep payment plan), and I hope—PRAY—that I get enough deep sleep and REM sleep to keep me from turning into a complete monster.

Because here’s the truth: sleep is important. Like, really important. Especially at this stage of life when our bodies are already putting us through enough chaos. Anything you can do to protect your sleep and actually GET some sleep is worth its weight in gold. Or melatonin. Or whatever you’re currently experimenting with.

If sleeping aids work for you and don’t leave you stumbling around like an extra from The Walking Dead the next day, then by all means, USE THEM. No judgment here. We’re all just trying to survive the night and make it to morning with some semblance of sanity intact.

And to all my fellow night-dwellers out there, tossing and turning at 3 a.m., staring at the ceiling and wondering if you’ll ever sleep normally again: you’re not alone. There’s an entire army of us zombie women out here, united in our sleeplessness and our desperate love for those magical six-hour nights when we wake up feeling like superheroes.

Now if you’ll excuse me, it’s 2 p.m., which means I should probably start fantasizing about putting on my pajamas.

*P.S. - If anyone has actually figured out how to sleep through the night during menopause, please share your secrets. Or your drugs. I’m not picky at this point.*