It was never that I could not fall asleep. I could. I was exhausted enough to fall asleep standing up in a meeting. The change, the one that took me a long time to name, was that sleep stopped holding me.
I would go down easily and then somewhere around two or three in the morning a line would appear in the night, and I would land on the wrong side of it. Sometimes I woke up drenched. Sometimes I was simply awake, eyes open, my brain suddenly online and running through everything and nothing at once. And even on the nights I stayed down, the sleep had lost its weight. I could log seven hours and wake up feeling like I had gotten four.
That was the part that scared me, because I have always been able to push. I built companies on it. I mothered on it. I got on planes and took the meeting and worked through the tired, and my body always caught up eventually. This was different. My body was not recovering overnight anymore, and no amount of willpower was going to argue it into doing so.
For a long time I treated my sleep like its own broken thing, separate from the rest of me. It was not. It was wired into everything else that was shifting. The simplest way I came to understand it is this. Progesterone is one of the hormones that helps the brain settle, and when it starts fluctuating and falling in perimenopause, that ability to settle can go with it. Estrogen sits in the picture too, including the way your body holds its temperature, which is why waking up soaked at two in the morning suddenly made a kind of sense it never had before. And underneath all of it, cortisol.
I thought I knew cortisol. I had spent years in startups. What I had not understood was how connected the whole system is. When you are waking through the night, running on stress, parenting, leading, and reaching for the coffee to power through one more day, you are not dealing with a sleep problem. You are living inside a feedback loop. The night feeds the day and the day feeds the night. Once I saw that, I stopped asking the wrong question. I stopped asking why can I not sleep. I started asking what is waking me up. Those are not the same question, and only one of them has an answer.
I want to be truthful about the road there, because I took the long way. I bought the pajamas, the moisture wicking ones that were supposed to solve the fact that I woke up looking like I had run a race in my sleep. I tried the supplements. I moved my bedtime earlier. I did all the things women do when we are convinced that if we could just optimize ourselves a little harder, the problem would dissolve. Some of it made bedtime nicer. None of it touched the reason I was waking up.
What actually moved the needle was the moment I stopped treating this as a personal failure of discipline and started treating it as what it was, a hormonal shift worth investigating. Understanding my labs. Looking at what my progesterone was doing, and my testosterone, and being willing to talk honestly about cortisol and the life I had built on top of it.
Eventually, working with a practitioner on a protocol that was mine, not a generic one I found at midnight. There is a great deal of money to be made convincing exhausted women that they simply need a better nighttime routine. Sometimes you do need the routine. And sometimes you need someone to actually investigate why you are awake.
If I could go back, I would ask my doctor one question years earlier. Could this be hormonal? Not what can I take to sleep. Not should I try melatonin. Not how do I manage my stress better. Just, why is this happening. For too long I carried my symptoms into the office one at a time, in separate hands. The night sweats over here. The sleep over there. The low libido, the irritability, the anxiety, the flat exhaustion, each one its own small appointment. What I needed was for someone to lay them all on the table at once and say, let us look at these together. And I needed to know I was allowed to ask for that, because no one had ever told me I was.
Here is the part I most want you to hear, because it is the part I got wrong the longest. Broken sleep is expensive, and not only in the way you think. Yes you are tired. But the real cost is that you begin living as a fraction of yourself. I was mothering four boys, running companies, making the decisions, keeping the household moving, trying to be a wife and a mother and an executive and a friend, all of it on a body that had not properly rested in months.
And this is the trap for a high functioning woman. I could still perform. No one looked at me and thought she is coming apart. I was still on the call. Still making dinner. Still hitting the deadline. So I assumed I was fine. I had spent an entire career learning to perform under pressure, and it was one of my greatest skills, right up until I realized I had quietly turned it against myself.
There is no award for being the woman who can run on the least sleep. Powering through was not a plan. It was a warning light I had reframed as a personality trait.
So I want to say something to the woman reading this at 3:07 in the morning, and I want to say it carefully, because the last thing I want is for you to close this thinking great, one more thing wrong with me. That is the opposite of the truth.
Your sleep is information. The waking is information. The temperature that climbs at two. The brain that switches on before your eyes do. The plain fact that you used to sleep straight through and suddenly cannot. None of it automatically means hormones, and none of it means every woman needs the same answer. It means the change has earned your curiosity instead of your shame. So track it. Write down when you wake. Notice where you are in your cycle, whether you had a drink, how heavy the week has been, what actually changed. Then carry that information into the room with you when you sit down with a practitioner. Your body is not handing you another problem to fix. She is handing you data. Read it before you agree to normalize it.
This is the whole reason I built The PHASE™. Not to give you another protocol to follow perfectly, and not to diagnose you from the pages of a workbook, and definitely not to add one more thing to the list of what you are supposed to optimize in your forties. I built it because I wished someone had handed me a way to connect the dots. Sleep. Cycle. Mood. Temperature. Energy. Libido. Stress. The things that look unrelated until you finally set them down next to each other. You do not need to walk into your next appointment holding the answer. You only need to walk in knowing your own body well enough to ask a better question.
So if you are reading this after another broken night, do not start by fixing yourself. Start by noticing yourself. Then we rebuild from there.
You are not falling apart. You are becoming MOMumental.
MOMumentally,
Erika Hanafin Austria
PS · If your sleep has been trying to tell you something, The PHASE™ Vol II Hormones is the companion I wish someone had handed me on one of those two in the morning nights. It lives in my Library whenever you are ready.
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Erika Hanafin Austria
Founder, MOMumental Moments® · Publisher, MOMumental Reinvention · Co-Founder, NeonID