Welcome to the 3am club
Three o’clock. Not 2.40, not 3.20. Three. Wide awake, duvet off, duvet on, duvet off, brain already doing the accounts, the emails, that thing I said in 2009. If you’ve just found this at 3am on your phone, hello. Pull up a chair. Mind the cat. There are a lot of us.
I should tell you something first, because it explains how badly I was ambushed. From my late teens until I was 45 I didn’t have a period. Not one. I was on the contraceptive injection, every three months, for my whole adult life. In the part of the world I live in, getting contraception is harder than it should be, and every three months I’d have the same argument to get it. Same chemist, same face, same sigh. I got very tired of that argument. Then the injection was pulled from the market, and the decision was made for me. Thanks for that.
So I came off it at 45 and walked straight into perimenopause. No periods to track, no hormones I’d ever had to think about, no practice at the moods. Most women get thirty years to learn how their body does this. I got about a fortnight. It was like being handed the keys to a car I’d never driven, at night, in the rain, by someone already walking away.
My family had a name for the version of me that came downstairs after a night like that, and it wasn’t flattering.
Here’s what I’ve learned since, and I’m not a doctor, so take it as one woman’s notes. As our hormones start to wobble, sleep gets lighter and the body’s stress signal seems to fire earlier and louder. Add a hot flush and a bladder with opinions, and three o’clock becomes a standing appointment. It’s common. It’s not just you. And it isn’t nothing, because a month of it will make a hot mess of anybody.
As you’ll know if you’ve read the About page, I’m a big fan of the Golden Girls at 3am. I’ve watched them more times than I could tell you, and they always got a laugh out of me, even on the nights when nothing else did. That’s not nothing either. Find your Golden Girls. Whatever gets a laugh out of you at 3am is doing you more good than lying there counting the hours till the alarm.
What actually helped me sleep, though, wasn’t a pillow spray. It was writing it down. Every day, four taps: how warm, how I slept, my mood, how clear my head was. After a couple of weeks a pattern showed up that I would never have believed if someone had just told me. On the nights I’d had a coffee after dinner and a sweet treat on the sofa, I woke at three. On the nights I hadn’t, I mostly didn’t. So I swapped them. Mint tea, a corn cracker with a smidge of peanut butter, a few strawberries. I know. I’ve had more exciting nights. But I slept, and I hadn’t slept in months, so the corn cracker can have this one.
Your trigger might not be mine. That’s the point. Yours might be the glass of wine, the late dinner, the spicy one, or nothing to do with food at all. You won’t know until you see your own days laid out side by side. Guessing doesn’t work at 3am. I’ve tried. Facts do.
Three things to try this week, if you’re in the club:
Write down what you ate and drank after 6pm, and what time you woke. Two weeks. That’s all. No judging the biscuits, just the noting of them.
Go to bed slightly cooler than you’d like. A hot room and a hot flush are a terrible double act.
When you do wake, don’t lie there fighting it. Get up, dim light, boring book or a Golden Girl, back when you’re sleepy. Fighting it wakes you up more, and you’ll only end up reordering the kitchen.
And if it’s more than the odd night, take your notes to your doctor. Walking in with two weeks of facts is a different conversation from “I don’t sleep well”. I know, because I’ve had both, and only one of them got me anywhere.
You’re not losing it. You’re in the 3am club. Membership was never optional, but at least now there’s a room with the lights on, and somebody’s put the kettle on.
Exhibit A. The culprits.
Emma