A Woman's Guide to Sleep: Guaranteed Solutions for a Good Night's Rest

Unique Solutions for a Woman’s Unique Sleep Problems

“Women are probably the most sleep-deprived creatures on earth,” says Dr. Joyce Walsleben, director of the Sleep Disorders Center at the NYU School of Medicine.

Fluctuating hormones—whether from PMS, pregnancy, perimenopause, or menopause—can wreak havoc on your sleep. If you’re a new mom, you could lose seven hundred hours of sleep in your baby’s first year! As you get older, your sleep schedule can slip off track. Depression and chronic pain can erode your sleep. What you eat—or don’t eat, if you’re dieting—can sabotage your nights, and then there’s the pressure of juggling work, home, and parenting.

Women’s unique sleep problems require unique solutions. The authors explain how to combat restless nights with the right sleep-promoting foods, supplements, herbs, exercise, stress reducers, and biorhythm adjustments, as well as with prescription, over-the-counter, and alternative treatments. You’ll learn how to avoid the sleep robbers hidden in many common foods and medications. You’ll also receive valuable tips on how to get a good night’s sleep when a tossing and turning partner or wakeful child is the problem. A comprehensive resource section will guide you to support groups, websites, and sleep clinics. With this groundbreaking guide tailored to your unique needs, you won’t ever have to drag yourself through another exhausted day again.

Feeling drowsy? "Women are probably the most sleep-deprived creatures on earth," writes Joyce Walsleben, director of the Sleep Disorders Center at New York University School of Medicine and the 1998 spokesperson for the National Sleep Foundation's Survey on Women and Sleep. Hormonal surges--pregnancy, PMS, perimenopause--disrupt our sleep, as do the combined demands of career and children. (A new mother may lose up to 700 hours of sleep before her baby's first birthday!) Add stress, bladder urgency, depression, pain, and a variety of other interferences, and it's a wonder we sleep at all.

Walsleben covers why and how we sleep, what's keeping us awake, aging and how it affects stages of sleep, and physical and emotional conditions that can interfere with getting enough sleep. She helps us understand what is disrupting our own sleep, with advice from simple lifestyle changes to herbs, supplements, drugs, and foods. And she provides tons of tips, such as these:

• If you have a glow-in-the-dark clock, turn it around so you won't see it when you wake up at night. We all wake up several times during the night, and watching the clock will reinforce the "awake feeling" and make it more difficult to get back to sleep.
  
• Avoid caffeine--including coffee, tea, soft drinks, and chocolate--and stimulating medications from afternoon on. It takes 3 to 7 hours to rid your system of caffeine completely.
  
• If you have a new baby, nap when your baby sleeps. Aim for a 30-minute nap in the early afternoon. A longer nap will make you sleep more deeply and awake feeling groggy and grumpy.
  
• If nighttime sex leaves you wide awake (while your partner sleeps like a baby beside you), try scheduling romance early in the evening, or delay it until early in the morning.
  

Whatever the reasons for your sleep deprivation, you'll find explanations and solutions in this book. You'll even learn a dozen ways to stop your partner from snoring! --Joan Price