Managing Hot Flashes and Night Sweats

If you feel like you’re contributing to global warming every time you have a hot flash, you’re in good company. Approximately 6,000 women reach menopause each day in the United States, and 75% experience hot flashes and night sweats.

While misery loves company, these numbers may be of little consolation if you’re in a constant body temperature battle that leaves you uncomfortable and fatigued and doing a lot of laundry to freshen up your sweat-soaked sheets.

At Southeast Urogyn in Jackson, Mississippi, many of our patients come to us for help in combating menopause-related hot flashes and night sweats. Fortunately, there’s a lot we can do to manage your hot flashes and put out the fire. Let’s take a look.

What’s turning up the heat?

Your body’s temperature is regulated by your hypothalamus, which acts as a thermostat and controls your body’s heating and cooling systems through your blood vessels, skin, and sweat glands. This information answers the “what” part of your hot flashes, but the “why” remains a bit of a mystery.

We do know that during perimenopause and menopause, your hormone levels start to change dramatically. This change appears to affect your hypothalamus, causing it to fire up out of the blue. While we don’t know why this happens, there’s a lot we can do to help you manage your symptoms, both on your own and with our help.

Getting help

If your hot flashes and night sweats are continuing unabated and disrupting your life in significant ways, hormone therapy can help. Since your fluctuating hormones are at the heart of the problem, it makes sense to find ways to regulate them. While this may sound easy enough, regulating your hormones is tricky science, and we do our best not to get in nature’s way. To accomplish this, we offer bioidentical hormone therapy, which delivers chemically identical hormones that regulate your levels. Each woman is different and may require different levels of hormone replacement, so we tailor the treatment to fit your specific needs.

We also believe that lifestyle changes can go a long way toward diminishing your hot flashes and night sweats. For women who are overweight, a sign tied to increased hot flashes, we work to devise appropriate weight loss programs.

Stress also appears to affect the frequency and severity of hot flashes, so we counsel our patients to try relaxation techniques that do wonders for destressing.

Ultimately, many of these lifestyle changes can dramatically affect your menopausal journey. Not to mention, all of these changes are extremely beneficial for your overall health and wellness, allowing you to better enjoy this stage in your life.

If you want to shorten and minimize the side effects of this transition, we can design a multipronged approach that tackles the issue from many different angles.

Do it yourself

If you’d rather let your hot flashes run their course without intervention, we’ve pulled together a few tips that may make you more comfortable:

• Dress in layers of clothes.
• Wear clothes that quickly wick away moisture.
• Wear loose clothing.
• Always have cold water handy.
• Avoid overly-heated areas, inside and out.
• Keep a towel by your bed for night sweats (or sleep on one).
• Layer your bed with blankets that you can add and subtract easily.
• Keep dry clothes handy (in your car and at work and home).

We’ve also identified some common triggers that you’d do well to avoid, such as spicy foods, alcohol, caffeine, and smoking.

If you’re tired of feeling like an out-of-control furnace, we’d be happy to help. Give us a call or use the online booking tool on this website to schedule an appointment.