No Shrinking Violets Podcast for Women
No Shrinking Violets is all about what it truly means for women to take up their space in the world – mind, body and spirit. Mary Rothwell, licensed therapist and certified integrative mental health practitioner, has seen women “stay small” and fit into the space in life that they have been conditioned to believe they deserve. Drawing on 35 years in the mental health field and from her perspective as a woman who was often told to "stay in your lane," Mary discusses how early experiences, society and sometimes our own limiting beliefs can convince us that living inside guardrails is the best -- or only -- option. She'll explore how to recognize our unique essential nature and how to use that to empower a new narrative.Through topics that span psychology, friendships, nature and even gut-brain health, Mary creates a space that is inspiring and authentic - where she celebrates the intuition and power of women who want to chart their own course and program their own GPS.
Mary's topics will include sleep and supplements and nutrition and how to live like a plant. (Yes, you read that right - the example of plants is often the most insightful path to knowing what we truly need to feel fulfilled). She’ll talk about setting boundaries, communicating, and relationships, and explore mental health and wellness: trauma and resilience, how our food impacts our mood and the power of simple daily habits. And so much more!
As a gardener, Mary knows that violets have been misjudged for centuries and are actually one of the most resilient and ecologically important plants in her native garden. Like violets, women are often underestimated, and they can even mistake their unique gifts for weaknesses. Join Mary to explore all the ways the vibrant and strong violet is an example for finding fulfillment in our own lives.
No Shrinking Violets Podcast for Women
Secrets to Better Sleep: Hormones, Food, Light and Movement
Thoughts or comments? Send us a text!
Sleep struggles aren't a life sentence, especially during hormonal transitions like perimenopause and menopause. Understanding the connection between hormones, diet, movement, and light exposure provides a framework for improving sleep quality naturally without relying solely on supplements or medications.
• Our "hormonal orchestra" includes sleep hormones, stress hormones, and hunger hormones that all work together
• Deep sleep in the first part of the night is crucial for brain health and cleansing
• Waking up during the night is natural and not necessarily problematic if you can return to sleep
• Sugar and alcohol consumption directly impact sleep quality and hormonal balance
• Caffeine has a five-hour half-life, meaning noon coffee affects you at 10pm
• Light exposure helps regulate your circadian rhythm—morning sunlight and evening darkness signal your brain when to sleep
• Movement throughout the day helps regulate cortisol and improve sleep quality
• Creating a wind-down routine with dim lights and relaxing activities prepares your body for rest
• Perimenopause disrupts progesterone first, which affects anxiety levels and sleep quality
Sign up for my FREE sleep workshop for women in midlife HERE.
Check out my virtual sleep program, RESTored, for women in perimenopause through post-menopause. It is over 4 hours of content and 16 resources that you get LIFETIME ACCESS to. It could literally change your life like it changed mine.
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Hi, welcome to a mini episode of no Shrinking Violets. This may go a little beyond mini, because once I start talking about this topic I can kind of go on and on, but basically my mini topics are just something that was on my mind. I might have seen an article or someone talked to me about this topic and I decided to make it a mini episode. I'm going to talk to you about sleep today. So I am a sleep coach that's one of the hats that I wear and I used to work with college students who really, overall, didn't sleep. They had terrible habits. They would stay up on weekends till God knows what time and often, unfortunately, in our college system, instructors and professors will make papers or big projects due at 11.59 pm. So if you're a human, you know that what that means is you're going to work up to the last minute. Often I used to do that in college. I have now trained myself much better. All it took was running out of printer ink at the last minute back in the day when you actually had to turn in a hard copy, but I sort of cut my therapy teeth. College students Now they were a little bit easier to kind of get on track believe it or not if they were willing to make the changes.
Speaker 1:As we get older and especially I'm going to talk about women in perimenopause through menopause it is a lot more difficult. So I want to give you a framework to think about when you think about your sleep. If you're struggling with sleep, there is help. I want to make that very clear. You don't have to keep struggling. Sleep is so, so essential and the more we learn, the more I see every week, or multiple times a week, that it is one of the most important things for our health. So I don't want that to scare you if you really have trouble sleeping. But let's look at a couple frameworks that you can sort of use to put on your sleep situation to see what direction you might need to go. So if you're a woman in midlife and your sleep issues kind of crept up on you which is what happened with me your hormones are all over the place, and especially if you're in perimenopause I won't go into all the shifts If you've heard other mini episodes or even full episodes with guests you know, when we start on the path into menopause and we're in perimenopause, progesterone is the first thing to drop off, and that has a lot to do with how we manage anxiety and how we sleep.
Speaker 1:That is a cascade effect because once that starts, then our other sex hormones respond, but our hormonal orchestra is all of our hormones. So melatonin is a hormone, cortisol is a hormone, ghrelin is a hormone, leptin is a hormone, and those last two have to do with when we're hungry and when we feel that we've had enough to eat. So if you've ever heard that poor sleep leads to weight gain, it's true. I mean the first time I was like what Is that not adding insult to injury? But we need to get hormones, like sort of calm down, and that can feel overwhelming.
Speaker 1:So let me tell you a few things about sleep. So it's okay if you wake up initially, if you wake up a lot and you can go back to sleep. Don't sweat it, think about nature. So I say this all the time we are designed to sleep. The most important stages of sleep and every stage is important, don't get me wrong but that deep sleep we have our deepest sleep in the beginning of the night. Those deep stages are what cleanse our brain. It's very important for the health of our brain to have that deep sleep in the beginning of the night. If you can lock that down and get you know, if you get one and a half hours before you wake up, you've completed probably a full sleep cycle of that deep sleep. I want you to be educated, but also not worry If you can get six hours of pretty restful sleep. We want to work on more, but that's a good start. So, if you think about nature and how we evolved, we no longer have to deal with things like sleeping outside or being exposed to threats in our environment. Some of us still have that, depending where we live, but I'm talking when we didn't have shelter or we had shelter. That was basically very rudimentary back, you know, thousands of years ago. So we are made to get that rest, the deep sleep being in the beginning of the night and the most important. If we don't get to the REM sleep, which is our dream sleep, that is still very important. But focus first on let's get some of that deep sleep under our belts each night, some of that deep sleep under our belts each night.
Speaker 1:The other thing that's important to know with the hormones is there are things we can do to start to balance them and calm them down. It feels out of control sometimes when you're in perimenopause, because not only do you start to feel emotionally all over the place, and there is a reason for that. So if you've had issues with your period, like PMS, if you would feel emotional anyway or much more irritable or have more anxiety. Hormones also connect to neurotransmitters. We are a whole being, so when those hormones change throughout our typical cycle, it can make us feel as though we can't manage cravings. Now remember what I said about hormones, how there are hormones specifically for our hunger and our satiety. So all of those things connected. You are not broken, but there are things that you can do to work with what's happening. Our body is basically, when we're going into this midlife change, our body is now transitioning out of being able to grow humans. So, as that happens, grow humans. So as that happens, our body is trying to get those, the remaining eggs that we have. It's trying to get them out into the system. So that is why there is so much change with our hormones, because some hormones are trying to get that to happen. So it's pushing more estrogen out, but at the time when the progesterone is lower. So things that seem like they're not related can help.
Speaker 1:Look at your diet, build in healthy proteins every meal. Really, look at your labels and look at the sugar. So if you look at a label and you see not the carbs, but if you look at sugars, I want you to divide that by four. So if it says 32 grams of sugar and you divide that by four and I'm doing that quick, in my head I think that's eight. That means it's eight packets of sugar. And what is helpful for me is to think about it in that way, because then I'm knowing, would I tear open eight packs of sugar and put that into coffee or whatever you're having? Now there's different kinds of sugar. So that's where the label comes in, because if you're talking corn syrup or white sugar, even cane sugar, I think we think, oh, that sounds natural. We want to think about how it metabolizes.
Speaker 1:So sugars that are just straight corn syrup or white table sugar, they're pulling nutrients from our cells to digest because they have no nutrition in them. So that can make us feel really crappy. Now I'm not saying don't have the cupcake, but I want you to just be educated so that you don't feel like all of this is out of control. Why am I talking about sugar when I said I was going to talk about sleep, because it's all connected. So if you have let's say you like your wine in the evening, guess what alcohol is? It's sugars. So that is why you can wake up in the middle of the night when you drink too close to bedtime. If you have coffee after 11 am or 12 noon, there's a half-life to that caffeine, which means if you have a full cup of coffee at noon, half of that caffeine is still in your system five hours later. That's 5 pm. Another half of that is still in your system at 10 pm. So just understanding how what we consume impacts our sleep can start to give you a little bit of empowerment.
Speaker 1:The other thing that's really important is how do you wind down at night? Circadian rhythm the light and dark is essential. Again, we are nature. There's a reason. It's dark at night. Most things sleep at night. Flowers close up at night. So if you can let your brain see the sun setting or the sky getting dark, that's telling your brain we need to up the melatonin, which is so, so, so much better than taking oral melatonin. When you do that, it can confuse your brain into thinking oh, I don't need to do this, or why is this here?
Speaker 1:I am a big proponent of let's work with our system. That means it's not a quick fix. It's not like let's take a sleeping pill and we're going to sleep well, sometimes with the oversight of your doctor. That can help. However, getting yourself into this rhythm that also means when the sun comes up, try to see sunrise. Try to be outside in the morning if it's 10 minutes, shifting your cycle of sleep to light and dark At night. Try to turn off fluorescent lights, turn on table lamps, soft light, limit your screens. I actually have a pair of the blue light blocking glasses that I put on. It looks like I'm wearing sunglasses sitting there at night. If I'm reading on my tablet or if I want to consume videos, tv is not that bad. But also don't watch a horror movie at 10 pm and think you're going to sleep, even if you think you handle horror movies. Basically, what we're telling our system is we need cortisol, we need to be worked up, and cortisol is what we don't want. So food is really important your timing of food, getting protein. If you have protein with a high carb meal, it also slows down the absorption of carbs, which can really help. So these are just a couple things to start to think about, because I really have heard from my clients and I know from when I went through it.
Speaker 1:When you start into midlife, everything feels out of control and if you're not sleeping well, you don't have the reserves you can be irritable or feel like things are even more out of control. Reserves you can be irritable or feel like things are even more out of control. You can have anxiety. You can feel depression. Your hormones are also doing all this in the background. That can make it more difficult.
Speaker 1:But the more you can regulate what you're eating, how you're transitioning to sleep and also adding in movement and exercise, I think is a charged word, especially if it's not something that you have in your routine movement, even if it's three five-minute walks a day, get out at noon, let your brain perceive noon, the sunlight. It starts to orient your brain into where it's supposed to be in its wake cycle because we want that melatonin to start to come up at nighttime light. It starts to orient your brain into where it's supposed to be in its wake cycle Because we want that melatonin to start to come up at nighttime, when it's getting dark and we want the cortisol, which is we do need cortisol. We just don't want it to be charging through our system at 3 am. There's a lot more to sleep. There's also the issue if you have anxiety at night. That can be a whole other issue.
Speaker 1:We're still setting the foundation with all the stuff I just talked about. It's still important. What is your routine at night? What's your bedroom environment? What are you eating? When are you eating? And then getting that movement in there and breathing, mindfulness, all of those things. That is how, as far as our nature, we are made to do those things. We're made to move. We're made to have a rhythm based on the daylight and the nighttime. We certainly didn't walk around thousands of years ago with tablets reading with blue light. So anytime you're thinking, what should I be doing here? Think about how we evolved. And if you want to have something in the evening, start to try some herbal teas. Treat yourself to those things. Get some real lavender hand lotion. I use actually lavender lip balm because lavender is a relaxant. There are so many things you can do that doesn't have to feel heavy or oh no, here's another thing I have to change. Go into it with a sense of empowerment, a sense of exploring, and if you want more information, as I said, I am a sleep coach. You can find a link in the show notes to sign up for a consultation if you wanna talk through what your needs are and we can see how I can help you individually.
Speaker 1:I have a beautiful program for women in midlife who are navigating peri to post-menopause. It's called Restored and there are four modules that are online and it's just it's lifestyle. It's basically a lifestyle program that changes how you can sleep, and so what I love about it is that you're not just targeting I want to sleep better. By looking at the buffet of options in the program, you are creating more wellness for yourself, and there is no one formula for any person. One thing is going to work okay for you. It's not going to work for another person. I talk about supplements, which is very complex and probably something you should do as icing on your cake. Don't start with that, because there are so many lifestyle things that can empower you, help you with brain fog and hot flashes, and those are things I also talk about in my program. So if you're interested in learning more about that, I'm going to put a link in the show notes. It's maryrothwellnet forward slash restored. You can learn about that program, which also includes two months of group coaching, which that's one of the most powerful parts of it, because women exchange information what are their wins, what are their challenges, and they help each other, which is, I think, one of my favorite parts.
Speaker 1:So when you're thinking about your sleep issues, take a deep breath. Set some goals for yourself. Simple things cut back on the caffeine. Find some yummy herbal teas that you can drink in the evening. Make sure they don't have caffeine in. Try to cut back on alcohol or move it earlier in the day and think about that half-life. Start to put some gentle movement in your day. Walking, yoga is wonderful. Deep breathing especially if you're lying awake at night, let yourself feel the bed supporting you. Take deep breaths, tell yourself it's okay, I'll think about this in the morning, but, like I said, that rumination at night, that sometimes needs more of an intervention, which I also have, that too, but anybody can get to a point where they're getting more restful sleep.
Speaker 1:It's not linear.
Speaker 1:There are still nights when I struggle with sleep, when I look back on what happened the day before, or sometimes three days before if I've been on vacation and had a lot of carbs.
Speaker 1:Our systems sometimes are really slow to process that stuff. So no quick fix, but you can take charge of some of these things. Feel more empowered so that you don't dread this part of life because there are so many beautiful and joyful parts about it. So thank you to all of you for listening. This is probably a little bit longer than most of my mini episodes, but I think it is so important and you're certainly going to hear me talk about sleep a lot more. If you have questions, you can text me there's a link in the show notes. Or if you want to comment, to ask questions in general or just things that you want to share with other people, I would love if you would comment on the episode and certainly always feel like you can give me a rating and until next time, go out into the world and be the amazing, resilient, vibrant Violet that you are.
