Live Like a Girl with Dr. Mindy Pelz - 4 Simple Lifestyle Tweaks for Deeper Sleep in Peri-Menopause

Episode Date: July 28, 2025

Join Dr. Mindy Pelz as she explores the sleep struggles women often face during menopause. Discover how four simple lifestyle habits—light exposure, movement, food timing, and temperature regulation—can dramatically improve your sleep quality. Dr. Mindy shares fascinating research on how sleep impacts cognitive health, the effects of circadian rhythm disruptions, and practical tips to align your daily routines with your body's natural clock. Small changes during the day can lead to big improvements at night and boost your overall well-being. Remember, as Dr. Mindy says, 'It's what you do during the day that matters for a good night's sleep.' To view full show notes, more information on our guests, resources mentioned in the episode, discount codes, transcripts, and more, visit https://drmindypelz.com/ep298 Check out our fasting membership at resetacademy.drmindypelz.com. Please note our medical disclaimer.

on this episode of the Resetter podcast. Let's talk about sleep because of all the symptoms that seem to be so overwhelming for so many people, especially when I'm going through menopause. Sleep seems to be the number one challenge that we are hearing from so many of you. So what I wanted to do is I want to break down exactly why you have trouble sleeping and give you four major lifestyle habits that you have. can use throughout the day to actually set yourself up for a good night's sleep. And this is super important because what I think a lot of people don't realize is that in order to get a good sleep

at night, it's actually what you do during the day that matters. So check this out because once you figure out how to include these four different parts of your lifestyle, sync them up with the circadian rhythm of your body, you will start to see that going to sleep and staying asleep become much more effortless. Welcome to the Resetter podcast. This podcast is all about empowering you to believe in yourself again. If you have a passion for learning, if you're looking to be in control of your health and take your power back, this is the podcast for you.

So let's dive. in, I want to talk specifically about the lack of sleep, and then we'll go into these four things. So here we go. First, I found a couple of interesting studies about Alzheimer's and dementia. And I think it's really important to note that when we are sleeping, we are repairing. So not sleeping is not a great thing. We want to make sure that when you go to sleep, that you actually give your brain and your body a good amount of time to repair.

So there was a 2023 study in the Journal of Alzheimer's Disease that named sleep quality as one of the biggest controllable risk factors to preventing Alzheimer's. In this particular study, the researchers found that poor sleep quality, we'll talk about quality in a moment, and lack of sleep were linked to significantly faster cognitive decline. people who didn't sleep well saw rapid decreases in mental processing speed and memory, especially after the age of 65. So one of the reasons for this is your brain actually literally shrinks at night so that the cerebral spinal fluid that goes up your spine and into your brain

can wash your brain of the toxins that you accumulated throughout the day. So if you've been listening to my podcast or following my YouTube videos for a while, hopefully you know that we are living in the most toxic time in human history. And why do we go to sleep? That is how we tap into our brain's internal mechanism to allow the brain to be washed of those daily toxins. If you are not sleeping, you are not detoxing your brain, which is why they look at these Alzheimer's and dementia's teeth. statistics and they go, oh, wow, one of the precursors to Alzheimer's and dementia is decades

before that, these people were struggling to sleep. Therefore, toxins were building up. Another 2024 study in dementia and neuropsychology noted that the duration and quality of sleep are fundamental factors for maintaining a healthy brain as we age. The authors of this study found that 45% of people who develop dementia have sleep problems earlier in life. So why are we not sleeping well? Well, if you've been again following you for a while, you probably know that I'm going to put this through the lens of a menopausal woman because those of us that have been going through this massive neurochemical shift in our body, our whole circadian rhythm really

gets messed up. In fact, they actually have a name for it. and it's called circadian dysregulation, and it is very common when estrogen goes down. But I don't want to leave the bed out. I don't want to leave the kids out in this sleep discussion, because as I go through the different steps that you need to apply during the day to get a great night's sleep, it applies to all humans on the planet. One of the reasons that we are seeing so much insomnia right now is because we are not

following the circadian rhythm principles. And these circadian rhythm principles really come down to these four different things we do throughout the day to put us in rhythm with our internal biological clock that knows what time a day it is. So when we don't get sleep, when we are in circadian dysregulation, there are three things happening. our brain starts to inflame. We have oxidative stress,

meaning that our brain has to work harder to function when we're sleep deprived, which is causing a lot of damage to neurons, especially in parts of the brain that can control mood and memory. And if you're not getting that washing of the brain with the cerebral spinal fluid, you're going to get the amyloid beta accumulation.

So this is major, and I want to help you sync this up. So here we go. We're going to dive in the four things. The first, and hopefully you've heard this before, is light. Now, light is really tricky because when I break down the different places in your day that you should be getting light, some of you are going to catch that you're missing some really pivotal moments in which your brain or your eyes specifically need to register different types of light.

So let's start with the beginning of the day and the end of the day. When the sun comes up, there is a red glow in the sky. So we go from dark into light and that in-between stage gives us this red glow. So a lot of you have heard about people that are in process of red lighting their house everywhere, red light bulbs. A lot of people are using red light as a therapeutic tool. and there's a lot of reasons that you should use red light. But for the sake of this conversation, I really want to point out that when the sun is rising, there is a red hue in the sky.

And that red light actually triggers sensors in your eyes, telling your eyes to turn melatonin off. So when you wake up in the morning, if you're waking up at sunrise, you are telling your body to turn melatonin off and to turn on cortisol. We'll go into this in a moment because cortisol is the hormone that is meant to make you move. So if you're not waking up and seeing that red light and you're not moving in the morning, we're already off to a bad start. So stick with me because I'm going to break this down so I make it really applicable to you.

So the first hot bit of light that you want to make sure that you see is you want to see that red sunrise. If you'll miss the sunrise, then this is where these red light bulbs come into handy. This is where these red lights that everybody's using comes into handy. I'll leave some of my favorite lights that I use in the links of the video in this podcast. But really, you've got to see red light first thing in the morning to turn up. off melatonin and start to turn cortisol on. We've given cortisol a really bad rap. Most people scream when they hear cortisol. And what I really want to point out is that cortisol is this hormone that's meant to make you move. It's meant to give you energy in the morning. So we need

that hormonal handoff to take place where melatonin shuts down and cortisol kicks in. Another interesting side note is when melatonin kicks off, your body becomes more insulin sensitive. So let's think this through for a minute. You wake up, you see the sunrise, you might be a little sleepy, but your brain starts to look. You can look out the window. If you have a backyard, you can go out. It's best if you're outside seeing the red light. If that's not possible, then again, look at it through a window or get one of these red light bulbs.

and all of a sudden melatonin turns off. And cortisol goes, okay, it's my, I got to kick in because we need to go find food. This is what your primal design was built around. It was in the morning. They didn't wake up and read the newspaper. They didn't wake up and go to a job. They woke up and went to try to forage for fit. So cortisol came on in the morning in order to make you move.

The other hormone that comes on in the morning is insulin. So when melatonin gets turned off because of seeing this sunrise red light, you get cortisol and then all of a sudden insulin, your pancreas wakes up so that your pancreas is now ready to make sure that if you eat, that you're going to be able to take that glucose from your food and get it into the cells. More on that in a moment. So this red light in the morning, if you're having trouble sleeping, I cannot emphasize enough how important it is.

And I've given you some options there. Okay. Second most important time for your eyes to see light is around one or two o'clock at the high point of the sun. And the reason for that is you have this massive full spectrum light that is coming in and telling your eyes where it is in the circadian rhythm of the day. So it saw the red light and it goes, ooh, red light, I'm going to turn off melatonin. Then it sees this big spectrum of full blue light.

So this isn't the blue light that comes off of your computer or your phone. This is a full spectrum blue light. And when it hits your eyes, it tells your body, hey, we're in the middle of the day. So it's like a, internal navigation system so that your body knows when and where and what point does it need to start thinking about sleep again. The other thing I really want to point out is that we have serotonin receptor sites in our eyes. So when you see that full spectrum blue light in the middle of the day, you actually trigger serotonin receptor sites in your eyes so that you can.

make serotonin. So it keeps you happy during the day. Another primal design. When you stop to think about it, we're so well designed. We just, our modern life is just taking us out of sync with our own natural rhythms. Now, the key with the midday one is no sunglasses. If you put sunglasses on, you are not stimulating those serotonin receptors. You're not helping the internal biological cool clock. So you want to go out 20 minutes out into the full spectrum, go for a walk, and let you make sure that your eyes are registering this blue light so it knows where it is and it can give you a good serotonin search. Okay, third time of the day with light that you need to see. And that is sunset. So at the end of the day, if your eyes see sunset, the red hue in the

sky, then all of a sudden it goes, okay, we're winding down now. And so I need to make more melatonin. So all of a sudden, more melatonin starts to slowly drip into your system so that by the time it's dark out, you're feeling sleepy and ready to go to bed. Now, if you are missing these three light moments, your internal biological clock that keeps track of the sleep weight, cycles is going to be massively off. So the first thing we want to start with is we want to start with timing our light. Get our body synced up with the proper light. A couple places that we actually mess up with when we're looking at light. And I think you probably already think thought about this. Well, a lot of us aren't getting red light in the morning. That's an easy one. A lot of us

aren't getting out in the middle of the day because we're too busy working. So we don't get out around one or two o'clock to get that full spectrum light. And then some of us do actually, especially in the summertime, we do get that sunset because it's so pretty. We go out. We look at it. Maybe we go for a walk. We sit on the deck. But then we come back home and we go back onto our computers. We go on to our TV. We turn on the lights in our house. And all of a sudden, we brought blue light back into the picture and the brain is confused. It doesn't know. Am I making melatonin? I thought I was making melatonin because we just saw the red light, but now I'm seeing blue light. And so if you are having trouble staying asleep, you've got to get the blue light out of your house after dark. Now, as crazy

as that sounds, there's a couple things you can do. So first, you can put red bulbs in your living room, in your TV room. You can put them in your bedroom. I can tell you I have red light bulbs in my bedroom. and I have a den that has red light so that when I'm at the end of the day, I can go into the den, I can sit and read, I'll talk about TV in a moment, and then when I go to bed, I can read with the red light so that I keep melatonin production high. Now, if you do watch TV or you're on your computers, this is where your blue blockers come in handy. This is where you want to wear some glasses to just really make sure that you shut off that bright light going in to these sensors of your eyeball. So let's help your body out if you're

struggling to sleep. Let's help it out so it knows where it is in the internal clock of the day. We call that circadian rhythm. Now, for metapausal women, it's incredibly important that we follow this timing of light. And the reason is that you had two mechanisms that controlled the internal biological clock that told your brain where it was in the day. One is these four things I'm going through like being number one, but the second is estrogen did this for you. And I think this is so fascinating. And I wrote about this in my new book. I can't wait to share my new book, excitement with you all soon. But one of the things that we know is that estrogen coordinated your circadian rhythm. And it did it in a really cool way. So check this out. When you obviously,

and estrogen peaked, so did melatonin. Melatonin peaked too. Why would your brilliant body decide that it needs to make, have massive amounts of melatonin when estrogen peaks? Well, estrogen peaks during ovulation. And at ovulation, an egg is being released from your ovary. That surprisingly takes a lot of energy from your body. And so you need to make sure that you can sleep well. So your brilliant body already came pre-designed. Then it says, hey, when estrogen goes high, melatonin comes along so that I can make sure that I sleep at night and I'm getting rest in recovery because spitting an egg out of an ovary, although it goes on every month that we take it for granted, it takes a tremendous amount of energy from our bodies. When estrogen goes away, then all of a sudden, melatonin doesn't know what to do.

It's like she lost her bestie, and she doesn't know. When am I supposed to show up? I was following the cues from estrogen, and now estrogen's gone. How do I know when to show up? So what I'm talking about with light for menopausal women is even more important. So if you think all the blue blockers and the red light and all that is silly and useless, It might have been when you were 25 and 30, but when you're 45, 55, 65, and you're not sleeping, timing these sensors in your eyes to the different fluctuations of the different hues of light is critical.

It's critical because there's no other way that your body knows when to make melatonin. So I just can't point that out enough. It's so important. Okay, second thing you're going to want to time your lifestyle to in order to tell your body where it is during the day is through movement. So when you, let's go back to our primal friends, they didn't just chill out and hang around the cave in the morning. There was no such thing as Saturday and Sunday as a day off. Every day was a day of survival. And so every day they would get up at the crack of dawn, especially to post-metaposal women,

a lot of you have heard me talk about the grandmother hypothesis. Again, you're going to hear a lot more of this coming from me in further videos and in my new book. But I want to point out that what we know about the grandmother hypothesis, this idea that it was the grandmothers that went out and forged for food, from the research I've seen, from the interview I did with Kristen Hawks, the champion of the grandmother hypothesis, you can hear that interview here on the Resetter podcast, is that they met at the crack of dawn. Grandmothers met with the sunrise, and they came together and they went walking. They went moving their bodies to go find food. Even the male hunter gatherers went and forage for food and went out to go find food in the morning. Our bodies are made to move

in the morning. So I get that some of you like to go to the gym at the end of the day. But honestly, the absolute best time to do exercise and movement is in the morning. It sinks you up with not just cortisol, because cortisol is coming in a couple hours later, right? After the melatonin goes down, cortisol kicks in. So two hours after you wake up, cortisol is at her peak. And if you don't use cortisol, you store cortisol. And you specifically store it around your belly. So you want to make sure that you're doing most of your movement in the morning. A walk is amazing. Doesn't have to be a lot, but you want to make sure you're not sitting at your desk. You want to, you want to move in the morning. So timing your movement to your morning hours is massively important.

Okay, third timing, third rhythm I want you to get into is food rhythm. Now, this one's tricky because I'm going to go to the idea that a lot of you have asked me, I've had so many questions of what is the best time for my eating window. I said this on Jay Shetty's podcast. If you haven't heard that podcast, go listen to it. he asked me what was probably the biggest health information that I've learned over the last several years that would progress somebody's health forward? And I said it is making sure that you eat in the light. When melatonin is high in the dark, you are going to store your insulin

resistant and you are going to store the glucose from your food as fat more than if you ate that food in the light when you were more insulin sensitive. So it's really important when you're looking at food timing to take your eating window and put it in during the day. When it is light out, we eat. And that also sends a signal to your brain of where you are in the day. Now, I want to bring something up that for those of you who've been following me for a while, this may seem a little controversial, but I'm going to bring it up because I'm always learning and I find sometimes that I evolve my thoughts from what I've said years ago. So when I first brought fasting to the world, the most common thing was do I skip breakfast

or do I skip dinner? I got that question all the time. And for me, I always said skip breakfast. because that was the way I felt for my body. It was easier to skip breakfast. I also, when I was first teaching fasting to the world, a lot of people in my clinic, a lot of people in my online world had families,

and they wanted to sit down and eat dinner with their family. So I would say, great, go ahead and eat dinner with your family, but we're going to skip breakfast. I have since evolved my opinion on that. and maybe because I'm an empty nester now. I don't have, I'm not sitting down with my family as much. But I believe for circadian rhythm, for weight loss, to stay in sync with our primally designed bodies that we should be eating in the light,

whatever that looks like. So in the wintertime, this is a little harder. So you're looking at a smaller eating window. You're looking at an eating window of something like, what, seven in the morning, to five o'clock at night, there's your eating window. So make sure you're eating within that time period. And once it gets dark out, you're not going to eat. Because melatonin is gone.

If melatonin is gone, you are more insulin resistant. But in the summertime, when the days are longer and it's getting dark at night o'clock at night, then you can get away with eating a seven o'clock dinner. The general rule that I gave my patients all the time was two hours before you went to bed. You do not want to put anything in your mouth two hours before you go to bed. And if you can sync that with making sure that you're also eating in the light, now you've put yourself into a really good circadian rhythm. So food timing is really important.

Now, another one that I want to talk about, that I've upgraded my thought on this too, is that when we're dealing with circadian rhythm, your circadian rhythm really likes some routine. So we talked about the light routine. We talked about the movement routine. While eating your meals around the same time is going to also signal to the body where you are in your day. So there are two places that melatonin is produced. Up in the brain, in the pineal gland, you actually get, this is going back to estrogen. estrogen will actually signal a part of the hypothalamus called the supercosmatic nucleus,

or the SCN for short. And the SCN, once it gets this big dose of estrogen, signals to the pineal gland, the gland inside our brain that controls circadian rhythm and says make melatonin. The other areas of your body that are making melatonin are the bacteria in your gut. So you want to make sure, especially at night at that dinner meal, that you're eating something really fibery that in order to be able to feed those microbes so they can produce you melaton. I know, this seems like a lot. But I'm going to tell you, when you go and break this down, this is one of those podcasts you're

going to want to go back to and you're going to take notes. I also will give you a little hint that what I'm teaching you today is in my new book, more on that, stay tuned, more on that of when that's coming. But if we are eating a high fiber diet at night, like a salad with some meat or some steamed vegetables, what you're doing is you're feeding those microbes that are going to make melatonin. So make sure we don't skip on the fiber and especially towards the end of the day. Okay, last thing, and this one is so interesting to me.

I just geeked out on this a couple weeks ago because of finishing my book up. And I looked at what our circadian rhythm of temperature is. So just like the light will tell us where we are in our day, night cycle, temperature also tells us where we are in our day night cycle. This is really important because how many of us, especially the menopausal women out there, love a cold room at night. And we love it because our heat has, our internal body core temperature has gone up. But what we may not realize is that we want the bedroom to be cold because it also signals

to our body that is time to sleep. When the sun goes down, melatonin gets turned off, your glucose insulin system gets turned down low, and your body needs the temperature in the room to start to progressively go lower and lower. So here's a couple of things that throw your temperature off. The first one is alcohol. This is why alcohol disrupts your sleep. It's because it raises your core temperature. And it's the core temperature that matters.

So if you're going to have a glass of wine, earlier in the evening is a lot better than right before bed. You want to get that wine out of you. So your core temperature at night will continue to go down and down and down. Your core temperature goes the lowest around two and three in the morning. If you have alcohol before you go to bed, most of us will realize we'll wake up at two or three in the middle of the night. And it's because we're sweating. Our internal temperature went up because of alcohol changing our core temperature when we drink. We also need to make sure that the room we're in is nice and cold.

This is why those grounding sheets, those mattress pads that chill you, really can make a difference. In fact, a lot of them you can set the temperature and you want it to keep going down so that it hits its peak, its lowest point at two or three in the morning. So what this might look like is you get in the, at night, you get done eating dinner. you decide to go into your red light room. You can go watch TV, put your blue blockers on, and make sure that room is colder than where you have been living or any other part of the house.

Make sure that there is a temperature drop in that room. And that is going to start to progress your body towards more of a restful state. Now, if you can't do that, you live with family or your husband's like, oh, absolutely not. We are not making the den, the TV room cold. Then you've got to make sure your bedroom is cold.

Because when you go into the bedroom and it is cold, you are signaling to your body. It is time to go to sleep. It is the drop in temperature. Now, the same thing happens in the morning. We have to make sure that the temperature starts to rise and that's how your body knows it's time to wake up. So just like light creates all these signals, temperature does the same. So it's more than just making sure you're sleeping in a cold room.

It's making sure that as you get later in that day, you are getting colder and colder and colder. And know that alcohol is going to mess up the core temperature, which is why it messes sleep up. So four daily routines to get you back into sync, your light, your movement, your food timing, and your temperature exposure. If you are a post-metapausal woman or even a woman that's starting to move into those post-menopausal years, I want you to understand that these four things are so important because you don't have estrogen doing that circadian rhythm job anymore. You are in a circadian dysregulation and how you get yourself out.

of dysregulation is by living a lifestyle that works with your body. And if you want to work with your circadian rhythm, you've got to apply these four things. Now, last thing I want to say, and bonus I'm going to throw in here is that there's another dysregulation that really messes us up. And this is nervous system dysregulation. So let's go back to our hunter and gatherers. Cortisol is the hormone that comes out when we are in a sympathetic nervous system state. So this is why cortisol makes us move. So in the morning, in the hunter-gatherer days, they went and they went out and they moved. I actually think stress is better to have stressful situations happen in the morning.

It's better to front-load your day. I wrote about this in the metapause reset. I did a whole chapter of sleep in there. And I talked about front-loading your day where more of your work is in the beginning of the day, more of your movement, more of your exercise, more of your cortisol-rich activities. This might also look like if you're completely stressed out or you have a tough conversation that you need to have with somebody, have it in the morning.

Because you are more primed for sympathetic nervous system expression in the morning, not in the evening. In the evening or somewhere around two and three, your adrenals are starting to move you more into your nervous system, more into a parasympathetic state. So if you look at the rhythm of the nervous system, we want to front load all of the stress in the beginning of the day, and we want you going into more relaxation later on in the day. This can be why, why, why, Watching TV at night could be very disruptive to your nervous system, which could be very disruptive to your sleep. Watching the news at night, scrolling social media, these are all activities that pull you

out of a parasympathetic state. So you want to, when that sun goes down, especially, you want to tell your brain, no more stress. I am going into a state of relaxation. And if you do that, and here's a couple of ways. by the way, that you can move into these states of parasympathetic energy. One way is move slowly. Get up from the chair slowly.

Wash the dishes slowly. Sit down and read a book. Reading a book is so good because you're going right left with your eyes as well telling your parasympathetic nervous system to turn on. Put those red lights on. Listen to some soothing music. But as the day goes on, you need to be in more of a restful state. You need to be tapping into the parasympathetic. Go to a yin yoga class, not a mega flow class that has you really amped up. You want to move into that more restful state so that you tell your body, hey, we're going to start going to sleep now. So we've got circadian rhythm and we've got nervous system rhythm and we have metabolic rhythm with food timing. And we also want to be looking at things like light temperature.

and movement. So there's a lot there. Hopefully that helped. Give me feedback. Let me know if this was useful. I think as somebody who's really worked on sleep, I can tell you that I've found through periods of really struggling with sleep. And when I go and I look at what caused me to struggle with sleep, I realize that I missed one of, tending to one of those four things, or I'm in such a state, a sympathetic to stress that I'm not able to get into parasympathetic at night so my body's not able to get itself prepared for sleep. But it's not like it's randomly happening to me. There's actually some explanation of what I didn't regulate myself with. This is what I want you to really to sum up this podcast as you're regulating yourself with all of these different lifestyle hacks so that your sweet,

brilliant body knows when to turn melatonin on, when to turn it off, when to turn it off, when to turn cortisol on, when to turn it off, and that way you don't become dysreguling. So, as always, I hope that helps. This is not, this was not a podcast where I wanted to spoon feed you. Hey, take this amount of melatonin. This is really about using your lifestyle, understanding how menopause can cause you to go into this circadian dysregulation and how you have the power for yourself. You don't need to be going on these medications. You don't need to be piling up on all of the different types of supplements.

You need to start with the foundational idea that you're dysregulated and bring yourself back into regulation, and you will find that you'll sleep much better. Okay, as always, I hope this helps, And I'm just going to say cheers to a beautiful night's sleep. Thank you so much for joining me in today's episode. I love bringing thoughtful discussions about all things health to you. If you enjoyed it, we'd love to know about it. So please leave us a review, share it with your friends, and let me know what your biggest takeaway is.