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Menopause hot flashes at night usually start for women at age 51. Ugh. It’s one of those particularly annoying parts of life, but you are most certainly not facing it on your own!
There are a lot of hormone-based medications for which you need a prescription, and there are also a lot of alternatives out there which can be used in isolation or in conjunction with prescriptions to finally get you a decent night’s sleep.
My best experiences have come from:
- Eight Sleep Pod
- Bed Jet
- Cooling Sheets
- Cognitive Behavior Therapy (for insomnia in particular)
- Mindfulness Meditation
Note: Most of these recommendations, just like prescription medications and other lifestyle changes, will not get rid of your hot flashes entirely but instead will help reduce the severity and the frequency with which they occur. And honestly, anyone who’s had hot flashes knows that even getting rid of a few episodes per day or reducing how terrible they are can make a world of difference.
Eight Sleep Pod
You’ll probably read everywhere that one of the most important things you can do to control menopause hot flashes at night is to control the environment, keeping your bed and your bedroom cool.
I started doing that. The problem is, even though I have my thermostat set to 62° at night, depending on the ambient temperature in the house and outside it can take several hours for everything to drop down to that temperature. Which means I’ve already tried to go to bed and dealt with the sticky sweaty hot flashes.
I went hunting for a bed that would help reduce those hot flashes, mostly because I got tired of waking up in a sweat and running out of pajamas/sheets. That’s when I found the Eight Sleep Pod.
This is an entire system, but you can purchase some of the parts individually if you want.
There are a ton of different “cooling” mattresses and sheets out there but this uses legitimate hydrothermal technology, not just a type of fabric that allows for good airflow. Also, and most importantly for myself, I didn’t have to buy a new mattress in order to use it. Don’t get me wrong, it’s still an investment, but this system basically revolutionised my nights.
With the Eight Sleep Pod, you have the base unit that goes on top of your mattress as well as the hydrothermal blanket that connects to the base. This blanket is legit.
I’ve never used a blanket like it in my life.
It has tiny tubes (don’t worry you won’t feel them or see them or hear them) that run through the blanket and these tubes fill with water which is constantly adjusted through the connected base unit to whatever temperature you have set. During my research I noticed people were concerned about some of the older models of the pod leaking, but I haven’t seen anyone (myself included) having any issue like this with any of the newer models. Rest assured you will stay dry all night long!
The Eight Sleep Pod doesn’t just adjust to a single temperature and keep it there; it makes adjustments based on where you are in your sleep cycle and what the ambient temperature is in the room. This means that as soon as a hot flash happens, the Eight Sleep Pod will automatically adjust to help cool you down in (wait for it) a flash!
#winning
Bed Jet
Bed Jet is a similar setup to Eight Sleep, but without all the advanced technology. It uses a unit that sits at the foot of your bed, much like the base for the Eight Sleep. It also helps to naturally wick sweat and keep your temperature down.
Where Eight Sleep actually uses hydrothermal technology to actively change the temperature in your blanket and your bed system, Bed Jet uses air-based cooling or heating, by pulling cool air from the floor level using its base unit and blowing it under your sheets to move any trapped sweat and provide a cooling effect.
This is pretty cool, no pun intended, but the biggest limitation I had when I tried it was that the cooling mechanism didn’t actually create any cold air but rather pulled the cold air from my house. So if I still had relatively warm temperatures, even at the ground level of my bed, the cooling wasn’t all that great.
Eight Sleep, by comparison, makes its own temperatures by changing the temperature of the water that flows through the tubes of the blanket. If you live in a super cool place though or you have built in floor AC (is that a thing? We have built in heaters in the floor so why not be a thing?), this might work for you.
Cooling Sheets
As I said before, cooling sheets are important. You can buy sheets directly from Eight Sleep to work in tandem with the Pod, but. if you don’t want their sheet sets, you can simply look for the type of material that you find most comfortable and breathable like eucalyptus, bamboo, or organic cotton.
Some of my favorites include:
- Theraluxe by TempurPedic
- Eucalypso Classic Sheet Set
- Cozy Earth Bamboo Sheet Set
- Brooklinen Cooling Cotton Percale
These all come highly recommended for breathability and temperature regulation– just remember that the temperature regulation in question is basically just that breathability, it’s not any type of advanced technology like the hydrothermal blanket you get with Eight Sleep.
Cognitive Behavioral Therapy
This is recommended by the North American Menopause Society and many others as a way to help with insomnia and stress.
I love cognitive behavioral therapy for all manner of things but I was surprised when I realized how much it helped with menopause hot flashes at night.
The UK has the Every Mind Matters program, which is the government funded public service to help increase awareness and management of mental health. They have a lot of great resources that involve self-help CBT techniques and some of my favorites were:
- Worry Time
This is where you set aside a specific amount of time each day, maybe 15 minutes after your lunch break or something, to face your worries. When I first started getting hot flashes and was overwhelmed with that anxiety about when and where they might happen next, this was a very useful tool. Every time I started to panic over when a hot flash might happen, I reminded myself that I didn’t have time to deal with it right now but I would face that fear during my worry time.
- Looking at the Bigger Picture
This is a great way to step out of your mind when you’re focused on little details. Because my menopause hot flashes at night were so severe for several months, as soon as the clock hit 8:00 p.m., I started to deal with a lot of anxiety, worrying about what I was eating, what I was drinking, what I had already consumed that day, when I drink my last cup of coffee, whether the temperature in the house was too high for me to sleep comfortably, and so on. This helped me to consider what advice I would give a close friend or family member who was going through the same thing, and then I would take that same advice and apply it to myself.
Note: There are dozens of different CBT techniques for insomnia, anxiety, and menopause hot flashes. You can find these online or with a therapist, you aren’t limited to the ones that I prefer.
Mindfulness Meditation
Mindfulness meditation can include things like relaxation techniques, where you clench all of your muscle groups and then release them to draw awareness, or use breathing exercises. It might even be a guided meditation. Whatever the form, the purpose is to help you shift your focus, focusing your awareness on the present moment in order to reduce tension you might be holding or turn away from the anxiety associated with your hot flashes.
So let me start by saying mindfulness meditation might seem very frustrating especially when you first start. After all, no one wants to sit with an uncomfortable feeling, especially things like hot flashes, sweating, or freezing.
However, now that I’ve practiced mindfulness meditation for several years, I’ve come to appreciate how effective it actually is even if it doesn’t feel like it in the moment. In fact, I’ve never walked away from even a couple of minutes of mindfulness meditation thinking, “Wow, what a waste.”
I always feel better after, helping to improve my focus and change my relationship with the things that are happening in my body. It won’t change my actual hot flashes but it certainly changes how I respond to them and how much I focus on them, both of which can diminish how much of my present thought or attention is spent feeling sorry for myself or feeling frustrated.
Summing Up
If you are one of the millions of women struggling with menopause hot flashes at night, you already know that controlling the temperature in your room is important. But now you know that there are many more options out there for you too. Personally, I found the most relief by controlling the temperature in my bed itself with the Eight Sleep Pod. You can also help control your relationship to that discomfort and your focus in the moment with cognitive behavioral therapy and mindfulness meditation.