Dr. Stacy Sims

Yeah.

So your melatonin is supposed to rise, help you go to sleep, and then it falls at a rate for when you're going to wake up so that when it's lower, you're going to wake up and your cortisol will naturally rise.

Melatonin can be helpful in very low doses.

Yeah, so I often recommend, you know, the patients take maybe like a milligram, but you have to buy a children's melatonin very often for that dose of it because people are taking these huge, huge amounts over the counter.

You can just get so much.

And so what you want to make sure is that if you're using it, you're going to take melatonin at a time where you're going to be able to go to sleep about 30 minutes afterward too because people are also using melatonin and then not allowing themselves the restful moment when it's trying to kick in.

Mm-hmm.

And then they're taking more or they're staying up later and they're suppressing their brain's ability to make their own melatonin.

But magnesium can be advantageous as well, especially if you're on your menstrual cycle and you're having menstrual related sleep.

So I think that's an important thing.

Why?

Well, it's just many women run low in magnesium, especially when your hormones are very low, especially when your estrogen and progesterone low.

You're having contractility of your uterus when you're having menstrual cramps.

Magnesium can help counter some of that and can also help you, if you're taking it at night, get into a more restful pattern.

Yeah.

I think when it comes to your health journey, nobody is really responsible for it except you.

But there's this idea that we should wait until things are wrong to then go get them fixed.

And what we are all trying to do across the spectrum of women's health and their lifespan is to say many of these things, if we start focusing on them much earlier and take a preventative approach—

which is often against some of these recommendations about when you should screen or when you should do testing.

But if we say, well, what is best for you as an individual?