The Week Before Your Period
On why sleep gets harder, and why it isn't you
You're tired. Genuinely, unmistakably tired. And it's two in the morning and you're wide awake, warm, turning the pillow over for the third time and doing the arithmetic of how many hours are left.
Then your period arrives a few days later and you think: oh. That was that.
Most of us have had some version of this conversation with ourselves, usually at an unsociable hour and usually while quietly wondering what we're doing wrong. It's worth saying early, then, that the answer is generally nothing. Here's what we know.
Your body is running warmer than it was two weeks ago. After ovulation, in what's called the luteal phase, progesterone rises; and progesterone raises core body temperature by somewhere in the region of 0.3 to 0.7°C. It sounds like a rounding error. It isn't, because falling asleep depends on the body losing heat rather than holding it. We drift off as our temperature comes down, and in the luteal phase it starts from a higher point. Research suggests the body's ability to release that heat is also dampened during the first hours of sleep. So for roughly two weeks of every month, we're asking the body to do something it has been made temporarily less able to do.
Nothing has gone wrong. It's simply harder work than it was a fortnight ago.
Then, a few days before bleeding, everything drops. Progesterone has a gently sedative quality, and in the late luteal phase both progesterone and estrogen fall away rather sharply. That's the window where sleep tends to come apart. Falling asleep is often fine. Staying asleep is the part that goes. A systematic review of thirty-five studies found poorer sleep quality, shorter nights and more daytime tiredness reported in exactly these days; one of the more consistent findings in women's sleep research, and one of the least discussed anywhere outside it.
And none of it is universal. This is the part worth saying out loud, because it's where the comparing starts. Researchers looking at how women's sleep tracks the cycle found three quite different patterns: some women notice no relationship at all, some find sleep hardest around ovulation, and some struggle in the days before their period. All three are entirely normal. If your sleep barely shifts across the month, nothing is missing. If it shifts a great deal, nothing is broken.
Since so much of the difficulty is about heat, most of what helps is about heat too. Which is oddly reassuring, because heat is one of the few things in this situation we can actually adjust. A cooler room than usual. Lighter bedding for those ten days. A warm shower or bath an hour or so before bed, which sounds like the opposite of the point until you know that the warmth draws blood to the surface of the skin and the core temperature drops afterwards, exactly the signal the body is waiting for. And, if it suits you, going to bed a little earlier during that week, on the quiet understanding that the back half of the night may be less reliable than usual.
When it's the mind that won't settle rather than the body, Sensate is a soft place to land. It rests on your chest, and the infrasonic vibration works on the vagus nerve to ease you out of alert mode. Ten minutes, lying down, nothing required of you.
Mostly, though, what helps is expecting it. Knowing that this particular week asks more of you, and arranging things a little more gently around it, changes what the two a.m. waking means. It stops being evidence of something and becomes what it actually is; a phase, doing what phases do, on its way through.
Perimenopause and menopause bring their own version of all this. We'll come back to it.
If you'd like somewhere to practise landing — join us for An Evening to Wind Down with Anouk Maas: yin yoga, breathwork and meditation, closing with aromatherapy and a bedside read to take home.
Where this comes from
- Changes in sleeping energy metabolism and thermoregulation during the menstrual cycle — NIH: ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC6981303
- Nocturnal polysomnographic sleep across the menstrual cycle — Sleep Medicine: sciencedirect.com
- Characteristics of Sleep Disorders in Women — Psychiatric Times: psychiatrictimes.com
- The Menstrual Cycle and Sleep (incl. Van Reen & Kiesner, 2016) — The Better Sleep Clinic: thebettersleepclinic.com
General information, not medical advice. If sleep is a persistent struggle, or premenstrual symptoms are affecting your daily life, a conversation with your doctor is worth having.
