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3:07am. That's what the clock said when I finally stopped pretending I was asleep. Nothing had woken me. No noise, no pain, not even a hot flush that time. One minute I was gone, the next my eyes were open like somebody had flicked a switch. And I knew, the way you just know, that I was up for the night now. Mark breathing away beside me, not a care in the world. Me lying there dead still, running through the Christmas food shop in my head for the fourth time. I watched 3:07 turn to 4:15, then 5 o'clock, heard the first bird start up, and wanted to cry. Because I had a full day ahead of me, and this was the third night that week. I never told a soul how bad the nights had got. If any of that sounds familiar, if you keep waking at 3am, wide awake, for no reason you can name, please read this. Because I finally found out what's really behind it, and it was the last thing I'd have guessed. I'm 52. And for the best part of two years, 3am owned me. The maddening bit was that I never had trouble falling asleep. Head down at half ten, gone in minutes. It was the staying asleep. Once I was up, for a wee usually, that was it for the night. Sometimes a flush did it, boiling then freezing. But half the time it wasn't even that. I'd just be awake, brain going like a washing machine. That December was the worst of it. Over Christmas I think I was surviving on four hours a night. Cooking for everyone, smiling through it all, dead behind the eyes. What doesn't kill you makes you stronger, right lol? And here's what I worked out far too late: the 3am waking was never really a night problem. It got into everything. One thing knocking into the next, like dominoes. 😔 It started with the tiredness. Not normal tiredness. That heavy, dragging sort that even a strong coffee doesn't touch. Then came the fog. I think it's the broken sleep that does it, because you never get a proper stretch, so your brain never clears itself out. Proper cotton-wool head. Reading the same email three times over. Walking into rooms and standing there like a lemon. I tried melatonin from the health shop for a while, and when I took those, I just felt worse. Foggy and sluggish every morning on top. Binned it. Then it got into my family. Snapping at the kids over nothing at all. Shoes in the hall, a glass left out. Snapping at Mark for breathing, near enough. Then lying there at 3am hating myself for it, because they'd done nothing wrong. It was four hours' sleep, three nights running, doing the talking for me. And the snapping was only half of what it did to me and Mark, if I'm honest. The four hours of sleep had me questioning my own marriage. When you're that tired, that flat, that done by nine o'clock, there's just not much of you left over for your husband, is there. Then came the one nobody warns you about. I went through a phase of dreading my own bed. From about nine in the evening I'd feel the knot starting. Will tonight be a good one or a bad one. And I'd done everything right, mind. Cut caffeine completely, which made me miserable. Lavender on the pillow. One of those sleep apps with the rain sounds and the whispering man. A drawer full of herbal sleeping tablets that did nothing except lighten my purse. And I'd still get into bed with my heart going, because I already knew what 3am had planned. And of course, the more you worry about sleep, the worse you sleep. Round and round it goes. I sat with all of that for weeks. And somewhere in there I just became her. The woman who's forgotten what well rested feels like. And then it finally reached my work. We had a team catch-up one morning. Nothing big. And halfway through, I lost my thread completely. Mid-sentence, in front of everyone. Couldn't remember my point. Couldn't even remember the project. Someone had to fill the silence for me, and I laughed anxiously and wanted the floor to open up and swallow me whole, right there and then. Two days later, an invite came through on my calendar. Me and my boss. It was labelled "Catch Up." That's it. 😢 I was so sure it was the end. I had a little cry in the loos beforehand, fixed my mascara, and walked in with my resignation speech half-written in my head. And he just looked at me and said, "Are you ok? You've not seemed yourself for a while." I nearly went then and there. But we had an honest conversation. I told him the truth. Not all of it, but the sleep, the 3am, the fog. And this man, my boss of all people, just nodded along. Like he'd heard it all before. Because he had. He told me his wife went through the very same thing a few years back. Apparently she used to really struggle with her sleep too, up half the night, worn out all day, and it turned out to be the menopause. He said there was a real reason behind it that nobody ever tells women. "Honestly, go home and look it up. It's not you." I cried again in the car park. A different sort of crying. 💛 That evening I read everything I could get my hands on. And within an hour, I understood more about what was happening to me than two years of lavender ever taught me. Here's what nobody told me, and I'll try and explain it the best I can. Basically, all your life, your hormones have been helping you sleep. The oestrogen calms your whole system down of an evening. It's part of what lets you drop off and stay off. It's been doing that every single night for thirty-odd years, and you never even knew. Then the menopause comes, and it goes. And without it, your body's like a smoke alarm with the sensitivity turned up too high. Everything's on alert when it shouldn't be. So there you are at 3am, bolt awake, heart going, with nothing actually wrong. When I read that, I welled up a bit, I don't mind telling you. Two years of blaming myself. My routine, my pillow, my caffeine. It was never any of that. My body had just lost the thing that used to switch it off. 💡 And then I found the bit that actually led somewhere. There's a thing your body uses to calm itself down at night, called glycine. I'd never heard of it either. But apparently it's one of the main things that helps you switch off, and one of the richest sources of it, of all things, is collagen. The marine sort especially, the one from fish. It's absolutely full of it. And collagen is exactly what the menopause takes off you. You lose around 30% of it in the first five years. I always thought collagen was a wrinkles thing. I'd no idea it had anything to do with sleep. So there's my body, losing its natural wind-down at the very same time it's losing the stuff that helps make it. Both ends at once. No wonder I was in a state. That's what my boss's wife had found out. And she'd been particular about which one to get, because the cheap tubs only put one sort of collagen in, and your body needs more than one sort, doing different jobs. The marine one for the glycine and your skin, the bovine one for your joints. Get a cheap one and you're only doing half the job. The one she takes, and the one I've been on since, is called Elavate. It had more of everything in it. Both sorts of collagen, a proper 8-gram dose when the shop tubs are 2 or 3, and the extras like vitamin C, biotin and hyaluronic acid, which are meant to help with your skin and hair and keeping your joints moving too. And one more thing in it caught my eye. B12. That's the one your brain runs on. It goes after that flat, foggy, worn-out feeling. The exact thing that had been making a fool of me in meetings. It felt like the whole thing had been put together by somebody who'd actually met a menopausal woman lol. ⭐ Over 20,000 women in the UK have left it five stars. 🙏 And it comes with a 90-day money-back guarantee, so you get three whole months to feel it for yourself, and every penny back if you don't. After the drawer full of tablets and sprays I'd collected, that guarantee was the only reason I risked one more thing. So I started. One scoop in warm milk about an hour before bed. Tastes like hot chocolate, so it became the nice bit of the routine instead of another chore. I didn't tell Mark. I didn't tell anyone. Not after I'd told everyone the whispering man app was going to save my sleep lol. That failed. The first few weeks, absolutely nothing happened. And I mean nothing. Still sat up at 3am, staring at the ceiling, thinking I'd wasted another twenty quid again. But then, literally a couple of days after I'd said that, something small. I woke up too hot one night, got up for a wee, came back — and dropped straight off again. Just like that. No staring at the clock for two hours. No getting frustrated at Mark's breathing. And then that started happening more often than not. Waking up didn't mean I was going to stay awake anymore. By week seven or eight, I was sleeping through way more nights than I wasn't. I still get the odd 3am wake-up. It's not magic. But when it comes now, I settle again. My body winds back down way quicker instead of ramping up. And that one change has meant everything. 🥹 Because slowly, the dominoes fell back the other way. I'm no longer as foggy. I'm sharp in meetings again. I've stopped snapping at the kids, which means I actually get to ask about their day and laugh with them like I did before. And the best part: me and Mark are us again. Funnily enough, his work's gone mad lately, so these days he's the one getting less sleep than me. How the tables turn lol. The nine o'clock dread has gone too. I actually look forward to my bed now. Imagine that. And the extra bits, I never expected them to do anything, but the morning stiffness I'd been putting down to getting older has eased right off. My hair's thicker than it's been in years. Between sleeping properly and liking what I see in the mirror, I'm just calmer. Less anxious about everything. More like myself. My boss stopped me in the corridor a few days ago and said, "You know, you seem much more like yourself these days." I just smiled. If he only knew he started it. 😄 💛 So if you're the woman lying awake at 3am right now, wide awake for no reason you can name, dreading your own bed, please hear this. You're not going mad. It's not stress, and it's not just your age. Your body has lost the thing that used to switch it off at night. And that, at least, is something you can do something about. I lost two winters to it. You don't have to. ⚠️ Quick warning, it does sell out. I got caught waiting on a restock once, so there's a spare in my cupboard now. And that guarantee is 90 days. Three months to feel it on your own pillow, and every penny back if you don't. 👇 I've popped the link below. It's the UK one, the one with the marine collagen, the glycine-rich sort, plus the bovine and the hyaluronic acid. That's the one that matters. From one member of the 3am club to the rest of you — there's a way back to sleep. Night night, ladies. x