Why You Wake Up at 2 AM After 40 and How to Sleep Better

Sleep changed for me during perimenopause. I used to fall asleep the minute my head hit the pillow. Then I started struggling to fall asleep and waking up in the middle of the night, even when I was exhausted. If you're experiencing this after 40, I want to share what helped me. In this solo episode of Live Like a Girl, I'm walking you through five steps to create a nighttime routine that supports better sleep. We're talking about estrogen, cortisol, blood sugar, and why your evening habits matter more than you might realize. I'll show you how I think about evening lighting, dinner, magnesium-rich foods, caffeine, scrolling, and calming your nervous system before bed. At the end, I'll give you three simple things to try tonight and a two-week plan to help you see what works for your body. IN THIS EPISODE Why women start waking up at 2 or 3 a.m. during perimenopause and menopauseThe connection between estrogen, cortisol, insulin, and sleepHow to set up the three hours before bedtimeFoods rich in magnesium and how Mindy uses them at dinnerWhat to know about magnesium drinks and supplementsWhy late dinners, caffeine, and phone scrolling disrupt sleepThree easy habits to start tonightRESOURCES MENTIONED FREE Magnesium smoothie recipes https://resetacademy.drmindypelz.com/magnesium-smoothie-recipes?utm_source=podcast&utm_medium=audio&utm_campaign=magnesium_smoothies_optinFresh Pressed Olive Oil https://www.getfreshmindy.comQualia Magnesium+ https://www.qualialife.com/shop/qualia-magnesium?rfsn=5237174.cd3714Free Nervous System Quiz https://resetacademy.drmindypelz.com/nervous-system-quizAge Like a Girl https://bit.ly/alagbookReset Academy https://resetacademy.drmindypelz.com/reset-academyGut health conversation with Dr. Rajsree Nambudripad https://www.drmindypelz.com/ep383For more resources related to today’s episode, visit the podcast episode page: drmindypelz.com/ep384/ Connect with Dr. Mindy: Join Reset Academy https://resetacademy.drmindypelz.com/reset-academy?utm_source=libsyn&utm_medium=podcast&utm_term=&utm_content=loc-description&utm_campaign=reset-academyWatch the episodes on YouTube https://www.youtube.com/@DrMindyPelz?sub_confirmation=1Follow Dr. Mindy on Instagram https://www.instagram.com/dr.mindypelz/Subscribe to Dr. Mindy’s newsletter https://www.drmindypelz.com/Disclaimer: This podcast is intended for educational and informational purposes only and is not a substitute for professional medical advice. Always consult a qualified healthcare professional before making changes to your diet, fasting routine, or lifestyle.

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:00Mindy Pelz?

  If you've spent years buying everything low-fat and measuring every drop of oil, I want you to think about what happens when you sit down to eat. Are you enjoying your food? Or are you still doing the math? I want you to feel comfortable bringing olive oil back to your plate. Farm-fresh, extra virgin olive oil is one of the foods I encourage women to enjoy, and enjoy lots of it. And tasting it is actually a great place to start. I don't know if you realize that there are actually olive oil sommeliers out there, because olive oil is so complex and has a vastly different taste profile depending

• 0:45Mindy Pelz?

  on where you are getting your olive oil from. Drizzle some over warm vegetables and notice a fresh, grassy flavor. Give yourself permission to put it over an avocado and you might notice that there's a little of a peppery taste. And every time you look at pairing olive oil with your meal, I actually really feel as if you are going to discover that olive oil has a very diverse taste, along with the fact it is one of the healthiest foods that you could eat. I like fresh-pressed olive oil. And to try it, you can just go to GetFreshMindy.com.

• 1:30Mindy Pelz?

  And they offer you three bottles for the price of two with 100% money-back guarantee. If you don't love it, request a refund without returning anything. That's how ethical this company is. So I'm excited to share this olive oil with you. I want you to fall in love with drizzling this over as many different combinations of food that you can find. So all you gotta do is go to GetFreshMindy.com and you can get your first olive oil experience like you have never had before.

• 2:11Mindy Pelz?

  Hey, Dr. Mindy here, and welcome to the Live Like a Girl podcast, where I bring you icons, disruptors, educators, scientists, and doctors that show you what can be possible when you love and celebrate the female body you are blessed to live in. Let's dive in.

• 2:38Mindy Pelz?

  So you're exhausted at 9:00 PM. You go to bed, you put your head on the pillow, and all of a sudden, you're wide awake. Put in the comments if that's you. Too many of us have suffered through that. Then you finally get to sleep and boom, 2:00, 3:00 in the morning, you wake up and you start running through your to-do list. There are two hormone imbalances that are driving this, and we are going to fix it on this video. Cortisol and insulin. And there was a 2024 review done out of Diabetes Care that looked at the impact of pushing your bedtime back by 90 minutes for six weeks.

• 3:19Mindy Pelz?

  What they found is when women got less sleep, they pushed it back 90 minutes, they didn't give them more on the other end, they became more insulin resistant. And the worst age group that it affected was our post-menopausal women. This is like a cruel joke. I totally get it, because I'm 57, post-menopausal. I have gone through my own sleep challenges. And I am telling you what I'm going to bring you on this video is going to fix it. Because research backs it. I've seen it work for me. I've seen it work for my Reset Academy members.

• 3:58Mindy Pelz?

  And there is nothing more frustrating than tossing and turning at 2:00 in the morning and then realizing, oh, this is affecting my weight loss results? This is affecting my brain clarity, my menopause symptoms? And then that vicious cycle starts all over again. I really want to help you with this. So let's dive in. And by the end of this video, you are going to have some real evidence-based tricks that you can do at night. And we're going to come up with a protocol together. Get your pen and paper. We're going to come up with a protocol of activities you can do at night so that you

• 4:39Mindy Pelz?

  hit that pillow and all of a sudden, you go straight to sleep and you stay asleep. That is what we are going to accomplish in one video. Are you ready? Here we go. Step one to getting a good night's sleep after 40 for women is we have to guard your nighttime sleep window. Now, what's interesting is why 40? Well, 40 is the age that estrogen starts to decline. I mean, really, she goes up and down and up and down. And this video still applies, and what I'm going to show you still applies for those of you who are on HRT.

• 5:18Mindy Pelz?

  Estrogen had an incredible impact on a part of the brain called the suprachiasmatic nucleus. It's just a fancy word. It is the timekeeper in your brain. And estrogen helped to make sure that that timekeeper understood what time of day it was and knew when to secrete melatonin and when to turn off melatonin. When estrogen goes down, the timekeeper is all mixed up. And so we need to use different cues to tell the timekeeper that we're ready to go to sleep.

• 5:56Mindy Pelz?

  So I totally understand that at 39, at 29, that you could just put your head on the pillow and go straight to sleep. I was that person. But at 49, 69, all of a sudden, that dramatically changes because of your sleep window. The hours leading up to sleep matter now more than ever. And what impacts, if you don't nail this sleep window, what will end up happening is it starts to affect your insulin sensitivity. And the more you affect that insulin sensitivity and you become, lead you down to insulin

• 6:37Mindy Pelz?

  resistance, not only are you going to notice more of the weight gain, but then it becomes this vicious cycle and will dramatically affect your sleep. So what changed in the study in the bodies the most from a lack of sleep was insulin and insulin sensitivity. So we've got to look at those three hours before you go to sleep as the magic hour, hours to be able to get you to sleep and stay asleep. So some things to consider. These are things you're going to write down. First, what is the light you are getting?

• 7:20Mindy Pelz?

  So if you don't have something telling the timekeeper that you need to make melatonin, you don't have estrogen, there is another way to signal to the timekeeper to make more melatonin, and that is light. One of the beautiful things about red light and our understanding of red light is we can look at something like the sunset. And when you look out your window at sunset and you see that red hue, if you can even just step outside so your eyes see the red light, what will end up happening is it sends a message to the timekeeper, hey, guess what?

• 8:01Mindy Pelz?

  It's getting dark now, and so you're going to need to start to make more melatonin. So within that first several hours before you go to bed, are you giving the timekeeper the light cue that it's, we're winding down now and melatonin production needs to kick in? That also means that you look at your exposure to blue light or LED light when you come in from looking at the sunset, that you are affecting how much LED light you're getting. Right now, I'm sitting under a lot of lights. They're all LED lights. And if it was right before bedtime, it would be challenging at 57 years old to be able

• 8:46Mindy Pelz?

  to get to bed, even if I went out and looked at the sunset. So I'm so excited about all these new bulbs that are appearing, and they're cheap. You don't have to buy a big, expensive red light system. You can get some bulbs online and change out your normal LED blue light for red light or even like a yellow light. So that when you start to move closer to bed, you are actually sending a signal to the brain through light that you are winding down. Second thing that you can look at in protecting your sleep window is I want you to think about how stimulated your brain gets.

• 9:27Mindy Pelz?

  So stimulation to the brain could actually come from something like a TV show. I know for me, I have to be very careful what I watch before I go to bed. If I watch anything too action-packed, then I can get overly stimulated and going to bed can be difficult. I also know that doing work before I go to bed can actually over-excite my brain and my brain doesn't realize that we are winding down. So we have a light message we are giving, and we have a stimulation message that we are giving. And those of you who have taken my nervous system questionnaire to see if you're stuck

• 10:07Mindy Pelz?

  in fight or flight affecting your sleep, you know that what ends up happening is that a system that needs to go, a nervous system that feels like it needs to run because it is under threat, will not put you into a slumber. So make sure that we're slowing down the stimulation. This, of course, also means your social media cues. Now, the third thing that you can look at before you go to bed, and this one's really simple, and it's going to sound, you're going to be like, what? This is so crazy and so dumb. But it works, and you're talking to somebody who had challenges sleeping for many years,

• 10:50Mindy Pelz?

  especially when I went into perimenopause. And that's how fast you move. So if you know, if you think about it, we move throughout the day in a sense of urgency. Can you shut that urgency off? Can you wash the dishes after dinner a little bit in a little slower pace? Can you walk a little slower? I love reading before I go to bed because that right? That movement of your eyes actually tells your body it's time to calm down. So we want to look at light. We want to look at movement and we want to look at brain stimulation. Step number two is we want to look at the meal we're eating before we go to bed.

• 11:34Mindy Pelz?

  And this one is really important because if we eat a meal that is either too heavy or is absent of certain nutrients like magnesium-rich foods. Sometimes we may actually be using our dinner as stimulation, not as a signal that it's time to wind down. So I want you to look at your dinner at having magnesium-rich foods. And here are some of the best. Pumpkin seeds is absolutely my favorite. And I sprinkled pumpkin seeds all over my salads for dinner. So add in some pumpkin seeds.

• 12:18Mindy Pelz?

  Almonds are great as a dessert. A lot of times I will have a bowl of almonds with some blueberries as my dessert as opposed to ice cream or something that's more sweet. So in my Reset Academy, recently, a woman was sharing that she likes to eat before she goes to bed. Well, okay, if that's and put in the comments, if that's you. What if we get her eating more magnesium-rich foods like? And I'm gonna list them here so you can write them down. Like pumpkin seeds, almonds, black beans for dinner, spinach, Swiss chard, quinoa, and avocado.

• 13:02Mindy Pelz?

  I mean, that alone is a meal right there that you put together as a treat for yourself for dinner. And then you have some almonds and blueberries as a snack afterwards. And maybe if you make a salad with the spinach, you throw some pumpkin seeds in there. Sounds like a recipe I need to make all of you. But think of your meal, your light, your conversations, your stimulation. All of that is going to affect if your body is going to slow itself down so it can go to sleep or if it's going to stay stuck in the fight or flight of the day. Super important.

• 13:42Mindy Pelz?

  And I get like, wow, it didn't, wasn't that hard when I was 35, but it is that hard. And you need to be that intentional after 40 as your hormones start to shift, specifically when estrogen changes. Third step that I want you to think about, which is some kind of warm drink before you go to bed. So this could be dark chocolate. Now, dark chocolate, let's unpack this because dark chocolate has a lot of magnesium, but it also has some caffeine. So some of you may not, if you're very sensitive to dark chocolate, you may need to do this

• 14:23Mindy Pelz?

  drink earlier, like maybe at five if you go to bed at 10. You may need to do it a little bit earlier than right before bed. So just beware of when you drink this drink. But something warm is a calming to the body. And you're gonna take that dark chocolate and add it to soy milk. Why soy milk? Because soy milk has more magnesium in it compared to any other milk. Now, when you go to use soy milk, make sure that you're reading the label and make sure that it doesn't have a lot of fillers in it. But that combination together in warmth, it's like the hot chocolate when you were

• 15:05Mindy Pelz?

  a little kid, again, is a signal. All of these hacks that I'm giving you are signals to tell the body, hey, we're going to sleep, we're going to sleep. So if you need a good nighttime recipe, I have a magnesium smoothie recipe you can use. Just I'll leave the link actually in the notes below. It's a free recipe that is really helpful for a lot of our Reset Academy members that they do it before they go to bed. And again, because it's rich in magnesium, it can really have a dramatic effect on putting you to sleep.

• 15:45Mindy Pelz?

  So we have our magnesium-rich dinner and we have our magnesium-rich smoothie or heat that smoothie up, make it warm. And that's going to start to move you into a more what we call theta state where the brain is trying to get itself into delta with brainwaves, which is what sleep is. One thing I really want to point out on magnesium is that there are a lot of things that will drain a woman's body of magnesium. Menopause alone drains a woman's body of magnesium. What ends up happening is magnesium is just used in a different way.

• 16:27Mindy Pelz?

  And so you don't have as much magnesium available to you in your body as your hormones start to go down. Magnesium stays more in the bones. It's not necessarily out in circulating blood. So just aging alone can reduce magnesium. We also know ultra-processed foods, surprise, surprise, also reduces magnesium. The refined flours, the refined sugars, the refined grains, those actually can really affect your sleep at night, no matter when you have them. They will deplete you of magnesium. And magnesium is a, is very much a parasympathetic stimulator.

• 17:11Mindy Pelz?

  It stimulates that part of the nervous system that calms you. So if we're doing the ultra-processed foods during the day and we combine that with the fact that our hormones are changing, that is going to end up being a bigger insult to your body than if you didn't have the ultra-processed foods. We also know that when we end up in these huge blood sugar spikes up and down, you know, the ones that, that have you feeling great for a moment and then giving you a crash, that lead to insulin resistance, that all of a sudden your kidneys will start to excrete more magnesium.

• 17:52Mindy Pelz?

  There's a lot going on that tells me, let's add magnesium back into the picture. Of course, we also know that drinking alcohol, gut issues, you know, alcohol is hard on sleep because it raises your core temperature. And when your core temperature goes up, that will dramatically affect and kick you out of sleep. But we also know people with leaky gut situations, with SIBO, with any kind of gut dysbiosis, many of you have been challenged with that. You've been diagnosed with that. And that too is affecting your sleep. If you have a gut challenge, I'll leave a link here below.

• 18:36Mindy Pelz?

  The podcast interview I did with a gut expert who actually walks through how we start to repair our gut. It's a really good interview. And then those of you who are on long-term acid blockers, that can really affect your magnesium load as well. How many of you felt your brain go offline the minute you hit your 40s? When my brain started to go offline in my early 40s, I was crazy scared. I went from being the woman who could hold everything together to not being able to get through a full workday. The positive thinking that had always been my superpower, it just disappeared. Worst-case scenarios replaced it. Anxiety I didn't recognize, aversion of myself I didn't sign up for.

• 19:20Mindy Pelz?

  I thought something was deeply wrong with me. And then I went looking for answers. What I found didn't just help me, it changed the entire way I understand what it means to be a woman moving through this season of life. Your brain is not broken. It's remodeling. That's why I wrote Age Like a Girl to really lay that out for all of you. It's part science, it's part my own story, the messy, humbling, ultimately beautiful story of a woman who had to fall apart a little before she could figure out who she actually was. If you're in that right now, I want you to know you are not alone. And this is not the end.

• 20:05Mindy Pelz?

  It might just be the beginning of the most powerful chapter of your life. So Age Like a Girl, it's available now at drmindypelz.com/books. And please know, I am always cheering you on. Okay, step number four. Have you made it this far in the video? Congrats. Follow me, keep, keep going with me here because I've overcome my sleep challenges and it's like the greatest gift anybody ever gave me. So I want that for you. Sometimes you can listen to a video like this and you listen to all those steps and you're like, I'm not gonna do a magnesium smoothie drink. I'm not gonna, this is getting so exhausting now. I've got to focus on some magnesium meal and I gotta look out for my light.

• 20:50Mindy Pelz?

  And you're, you're struggling with the suggestions I've made so far. This is sometimes where we just take a magnesium supplement. But we need to take the right type of magnesium. And the right type of magnesium is magnesium bisglycinate. And the kind that I personally like, the brand I use every night is Qualia's Magnesium. It is a magnesium complex. I'll leave the link below in the notes with discount codes so you can test it for yourself. The research shows that 250 milligrams of this type of magnesium, when looked at over

• 21:34Mindy Pelz?

  a four-week period in 155 different adults, showed that insomnia scores fell by 28% in the magnesium group compared to 18% in the placebo group. Magnesium supplementation is powerful. I don't go a night without it. I often find I need to put it two to three hours before I go to bed. It just, it just so it's like a signal to my body, hey, we're starting to go to sleep. And I definitely have played with the different types of magnesium and for sure, Qualia is my favorite. Step number five. This is a retraining process.

• 22:19Mindy Pelz?

  So I want you to think about this in terms of what you do in the morning. Our sleep-wake cycles are very ritualistic. So step number five is we got these recommendations I'm making. We've got to give it two weeks. You've got to give it time. Otherwise, it's not like you can do it for one or two nights and be like, "Ah, that didn't work." So let's go back to your morning. What do we know about your morning? I know for me, I have a ritual. I like to get up slowly with my cup of coffee. I do, I meditate. I do some Wim Hof breathing before I ever turn on my phone.

• 23:01Mindy Pelz?

  If you were to change that morning ritual for me, it would take me a couple of weeks to adapt to it, especially if you took the coffee away. It would take me some time to adapt. It's the same thing at night. Why don't we have a nighttime ritual? Especially for women going through menopause. Like you, your timekeeper is all confused. So what would happen if we had a regular nighttime ritual that we honored as deeply as our morning ritual? That, I think, is one of the most important things I can ever tell you about sleep, is it's the consistency of what you do with these tricks I'm giving you

• 23:43Mindy Pelz?

  that will really make a great difference. So let's sort of map out what that might look like with, starting in the afternoon until you go to bed. Well, one, let's make sure we're not bleeding our caffeine intake into the afternoon. So pick your time that you stop caffeine because that's a stimulant. Dinner. We already talked about let's put our meal together, magnesium-type foods. Then 45 minutes before we go to bed, let's have our magnesium-rich drink. Let's make sure that we hit like an hour ahead of bed, that the lights are going down and that we need to work on the conversations calming down.

• 24:28Mindy Pelz?

  Maybe you read a book. And we do that over and over again till we get to a point. Give it two weeks. Rate your sleep. So tonight, you can start to apply some of these tricks. I want you to rate your sleep. 10 being the worst sleep you ever had and 0 being the best. Maybe then over time, or whatever scale you want to use, over time, you will start to see that that number moves. Sleep is very elusive and sometimes, you know, it's like hard to tell how long you were tossing and turning at 2:00 in the morning. So let's create some kind of measurement. If you have a biometric wearable, you can use that as your measurement.

• 25:13Mindy Pelz?

  Mistakes women make a lot is that after 40 specifically, that for some reason, they think they just, we got to live with it. I can tell you, I've been so committed to my sleep that I am so proud that at 57, I feel like I'm sleeping as well right now as I did at 27 because I've really trained myself and put a lot of effort into doing tricks like the ones I gave you here. The second mistake that a lot of women make is unknowingly eating a late dinner. This is probably one of the biggest ones that I've seen and I've experienced for myself. It's really hard to eat a big dinner and then go straight to sleep. The body is confused.

• 25:56Mindy Pelz?

  So let's create a little space between dinner and the time you go to bed. The other mistake many people are making is scrolling on their phone. Keep in mind, I talked about how cortisol can kick in here, especially at 2:00 in the morning. Well, keep in mind, when you are scrolling and going up and down like that, that is actually agitating to the brain and that actually turns on the cortisol system. And it can make going to sleep harder and it can make you kicking in and waking up at 2:00 a.m. more difficult. As opposed to reading a book where you're going left to right, back and forth,

• 26:39Mindy Pelz?

  that actually calms the nervous system. It brings cortisol down. So how your eye movement is at night really makes a difference. So let's get off the scrolling. And then let's not take the wrong magnesium. So let's get the right magnesium source. Let's make sure it's 250 grams and make sure you're doing it on a regular basis. If you really have trouble falling asleep, take that magnesium a lot earlier. Now, why does this all hit women harder after 40? A piece of it is because estrogen was in control and she told the brain when it was time to go to sleep.

• 27:24Mindy Pelz?

  So we already addressed that. But we also know that magnesium depletion is real for women after 40. And so I think this is a big part of just the overall nervous system is that we haven't given enough oxygen to the conversation around magnesium and how important it is for women. One trick outside of the supplement is an Epsom salt bath where, because you're getting magnesium in through the skin. So some of you might find that you need the magnesium drink. You might need the magnesium supplement and you might need the magnesium bath.

• 28:06Mindy Pelz?

  So after 40, magnesium depletion is real for most women. Here are three things I want you to think about doing right now, or this, tonight. Tonight, here, I'm just going to give you three because I just gave you a lot and I don't want to overwhelm you. You can go back and re-watch this video and take notes and you'll see there's a whole sleep protocol I gave you. These are the three I want you to do tonight to get in the exercise of this sleep training. Dim the lights two hours before bed and pick a set bedtime that you can go to bed at. Tonight, pumpkin seeds and almonds on your dinner plate.

• 28:49Mindy Pelz?

  And the third thing is we're going to move caffeine a lot earlier and coffee a lot earlier so we're not getting that overstimulation. These are easy, easy things you can apply tonight and you will see an immediate result. So let me know if you're going to dedicate yourself to this sleep training experience that I mapped out here. If you've had great success with any of these hacks that I gave you, put it in the comments so we can all learn from your experience. And if you're completely overwhelmed and you don't know what to do, come join me in my academy where we can give you more community support. Most importantly, please don't give up on yourself

• 29:33Mindy Pelz?

  because it's just a different sleep game after 40 for women. And we just, nobody gave us the manual. So now you have some protocols that you can put into action right away. As always, I hope that helps.