Maybe it’s because I’m around women all day long, but it seems to me that women struggle with insomnia more than men do.   No doubt for many women menopause plays a role and as I’m starting to struggle with sleeping problems I wonder if that’s something I need to take a closer look at.  Knowing that sleep deprivation revs up the appetite and doesn’t do wonders for immune function, I want to nip this in the bud.

Lately my pattern has been to wake at 3:00 in the morning and find myself up for hours before I can fall back asleep.  I used to call this the 3:00-stress-wake-up in the past.  There is no doubt in my mind that stress can trigger this for me, but why?

Digging a little deeper (aka googling) I stumbled on a forum with people reference a host of different reasons why they think this occurs at 3:00 for so many.  Here are some of the ideas they came up with:

• noise – alarm set in neighborhood or hot water heater on a timer kicking on
• religious reasons – referencing the time of Christ’s death
• watching Amityville Horror too many times (since waking at 3:15 every night occured for a character in that movie)
•  Chinese medicine and 1am to 3 am being ruled by the liver and 3am to 5:00 being ruled by the lungs – apparently the transition wakes you??
• being at your lowest metabolic rate at 3:00 am
• depression

No one mentions cortisol and stress, which I suspect.  It looks like cortisol might actually take a nose dive around that time and could potentially affect blood sugar levels at that point.  This is interesting to me, because I’ve woken hungry at this point in the night a few times.  Despite the effect on blood sugar, I find it odd that a LOW cortisol level would induce waking.  I’d be more inclined to expect high levels to reduce length and quality of sleep.  I plan on digging deeper, past google to find some research on this phenomenon that seems to occur for so many other than me.

Do you often wake at 3:00?  Have you discovered any rationale for this occurring?