 Hello and welcome to another Swannick Live. It's great to have you here and if you are a woman and you struggle with your sleep then this is for you today. We have a wonderful expert on all things sleep and all things perimenopause and menopause. So if you are a woman going through that or about to go through that, if you're a woman who struggles with her sleep, listen in because over the next 30 or so minutes we're going to be doing everything we can to help you sleep better. I'm joined today by Katish Haberfield who is the founder of Reclaim Your Life with Katish and Katish. It's great to have you here. How are you doing? I'm great. Thank you James. Thank you for having me. Yeah and you're the founder of Reclaim Your Life with Katish which helps women understand the life stage transition of perimenopause. So just tell us a little bit about how you got into this and what your area of expertise is. Yeah sure. I think with most things in life we teach what we need to know and what we're going through based on our experiences and the reason we do this is so that we can help others who are going through similar to us. So for me it's coming up to my 45th birthday and when I started experiencing quite dramatic changes in my life was around the age of 42 and I thought what the heck is going on with me? And so being a little bit of a research geek I used Dr Google and started doing and reading all the things to try and figure out as my kids say why are you so angry mum? I'm not angry because it's nothing wrong with me. And why when I was having a glass of white wine why I would suddenly break out in a sweat? And sort of a whole bunch of things started to make sense to me and I realised there's this unspoken thing out there that's called perimenopause. So perimenopause is the stage before menopause and you know women have a really hard time talking about their reproductive life as it is. You know we're still in this day and age not comfortable talking about words like tampons or pads or periods and then suddenly there's this process as we're hitting middle life and our bodies start to look different. We're still the same inner child inside but our outward world is changing a little bit. We all have our ideals about who we are, what we look like, what beauty is, what success is, are starting to morph and to change and then at the same time our body changes and it can throw out everything sleep included. And so I just started to share my experiences and women started resonating that and we've just been going on a journey together for the last few years to say hey I'm having trouble sleeping. Did you realise there's actually a biological reason for that at this time of your life and to help women go through this journey? I don't understand that they're not alone and they're not going crazy that they're perfectly normal and there are some simple tools that can help them. Yeah and what's the age group usually where women experience perimenopause or menopause? What's that age range? Yeah so perimenopause can start, are you ready for it? Anytime from 35. So 35 to 55 it's quite a big age bracket and it depends upon your body, your hormones, your level of stress and genetic factors. 55 is roughly the age when we go into menopause. Now menopause is a difficult term because we can only say we're in menopause once it's been 12 months since our last period. So it's a retrospective term and then you can get this amazing realisation that that's what you've gone through and things start to make sense. So perimenopause is the lead up to that and it's when changes start happening and women start to feel a little bit not themselves but they don't have a reason to understand why and there's actually 35 different things that go on in a woman's body and her brain that's a part of the perimenopausal stage. So yeah it's quite a wide bracket but 35 to 55. Yeah and you've actually created a Facebook group for women aged between 35 and 55 and we'll put the link in the comments wherever you're watching this at the moment. There should be a link down below. We'll put a link there to the Facebook group and the Facebook group is named perimenopause and menopause essential oils and natural solutions to private group. So we'll put the link down there below where you can access that. So what are some of the is it correct to say symptoms from perimenopause and menopause or is that incorrect? Yeah well symptoms is kind of one word that we do use the medical industry of which I'm not part of the medical industry but uses the word symptoms but the problem with using the word symptoms is it kind of treats it like a disease and I like to say that it's not a disease it's just a life stage with indicators that your body is changing and that you're going out of alignment with some things in your life and that you need to take some pause take care of yourself and pay attention to what your body is saying to yourself before you get full blown experiences. I'm from the background whereby I believe and understand completely in the approach of I have a symptom have a hot flush and I need something to treat it but I also believe in the wisdom of learning what your body is telling you. So what's the actual message behind that? What's the root cause behind it? There will be biological changes and physical chemical changes in your body but there's also some emotional concepts as well. So it's really a period of time that a woman needs to learn to nurture herself and that can be really difficult for a lot of women because they've been so busy nurturing their families and their partners and their parents may be getting older so they're used to nurturing them but they've really got out of practice of nurturing themselves and the true definition of self-care. So what are some of the signs that period menopause and menopause is struck then? You mentioned some biological changes but then you also mentioned some emotional changes as well it seems. Yeah so anger is a really good sign. What happens is that at a fundamental level our hormone, sex hormones change from that age. Men go through this as well but a little bit later and it's called andropause but for women the changes happen not only in the ovaries but in the limbic system as well. So it's the equivalent to the changes that a teenager goes through at puberty but it's just for women and it's kind of like your sex hormone in sex hormones change in reverse. So a lot of women will notice changes in their progesterone levels and the estrogen levels. They will also see a change in the display of their testosterone and one of the other things that happens is their melatonin production changes as well quite dramatically. So it goes up and down and it can change according to the time of the day, the day of the week and where we are in the month but basically it's kind of like you have your estrogen drops dramatically as time goes by and so does your progesterone and when we start pairing menopause generally speaking we can have high levels of estrogen and low levels of progesterone and in comparison our testosterone might say stay high and so what we get is the changes in the limbic system combined with the changes in the hormones in the whole uterus and the worm space can bring forward anger and frustration. So that's one of the number one signs is anger and irritability. The things that you would normally put up with or tolerate in your life are suddenly making you blow a fuse. So you're less able to deal with stress and your cortisol levels really increase a lot. Another sign closely linked to that is waking up in the middle of the night. So there's two ways that you can wake up in the middle of the night. One is with a hot flush where you're literally waking up sweating and the second way can be that you can wake up with a panic attack or a phase of anxiety and can't get back to sleep and that can very quickly spiral into insomnia if you don't have some strategies and tactics to help you get back to sleep quickly or learn to get to self-sooth and to get back to sleep. I want to dig into the sleep aspects of this in just a second. But is it a common thing that women mistake these, I don't want to use the word symptoms again, but they mistake these changes for something else other than menopause or perimenopause. Do they mistake it for just life is just happening or circumstances and that they're unaware of the actual physical changes that are going on in their bodies? Yeah it's really misunderstood term because we don't talk about it much. A lot of women will become highly emotional so they may not only become angry but they may feel overwhelmed. They may become emotional in terms of cry a lot especially and so they may present themselves to the doctor eventually and just end up a crying mess and not know why they're there and then what happens is that the doctor goes oh she's having a midlife crisis let's put her on some antidepressants which has been historically the way that you deal with hysterical women is where the whole term hysterectomy came from which is get rid of the woman's womb so that she can function and not be such an emotional mess. Got it and that's pretty antiquated thinking at least in your in your view yes? Yeah very antiquated because we have emotions for a reason right they're there to tell us that we have lots of thoughts about a particular topic or something's happening in our lives and we're not processing it or we want to process it and for example the the emotion of anger is a boundary crossing. When you feel angry in life there's something that has been crossed someone has crossed your boundaries or you have let your standards down and you've let somebody cross your boundaries and so it's actually an important message to us to really check in with our inner wisdom and see what it is that is creating that emotional response in our body so that we can actually be doing things that are more in tuned with what we should not what we should do but what we really want to do. Yeah there's a combination of a lot of things and how in my view how to handle these things which don't involve getting a pill from a doctor or taking prescription drugs I've personally done a lot of self-development programs you know for landmark forum to elevate leadership community to just you know going inside of meditation 10 day silent retreats called vipassana a lot of different ways in my view that you can resolve in some cases childhood trauma you can resolve a lot of the issues around why you're getting triggered in day-to-day life that don't need a doctor to like I said before prescribe a pill for you a lot of times these prescription pills also have shocking side effects and can do actually more damage long-term than what they may potentially alleviate short-term so certainly I am in alignment with you there and taking a natural approach or natural and holistic approach I would say and not necessarily trying to find trying to resolve issues through prescription medication and James one of the things I know that you're particularly passionate about is alcohol and the over reliance of alcohol in our lives and in perimenopause a lot of women find that if they don't understand their anger and their frustration and their emotions they may end up medicating themselves with a bottle of wine yeah when you said you know that you're I'm very passionate about alcohol I was like well that's actually not quite correct I'm very passionate about people not drinking as much alcohol or quitting alcohol yeah I wanted to make that just wanted to make that distinction there yeah but passionate about their role that alcohol plays in your life in a negative perspective is what I mean so and interestingly during perimenopause with all the changes in the hormones the act of simply drinking alcohol can actually induce a hot flush so drinking alcohol can be a very unpleasant experience for a woman in this period of time but if you're not really in tune with your body and don't understand the reason behind it you may just plow on anyway and just just think it's suddenly really strange that when you drink your favorite glass of red or whatever that you suddenly sleep your sleep is more disturbed and you might wake up in the middle of night with a hot flush if you don't get one immediately upon consuming alcohol yeah and just on that you mentioned red wine there if red wine and beer actually have the most toxins in it of all the different alcoholic drinks that you can have so while it's true that having some alcohol at night may indeed help people feel sleepier and fall asleep your sleep quality is going to be severely compromised a lot of people mistakenly feel like alcohol is a good way to reduce stress and anxiety and to wind down from the end of the day but sadly what's actually happening is that you're pouring attractively packaged poison down your throat you're disrupting your sleep patterns you're disrupting your melatonin production your body is not fully rested you don't spend as long in that deep REM restorative phase of sleep during the night um which is why when you wake up even if you've had seemingly seven hours of like you think it's undisturbed sleep and in most cases it is disturbed sleep but even if you have seven or eight hours of undisturbed sleep at least what you perceive to be undisturbed sleep often you still wake up feeling tired and lethargic it's because the sleep quality was compromised by that seemingly innocent glass of wine that you had before you went to sleep you mentioned before about melatonin production and perimenopause so just explain to us a little bit about how perimenopause affects the body's ability to create melatonin which of course is the hormone that helps us sleep yeah so it's it's quite simply it happens in both males and female so um from the age of 35 our melatonin production decreases um it just goes on the on the slide on the slide i don't have a diagram to show you but i know that people like Dr Jocker's G-O-E-C-K-E-R-S has a great graphic um on his website that shows you melatonin production and so if you're not naturally producing the melatonin you start to get the sleep issues and so what you need to do is obviously to start learning how to encourage melatonin production and to do things like lock your blue light and to to help with the whole sleep process and you basically need to learn how to sleep i think we've learned we teach our toddlers how to go to sleep but quite often we don't teach ourselves as adults how to how to go to sleep and how to create a sleep ritual so that we have a process whereby we um set up ourselves for success at night and that's what i'm really quite passionate about is teaching people to really take the time and cultivate the space to acknowledge the importance of sleep on their health acknowledge the importance of taking care of yourself and really being a little bit selfish in terms of respecting yourself and the sacredness of your bedroom and the sacredness of a sleep ritual every single night yeah walk us through your sleep ritual in our house um we've added little bits and pieces to our sleep ritual over the last sort of nine years and we added a new layer at a time um because we like to experiment and also we different changes in our lives but for us um and i have two teenage boys um one who is a a an owl he's a night boy and the other one who's a lark i'm a bit of a lark i like to get up early so i naturally want to go to sleep about 8 30 at night um but for us the process of sleep starts around five o'clock in the afternoon for us it's about acknowledging that we're about to come into dinnertime and we need to start to wind up all the busy activity of the day i'm a little bit um of a taskmasker when it comes to the evening in terms of um and it's going to be more and more difficult as my children get higher up in the high school grades but at the moment we have a ritual of like six o'clock is dinner and you have to have had a shower by six o'clock which is i know for a lot of families is like we're not even home yet but for me a shower before dinner um starts to unwind the body to relax the muscles and there's something just so relaxing about the water for helping you get rid of all those excess energetic thoughts from the days you cleanse it away um and once we've had dinner we have a rule of um you have to um turn off all devices um so the only time devices that are allowed at night time is on the weekend um but normally all screens are off um we dim the lights um all of our devices are set so that the um the night time setting comes on at five o'clock so we're starting to create that association with dimmer lights less noise um we're starting to we've got into our pajamas we're we're more relaxed and then we turn our diffusers on in all the rooms each of us have different sensory cues so we all have our own customized blends that we use and the diffusers go on to signal to our brain that these particular aromas are getting us ready to unwind to go to bed um and then because our bedrooms are for sleep only there's no school desks in there um they're not for play either um so there's no toys in the bedrooms and um we don't have bright lights in there we use um salt lamps in the bedrooms or in the bathroom so if you need to go to the toilet in the night you don't need to turn on massive fluros or anything to let jolt you back in um and then it's over an hour of reading before bed um or listening to a meditation or a sound a bit of sound music or binaural beats or a hypnotherapy and then um I'm quite mindful of making sure that a room has adequate ventilation so it's not too hot not too cold um and that the boys are set up so that we each have um our own waiter blankets to go to sleep under because we like the feeling of weight and then we either have an eye pillow or an eye mask um because I always used to go to sleep like this and then I was like uh you know a mask or a pillow would be a whole lot easier than sticking your hand over there until it sort of falls off with pins and needles so that just that pressure over your face helps go to sleep and um there you go you drift off pretty much yeah you mentioned a couple you mentioned a couple things there I know you sell some produce some products for that just a shout out to your your website if you go to shop.katish.com Katish is k-a-t-i-s-c-h-e.com um I think you sell some uh you've got a you've certainly got a book there haven't you you've produced a book and you've got some essential oils I think for sleep is that right Katish yeah I have a um an e-book that you can purchase and it goes through the um and identifies the particular essential oils that have sedative properties so when we if you decide that you're interested in using aroma as a sleep base tool then there's a lot of oils out there and there's lots of different blends and and and types of types of essential oil aromas and it can be like um pouring money down the drain if you don't know why something works a certain way and so I've created a guy which basically tells you which oils have sedative properties and why and that way you can focus your money on buying the oils that have actually got sedative properties so for example clary sage has sedative properties and um frankincense and hawaiian sandalwood um so my brain just works as I need to know the reason why something's good for sleep so yeah yeah wonderful so grab that book grab some of those oils and then you can use a swanik diffuser to actually um use some of those oils you're mentioning lights as well we've actually got um a swanik companies come out with a um a light bulb here which is stripped away all of the blue light which is responsible for messing with your melatonin production so uh yeah we've um it's a yellow it says a little yellow bulb in nature and then you put them in your bedside lights and it creates a very calming soothing light which is has uh no blue light in it and then of course if you're watching this and you're an existing swaniks customer you already know this but wearing a pair of blue light blocking glasses in the last hour or so before you go to sleep um wearing these glasses as well will continue to block out that artificial blue light that you may be you know staring into right now quite frankly if you're watching this this uh this interview on a phone or a screen of some kind putting that orange lens up to the screen there would block out that artificial light your body is then able to produce melatonin the way that nature always intended it to produce melatonin as opposed to if you're scrolling through your phone for example and you're staring into that light and it's stimulating your pituitary and pineal gland which suppresses your melatonin production um another thing um which you didn't mention that i would offer kateches exposing yourself to as much natural sunlight first thing in the morning um our skin has receptors in it and when the sunlight hits our skin um you know minutes after waking up it tells our internal body clock which is named our circadian rhythm this is wake up time and so our body floods with daytime hormones there's a lot of cortisol actually in the first 20 minutes or so in the in the morning which is good we want that initially but then after that we want a very very low levels of cortisol and then if you if by exposing yourself to that natural sunlight first thing in the morning in actual fact 12 to 16 hours later your body is actually then going to want naturally start to flow with melatonin and start to prepare itself for sleep sadly most people in the modern world will wake up and stay indoors for at least a couple of hours before actually even leaving their home and exposing themselves to sunlight um but if you can do it even if you stand by a window for example and just let the sunlight sun come in and hit your skin for five minutes that you will actually find that your sleep will noticeably improve um and you're a big fan of that yeah big fan of the sunglasses off when you first uh get go out of the house in the morning and uh preach that to a lot of friends take your sunnies off um and we naturally go we've got a vagola so let open that straight away in the morning to let that light in um yeah really important I think that people um over use the sunglasses you need to let that light in yeah uh we're talking to Katish Haberfield here who is the founder of Reclaim Your Life with Katish uh why don't you give a little shout out there on your to your Facebook and Instagram and YouTube pages and website Katish before we move on yep so the easiest way to find me is uh katish.com and then at katish.com it's got all the little icons that you can click on to go to my other social media accounts but they're usually underscore Katish what's really the first step for a woman who might be watching this and who now suspects that they may have some peremini paws starting to kick in but they're not sure like how do they confirm that this is actually what what is going on versus some other health issue? Sure um well the first thing would be to just grab some awareness about your body start paying attention to the things that you're feeling see if your cycle's starting to change you can go to the doctor and ask them to confirm it but they'll do a blood test but to be honest most um obstetrician gynecologist and doctors these days will say the hormones fluctuate so much that I could give you a test today and it'll be different than tomorrow so it's more about feeling into the situation whether you feel any different and then just being aware of the changes in your body but a good place is to start you can go onto my blog and and read about peremini paws or come and join the Facebook group and just ask questions from people just start the conversation hey I've been feeling this what do you think are you feeling the same thing because a lot of women once you start to talk about this they'll go oh my god yes I didn't really want to say it to anybody but I've been feeling that too you mentioned uh you have two boys is that right and how old are you how old are your boys skatish? uh one boy is turning 12 this week and the other is just about to turn 14 and have there been periods of their life like an age range where you have found that as a mother you have slept better or slept worse or your sleep has felt more challenged um you know has has your sleep progressively got better as they've got older or has it has it been more challenged as they've got older like can you speak to that a little? I think that each child has a different personality so um my youngest has always slept differently to my eldest um my body rhythm changed completely when I had kids so prior to having kids I was the night owl I was always up late I like to read late into the night um and I wouldn't have any troubles with that but as soon as I had my eldest child he was awake from five and I just learned to be awake from from five and so he's nearly 14 now and my body has changed I'm up I can't sleep in he can't sleep in um so that's fine I've changed the other one the little one has always been a very light and restless sleeper um and has always um been a night owl so for me a lot of um learning about sleep has been to help assist him fall to sleep he's a lot more of a device kid too so my next stage is obviously getting him a pair of swannies himself so that when he's spending time on the Xbox he can wear his daytime swanies so that's my next purchase um so that he's uh we're reducing that um blue light even in the daytime for him I think rocking a pair of the daytime swannies daytime swannies here with the clearer lens you can actually see the blue light bouncing off the lens you see how the blue light doesn't penetrate the lens it's quite interesting isn't it because there's not there's not actually there's no blue really on the screen that I'm looking at at the moment but in the reflection you can see that it's very clearly blue so the blue light that is being emitted from the screen is literally bouncing off that lens so yeah a pair of daytime glasses um and kids are actually and children are most susceptible to blue light exposure because as we age we actually start to build more of a um of a barrier to blue light but when we're very young that barrier hasn't really progressed and so these kids who are staring into iPads or computer staring at tv screens and staring into light um they're doing that they're potentially doing a lot of um not just physical damage to the eyes but behavioral damage as well because lack of sleep or poor sleep because of that exposure leads to irritability and irritability leads to eating junk crappy food and eating crappy food leads to more irritability and so forth and becomes this vicious cycle yes and I think that a lot of families will have noticed um with lockdown um when the kids were at home here for that period of time and their entire school day was eight hours on a laptop it's hard for them to unwind after that amount of exposure so yeah um yeah they they would have been a lot a lot more helpful if they were sitting there with those laptops and the glasses on I can tell you that now in hindsight you've got have you got a pair of swanis kateesh no I don't have a pair of swanis it's been one of those things you know where you you walk the walk and you don't actually well you talk to talk and sometimes you don't walk the walk so don't worry we'll get on to it this week until now you don't have a pair of swanis until now we'll make sure that we get through that um for for women who are watching this um thank you so much for your guidance and expertise on this we really appreciate you um helping out our community certainly the swanis community but for women who are watching this what would be your overarching um piece of advice for them especially I think for a woman between 35 and 55 who may be experiencing some of those um those behavioral or physical changes that you referenced yeah so number one thing is you're not alone every um woman on the planet goes through it whether she's given birth or not it's the way that you're desired to change happens um it can freak us out or we can learn to adapt and to surrender and go with the flow um and the only way that you can can do that is to become more mindful about your body and your feelings and um take really small steps build yourself a nurturing self-care ritual every day and in particular pay attention to your sleep because if you can't sleep at night then you're irritated frustrated and cranky other normal during the day you don't have patience with your children you can't think clearly at work and it's a self um this goes around and around in circles so the the most nurturing thing you can do for yourself is to build yourself a really beautiful night time ritual around sleep and really honor your need to sleep um and don't give it into the culture of busyness and compromise your sleep wonderful Katish Haberfield thank you so much for your time and your guidance and expertise I so appreciate you remember that you can uh learn more at shop.katish.com that's katische.com uh and you can find her on instagram as well which is underscore Katish um maybe send her a message over there uh tell that you uh saw her and listened to her on this show and this episode um thank you so much for your time I really appreciate it thank you James appreciate it