How to Sleep After a Hot Flash

Hot flashes are a huge factor for women when they sleep. I had one patient call them power surges, where in the middle of the night she just had all of this heat and all of this energy and had a really tough time going back to bed. Believe it or not, there are some interesting products on the market that are pretty cool for this. Uh, there's these things called wicking pajamas. Now this is very similar to the dry fit, or the things that you see the athletes wear, but it actually works much the way a wick does. So a wick in a candle actually pulls the wax up into the wick, otherwise, if you lit the wick, it would just burn straight through the candle. The same process is done with these wicking pajamas, is it pulls the sweat off of you, then there's a second layer that's got a very large surface area and allows the sweat to evaporate, so women aren't waking up in soaking wet clothing, being cold. Because what happens is they get this hot flash or power surge, they begin to sweat to reduce that temperature and then all of a sudden their clothing is wet and they've already made their bedroom as cold as humanly possible, and then they get the shakes or they get the shivers, and they are not feeling so great. So these wicking pajamas are actually quite effective. There are other things that you can do. Believe it or not, there's a device out there, a chillable pillow that you can use and there's an insert that you put into it and it allows for because remember, you lose most of your heat through your head and that's where you feel a lot of your heat to again maintain sort of a constant temperature. But if your hormones go kooky, you're going to have a hot flash whether you like it or not.