86: Perimenopause and the Health Clues I Wish I Tracked Sooner

Carrie Jones (0:00)

Welcome to Hello Hormones with me, Dr. Carrie Jones, a podcast where we explore how to make friends with your hormones so that you can thrive in your 30s, 40s, and beyond. Whether you're premenopausal, perimenopausal, fully postmenopausal, or honestly, just a woman dealing with the chaos of hormone imbalances, you are in the right place because handling your hormones doesn't have to feel like hurting cats. So let's decode what's really going on, ditch that confusion, and help you feel like yourself again. You bring the symptoms, I'll bring the science with a bit of sass, and get you solutions together.

There are endless things you could track when it comes to their health. Am I right? I mean, there's blood work, there's wearables, there's your sleep scores. Glucose, hormones, body composition, heart rate, recovery, your list gets very long very quickly. And I definitely do not give every number the same amount of attention. So today, I was thinking that I would share the health metrics that I personally care about the most, why they matter to me, and what I actually do with that information. Now, please understand, like, my health metrics may not match what you would track, but, you know, curious cats want to know what am I tracking. So this is less about creating another checklist of numbers that you should be obsessing over and more about, like, how do I think about my own health behind the scenes? Metric number one, the first thing that I check and have checked for years is my sleep data.

Once I got into perimenopause, one of my first symptoms was sleep.

I couldn't stay asleep. I can always fall asleep. I just can't stay asleep. In fact, yesterday night, I woke up, I think, at 4.36, like, rude, just rude. So I want to know my REM sleep, my deep sleep, my length of time sleeping, and in fact, what I use, some of what I use can tell me if I snored or not. As women get older and go through perimenopause and menopause, the risk for sleep apnea goes up. So I want to know, am I snoring? I started this years ago, like I said, I started tracking the Oura ring when the Oura ring first, first, first came out. I was that girl.

I've had multiple forms of Oura ring. This is so not sponsored by Oura ring. I'm just telling you what I started with. I no longer use an Oura ring. My Oura died, the battery stopped charging in 2024, and I just never went back. I broke up with tracking that for a minute. But then I got an 8 Sleep, also not sponsored. I just love it. An 8 Sleep is a mattress that, like a mattress cover that has little tubules in it, and like water hot and cold water can go through it. So it's wonderful. In the winter, I have it warm and I'm snuggling. In the summer, when it's hot, I've got it, you know, it's cooler, that has this neat alarm in it that will pulse water through to get you to wake up. But more importantly, it tracks.

That's what will track actually snoring if I have it, but it'll track REM and deep sleep. And now I am beta testing for a company called Avercare. They have a band and that's the, I don't normally get into bands like I don't have an Apple Watch or a Whoop or anything like that. But I did agree and I'm really liking this Avercare band. So I can also look at like my heart rate, my HRV, what they say my sleep is doing. Because again, I'm not obsessing over my sleep, but I do want to know how my choices, my stress, where I am in my menstrual cycle, because I can tell a difference between my luteal phase and my follicular phase. I want to see how change of seasons are affecting me.

Travel, now that I have the band, I can see how travel and things I do when I travel affect my sleep. And I'm always going for better. I know what makes it worse. I'm going for like you drank your tea at this time, you took your melatonin at this time, you read a real book versus a Kindle.

When did you last eat? Did you eat dinner late because it's a conference? Or if you eat around five o'clock, is that better for me?

Spoiler alert, it is better for me. Alcohol is by far the worst. I don't really drink, but when I do, I love a good glass of wine and it will ruin my sleep.

Full stop ruin my sleep, I learned that very quickly. Travel across multiple time zones and eating late are both really bad for me. And late can be at like seven o'clock PM, which is absurd. You go anywhere in Europe, anywhere in Europe and they're like seven PM is when we start. I'm like, I know, but I like to eat by like five, six at the latest because at this age, as I'm transitioning through perimenopause, I just noticed a difference. A positive, I can tell when I travel, if I take melatonin sooner, I'm more on the take melatonin two to three hours before bed. That works better for my body to get me back in the time zone and sleeping. My HRV and sleep will get improved. When I'm home, if I sauna about an hour, two hours before bed, so I will get in my sauna for about 30, 40 minutes, go take a shower, then go start reading, drink my tea. I will also notice that my sleep is significantly better. It's been really nice to know these little nuances of timing or if I'm going to choose to do something one day, how it's going to affect me. I think a lot of women find that they think that they're sleeping fine. Oh, I sleep fine. I sleep eight hours. I sleep seven hours.