Hot Flashes, Weight Gain, and Sleepless Nights—Why Cannabis Might Be the Answer, part 3

[00:00:08] Support for how to do the pot comes from Lazarus Naturals. Are you struggling with sleep issues? I take Lazarus natural sleep capsules. For me, it’s like a sleep vitamin. I also keep a CBD oil tincture on my nightstand for those middle of the night. Wake up. It works. Lazarus Naturals makes potent effective CB, D so you actually feel the benefits.

[00:00:34] Please prioritize your sleep. It really affects everything. And I have a promo code for you. Visit lazarus naturals.com and use the code. Do the pot for 20% off. I’ll add a link in the show notes with all the details.

[00:00:53] Dr. Lauren Streicher: Why is it that cannabis is so helpful when it comes to sleep in women in [00:01:00] this age group? Well, number one is that we have reason to believe that it is going to help alleviate hot flashes, and that’s certainly a huge, huge part of it. The second is just as an anti-inflammatory pain keeps people up. It’s very difficult to fall asleep if you have aches and pains.

[00:01:21] Ellen Scanlon: Welcome to How To Do The Pot, an award-winning podcast helping you feel confident about cannabis. I’m your host, Ellen Scanlon.

[00:01:38] You just heard from Illinois based Dr. Lauren Stryker, a clinical professor of obstetrics and gynecology at Northwestern University’s Feinberg School of Medicine. She is an md, a menopause expert, and the host of an excellent podcast, Dr. Stryker’s. Inside information. Today we’re talking all about menopause, [00:02:00] and this is the third episode in our series.

[00:02:03] Here’s a quick recap of the earlier episodes, and I really recommend listening to them if you haven’t yet. In episode 2 77, Dr. Stryker explained what menopause and perimenopause are. I shared how symptoms can start much younger than many people realize, and we learned why women are turning to cannabis for relief of symptoms related to stress, sleep, sex, and hot flashes.

[00:02:30] In episode 2 78, I shared how a lack of research about women’s health has created basically a knowledge gap for women who are entering menopause. We talked about hormone therapy and a Harvard study on menopause and cannabis. There are more than 30 symptoms related to perimenopause and menopause. In today’s episode, I’m gonna talk about some of the most common sleep issues, hot flashes, and their [00:03:00] connection to weight gain.

[00:03:02] It has been so great to hear from so many of you that this series is really helping you understand what is happening in your own body. I hope you feel more knowledgeable and realize that you are not alone in this. Please consider this series an inspiration to keep asking questions if you’re not feeling your best.

[00:03:22] What I have learned is that menopause does not have to be a terrible time in a woman’s life. I talked about perimenopause in my Substack newsletter last week. Are you reading it yet? If you love listening to how to do the Pot, I think you’ll love the newsletter too. It’s where I share podcast highlights, inspiring stories, brand discounts, and my favorite personal Rex all in one place, straight to your inbox.

[00:03:52] Are you already a reader? You can upgrade to a paid subscription for just $6 a month to [00:04:00] directly support the show. It helps me keep this work going and I would be very grateful if you haven’t signed up yet, please check it out. I’d love to have you there. Thank you for supporting the show.

[00:04:22] Earlier in the Menopause 1 0 1 series, I talked with Massachusetts based journalists, Megan Margolis. Megan wrote an article for InStyle Magazine about a Harvard study that showed women are turning to cannabis for relief from issues related to menopause. If you have been brushing off challenging symptoms, Megan says it’s time to change that.

[00:04:45] Megan Margulies: The study had 258 women participate, and they found that almost 80% of these women found relief with cannabis for the menopause related symptoms. The majority of [00:05:00] those people, it was for sleep disturbance, and then the rest was for mooding anxiety. Even in the study itself, at the end, it says what this study accomplishes.

[00:05:11] Is not that this is the way to go for relieving symptoms with menopause. This isn’t like the gold standard, but what it means is that it’s absolutely worth looking deeper into and researching more, even if it’s this, the smallest disturbance in your life, or very minor symptom, or what feels minor if it’s, you know, insomnia here and there.

[00:05:38] But you’ve never had insomnia in your life. We’re still allowed to want to feel healthy and not deal with these symptoms. Even just for PMS. How many men, if they had to deal with having their period dealing with PMS, I mean, the world would shut down. [00:06:00] So to brush aside women who are in perimenopause is just so infuriating.

[00:06:07] Because even the smallest symptoms can ruin your day and your week, and how you behave as a mother and a partner and a friend.

[00:06:19] Ellen Scanlon: Kelly Kaiser, the California based founder of Cannabis Accessories Line, Kelly Green, went to her doctor to talk about perimenopause symptoms. It wasn’t the most helpful visit.

[00:06:31] Kelly Keiser: I am currently in perimenopause and I started having symptoms about a year ago.

[00:06:37] I have to say that I wish I had known I was going to kind of be on my own for this part of the female journey. My current OB, GYN, is great but wasn’t very helpful and um, it was a little bit alarming to tell her everything I felt and then get. Kind of not the greatest response. So because I wasn’t late on any of my periods, you know, there was kind of no [00:07:00] action required.

[00:07:00] But I did have symptoms. So the symptoms that I had and I’m still having are that I’ve had a change in my cholesterol. I’ve had joint and muscle aches. You know, not even like after I work out just kind of all the time lately, and then I, I basically have PMS symptoms during times that are not my period.

[00:07:19] And I would say that along with that, I sometimes, unfortunately have mood swings. I. For the last 48 years, I’ve always slept well and I have a lot of girlfriends who don’t, and I really feel for them. But I will say in the last couple of months, I haven’t slept all the way through the night as often. And so I think this is really part of the bigger picture, which is just this, you know, hormonal change.

[00:07:43] So yeah, as far as sleep goes, that’s kind of where I’m at. It’s gotten a little more disrupted than my usual perfect sleep that I was so proud of.

[00:07:53] Ellen Scanlon: The main message I hope you take away from this series is that if you are noticing new [00:08:00] symptoms, there is help out there, you can go to menopause.org and on the website look for a tab called Find a Doctor.

[00:08:08] I. Put in your zip code and you’ll find physicians with training in menopause who can meet in person or through telemedicine. Please don’t give up if your current doctor isn’t very knowledgeable about menopause. I. When people ask me about cannabis and sleep, my first question for them is, do you have trouble falling asleep or staying asleep?

[00:08:34] If staying asleep is a struggle for you, taking CBD regularly will bring balance to your sleep cycle and allow you to rest all night. If falling asleep is a challenge for you, you’ll need THC. We have a very popular four-part series all about cannabis and sleep, which I recommend listening to. If you haven’t yet.

[00:08:57] It’s episodes 1 92, 1 [00:09:00] 93, 1 94, and 1 95. I’ll link to it in the show notes. I. Those sleep episodes go into lots of detail. So today I’m gonna focus on the specifics of sleep in perimenopause and menopause. I asked Dr. Stryker how she advises patients who come to her with menopause related sleep challenges.

[00:09:24] Dr. Lauren Streicher: Sleep is so interesting because like many things, it’s not one solution fits all. If you look at why is it that midlife women and post menopause women have so much trouble sleeping, it’s not one thing I. It can be hot flashes, it can be sleep apnea. It can be restless leg syndrome. It could be the snore in the bed with you.

[00:09:48] It could be stress, it can be anxiety. It can be you’re getting up to pee every 20 minutes, or it could be all of the above.

[00:09:55] Ellen Scanlon: Patty Pappas, the California-based co-founder of Cannabis Brand, hello [00:10:00] again. Didn’t know what to do about hot Flashes, night sweats, and the effect it was having on her sleep.

[00:10:07] Patty Pappas: I started probably in my early forties.

[00:10:10] I was fortunate enough to go through my major heaviest symptoms while I also had three teenage daughters living at home, which was rough and ’cause they were going through their own hormonal imbalances. But I would have hot flashes just come on, you know, 10, 15 times a day, come and go. I would. Sleep with a towel underneath me.

[00:10:31] So I would sweat through the towel, then I would take the towel off and I would sweat through the night. So sleep became a real issue for me. And then that leads to just a host of other, you know, irritability and, um, you know, it affects the relationships in your life, your intimate relationships when you’re exhausted and tired, for sure.

[00:10:49] I just kind of gutted it out and I didn’t really, you know, understand what the options were. Not knowing what it was, not knowing how to treat it, not talking to any about it. I probably had too [00:11:00] much wine at night to calm down and to relax, which was the opposite of what hap actually happens. Um, and I think women do that often and you know, they turn to prescription medication to help sleep through the night, which causes a whole series of other issues.

[00:11:14] For you. So I wish I had discovered cannabis or it was available much earlier.

[00:11:19] Ellen Scanlon: I’m hopeful that we will have more data like the Harvard study about cannabis and menopause in the future. Dr. Stryker shares where cannabis is showing the most promise in relieving symptoms.

[00:11:32] Dr. Lauren Streicher: But when you look at cannabis and you say, why is it that cannabis is so helpful when it comes to sleep in women in this age group?

[00:11:43] Well, number one is that. We have reason to believe that it is going to help alleviate hot flashes, and that’s certainly a huge, huge part of it. The second is just as an anti-inflammatory pain keeps people up. It’s very difficult to fall asleep [00:12:00] if you have aches and pains, whether it’s from arthritis or general muscle aches.

[00:12:04] Or whatever else is going on. So just using something that is going to help with the aches and pains is gonna make a difference. I mean, we know that even people that do things like take Advil PM and, and products such as that tend to sleep better, not just because it has the sleepy part in it, but because it has the Advil part in it because it’s an anti-inflammatory.

[00:12:25] And certainly we can stay the same for cannabis.

[00:12:32] Ellen Scanlon: When I talk to women about menopause, the first thing I ask is, how are you sleeping? Because for so many women, trouble sleeping is a first sign that your hormones are shifting. And as you’ve heard and will hear throughout the series, not sleeping can set off a cascade of negative effects, mood swings, weight changes, low libido.

[00:12:56] The list unfortunately goes on. I am [00:13:00] very protective of my sleep and I’m grateful to have tools that help me. CBD is an essential part of my nighttime routine. I think of it like a sleep vitamin. If sleep has been elusive for you, I wanna share what works best for me. Before bed, I take one Lazarus natural CBD plus CBN Sleep capsule, which helps me stay asleep all night.

[00:13:25] If I wake up, I have a Lazarus Natural Sleep Oil tincture ready on my nightstand. You just put a dropper under your tongue and hold it for about 30 seconds. One of the reasons I’ve been waking up recently is because of my 10-year-old Maine coon cat. He is vocalizing in the middle of the night. It’s brutal.

[00:13:49] When he wakes me up, I take a dropper of CB, D sleep oil, and I give him one too. We both fall back to restful sleep in about 10 or 15 minutes. [00:14:00] Sometimes women tell me that CBD doesn’t work for them. Its effects can be subtle at first. It takes consistency. You’ll need to take it for at least two weeks before you’ll feel the full benefits.

[00:14:13] But please know that if you’re struggling with sleep, you do not just have to power through. Try Lazarus Naturals, which is offering how to do the pot. Listeners, 20% off with promo code, do the pot. Go to lazarus naturals.com today. Get the sleep support you need, and wake up feeling like yourself again.

[00:14:39] Hot flashes are by far the most common symptom of menopause with about 75% of all women experiencing them. Dr. Stryker explains what we know about cannabis and hot flashes.

[00:14:55] Dr. Lauren Streicher: Well, we know CB D’s an anti-inflammatory CB D’S gonna help with pain. Well, [00:15:00] it appears the THC though is the magic ingredient to help with hot flashes because IDE is in the pathway that is in temperature regulation and you need THC basically to get that.

[00:15:16] When I went to medical school, and I’m aging myself here, we never even knew the phrase endocannabinoid system. It, it really hadn’t been identified. It was certainly not understood. And as time has gone on, of course there’s been a, a tremendous amount of research and understanding what our internal endocannabinoid system is and the sorts of things it controls and there’s.

[00:15:40] Not very much that it doesn’t control, quite frankly. But one of the things on that list is temperature regulation. When we look at what keeps us at a nice even temperature so that we don’t have hot flashes, so we don’t get cold when we’re not supposed to be, this all takes place in the brain. The candy neurons are really [00:16:00] what controls our internal thermostat, and estrogen controls those candy neurons, so.

[00:16:05] When we run out of estrogen, those candy neurons go into overdrive. They get crazy, they enlarge, they don’t work quite right, and then we start having hot flashes. But the point is, is this is all part of the endocannabinoid system, and we know that when we look at the endocannabinoid system, that estrogen is in many of these pathways, and the loss of estrogen impacts on how the endocannabinoid system works.

[00:16:32] Ellen Scanlon: I hear from a lot of women that menopause symptoms can create kind of a downward spiral of symptoms that all feel bad, but might seem unrelated. Dr. Stryker explains how for women, a lack of sleep, hot flashes, and weight gain are actually all connected.

[00:16:53] Dr. Lauren Streicher: Weight gain in menopause is complicated. It is real.

[00:16:57] We used to say that it’s because metabolism [00:17:00] slows down at the time of menopause. We now know that not to be true, menopause doesn’t slow down until the sixties, and let’s face it. Men and women are aging at the same time, but it’s women that are gaining weight around the time of menopause. So when we look at the specifics of why do women gain weight, well, number one is we look at sleep.

[00:17:20] We know that there are hormones, the leptins and reins that are controlled by sleep and the leptins and reins not only impact on metabolism, but also appetite. If women get less than seven hours of sleep a night. This is going to cause an imbalance in their leptins and reins and their metabolism is gonna slow down and they’re going to eat more.

[00:17:42] Why don’t women sleep in menopause? Well, hot flashes is, is the number one reason. But we know that even the women that don’t have hot flashes have sleep disturbance. And in addition, sometimes women don’t know that they’re having hot flashes. We know from very good studies that they’re not even aware of all the hot flashes that they’re having.

[00:17:58] So when women would come [00:18:00] to me and say, I’m having a really hard time losing weight, the first question I have is. How are you sleeping and are you having hot flashes? And then find that if we address that, it’s gonna help with the weight loss. The other issue with hot flashes, aside from the lack of sleep, is that every time someone has a hot flash, they have a surge in cortisol.

[00:18:21] And we know that those surges in cortisol. Over the long term have an impact on the ability to lose weight. The other thing that we also know is that women that don’t sleep well make bad food choices and they don’t move around as much.

[00:18:37] Ellen Scanlon: Carrie Mapes, the co-founder of Hello again, found that as her sleep got worse, it was harder to maintain other healthy habits.

[00:18:47] Carrie Mapes: I didn’t have any trouble going to sleep. I didn’t sleep well, so I was probably tossing and turning and sleeping too lightly, and I would wake up at 2:00 AM every night and not be able to go back to sleep until 3 30, [00:19:00] 3 45 or so. I too drank too much coffee, ate too much sugar, and drank too much wine to just kind of, you know, get the, pick me up in the middle of the day and then have a treat at the end of the day and just feel better.

[00:19:13] Comfort food, definitely just to kind of have a full body relaxation with the chardonnay and, and all of those things came with their own issues as well. So my level of exercise went down. So it was, you know, it was a long tenure kind of, I wouldn’t say it was a struggle every day, but it was certainly a time period when I didn’t feel my best

[00:19:44] Ellen Scanlon: for Michelle Courtright, the Minnesota based founder of cannabis brand. Jane, keeping a journal helped her pay attention to how cannabis was helping her.

[00:19:54] Michelle Courtright: I would recommend also keeping a journal. Sometimes the benefits of cannabis are subtle and when you start [00:20:00] writing down how you’re feeling before with the menopause symptoms, whether it’s, you know, being irritable or racing thoughts or trying to sleep or whatever, the cannabis is gonna level out.

[00:20:11] All of those in a very smooth way, um, in a very subtle way. So it’s nice to be able to look back at your journal and realize, you know, wow, that’s right. I, I did have the worst insomnia and now my sleep is much more restorative.

[00:20:25] Ellen Scanlon: Women often feel like they’re on their own with menopause symptoms. Dr.

[00:20:29] Stryker’s mantra is when women have good information, they make good choices. Since sleep changes as you get older. She says, don’t make assumptions about what’s going on. Find an expert.

[00:20:45] Dr. Lauren Streicher: It is so important for women who are really struggling with sleep that they don’t just assume that it’s hot flashes or aches and pains if it’s a real issue.

[00:20:54] I really encourage women to get it evaluated to get a sleep study because we know that post menopause sleep [00:21:00] apnea increases. Even in thin women. You know, we think about sleep apnea being something that. Overweight, obese people have the snores have, and one thing that’s very interesting is there’s actually changes in the tissue in the back of the throat, the tongue, the epiglottis that make those tissues a little floppier, if you will.

[00:21:19] And women tend to develop sleep apnea just because of those structural changes. So you can’t always assume that it’s because of hot flashes or aches and pains.

[00:21:32] Ellen Scanlon: I hope this episode has been helpful. Whether you are in the throes of perimenopause or learning about how your body might change in the future, please take your symptoms seriously and know that there is help out there.

[00:21:47] Sleep is an incredibly important part of maintaining your health and your vitality. So a quick recap. Hot flashes cause sleep disturbances and [00:22:00] THC helps to reduce hot flashes by regulating your body’s temperature. Pain may also be keeping you awake. Cannabis is anti-inflammatory, which helps with pain relief, so you’ll sleep better.

[00:22:14] Our next menopause 1 0 1 episode is all about sex. You’ll hear from experts about how cannabis can help increase your sex drive, soothe painful sex, and improve orgasms. If you like this episode, please share it with a friend. We love new listeners and are here to help everyone. Feel confident about cannabis.

[00:22:43] For lots more information and past episodes, visit do the pot.com, and that’s also where you can sign up for my substack newsletter. If you like how to do the pot, please rate and review us on the podcast platform that you use for listening. It really helps more [00:23:00] people find the show. Thank you to producers Maddy Fair and Nick Patri.

[00:23:06] I’m Ellen Scanlon and stay tuned for more of how to do the pot

[00:23:16] support for How to Do the pot comes from Lazarus Naturals. Are you struggling with sleep issues? I take Lazarus natural sleep capsules. For me, it’s like a sleep vitamin. I also keep a CBD oil tincture on my nightstand for those middle of the night wake up. It works. I. Lazarus Naturals makes potent effective CB, D so you actually feel the benefits.

[00:23:41] Please prioritize your sleep. It really affects everything. And I have a promo code for you. Visit lazarus naturals.com and use the code. Do the pot for 20% off. I’ll add a link in the show notes with all the details.