Lara Briden - The Period Revolutionary
Leading the change to better periods and hormones
Hormonal sleep problems can be improved with magnesium, melatonin, and progesterone.
Sometimes a patient tells me she had only a salad for dinner. Or, even more puzzling: A green smoothie.
I could never do that. I’m tired at the end of the day. I’m hungry. I need a substantial dinner such as roast chicken with potatoes, vegetables, and butter. I honestly cannot imagine sitting down with just a cold green salad.
I don’t think I’m different from other women. Women get hungry. Women need food.
As my patients can tell you, I prescribe magnesium for almost every hormonal condition, including PCOS, insulin resistance, PMDD, migraines, and perimenopause.
Magnesium deficiency is common because modern soils are depleted, and your body dumps magnesium during stress. So, if you’re under stress, you probably need magnesium.
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Our stress response system—the HPA axis—is calibrated for intermittent, severe threats such as lions. Not for the incessant, trivial threats of modern life, such as difficult phone calls. We don’t want our hypothalamus-pituitary-adrenal axis to charge up and release cortisol every time we drive in heavy traffic, but it will do so.
If you’re like me, you’re trying to ease up on the HPA throttle. I practice yoga. I take magnesium. I switch off my computer in the evening like a good naturopath. I sternly instruct my HPA axis to power down, but I must say that it does not always listen. If I could only be more Buddha-like, then I would not need to coax my HPA axis with a herbal medicine like Rhodiola.
Eight hours of continuous sleep is a modern and artificial rest pattern. Some people are fortunate to have adapted to it fairly well, but for many of us, our bodies remember a different time.
Night used to be longer. Before electric light and Facebook, people went to bed earlier. Our ancestors didn’t need to condense sleep into an efficient eight hour bundle, so they enjoyed segmented sleep, or divided sleep.