Hi friends, settle in. Grab your coffee or your tea, whatever your drink of choice is.
I’m Seanna Aker, founder of The Sleep Nurse. A few weeks ago I shared my first podcast episode, Genesis Started With Light, Medicine Starts With Pills. If you haven’t heard it, go listen. That was the big picture. Today I want to get more personal.
First, I owe you an apology for missing last week. I got sick. It happens. I’m human, having a human experience. I rested, I let my voice recover, and I’m so glad to be back with you.
On Sunday, October 11, I turned 54. (I almost typed 24. I must feel 24.) Birthdays have always made me reflect even more than New Year’s does. What have I done? Where am I going? What have I accomplished? In the past they hit hard, because I wasn’t doing the work that lights me up. It took me time to figure that out. This year felt different. I felt gratitude, peace, and real excitement for what’s coming with The Sleep Nurse, because I know I can be your guide and show you a new way to feel better, sleep better, and live better.
A fair warning before we go any further: this post is my opinion and my story. It comes from my own experience living a circadian lifestyle as best I can. Am I perfect at it? No. Was I perfect while I was sick? Absolutely not. I still went outside in the morning, because it’s a priority and I know how much it matters, but it’s a balance. Is all of this anecdotal? Yes. And most of us start paying attention and making changes because we heard somebody else’s story and it touched us. That’s what this is.
As always, the five lines I live by:
Clarity instead of complexity.
Rhythm instead of constant optimization.
Practical action instead of information overload.
Self-responsibility instead of perfection.
Human connection instead of impersonal instruction.
I hope this feels like a conversation between friends, even though I’m not sitting right next to you.
Three things I don’t struggle with at 54
54 feels big to me. As I was thinking about it, I realized there are some things a lot of you struggle with that I really don’t, and haven’t.
3am wake-ups. Have I had one? A couple of times. Is it a consistent thing? No.
Hot flashes and night sweats. I’ve had maybe a handful of hot flashes in my entire life, and just a few night sweats. I’ll explain why I think that is.
Glasses. I used to wear reading glasses, and I needed glasses to drive. After our last move, I went to get my new driver’s license and I didn’t need my glasses anymore. That surprised me, because I’d worn them for a good part of my adult life.
I’m not saying any of this to brag. This is why I started The Sleep Nurse. I want more women to free themselves and feel better in ways they didn’t imagine, ways that go beyond sleep. The deep dive on how it all works is in my second podcast, Sleep 101, and I’ll keep building that series. This post is about what it looks like when you live it.
Where I came from
I’ve been a registered nurse for over 32 years, and I worked night shift for two decades. It really messed up my sleep. I’m the mom of three kids, and through my 30s I leaned heavily on sleep aids, like Benadryl and Ambien, whatever would let me sleep in the middle of the day so I could feel safe taking care of people in the middle of the night.
What I didn’t understand then is something I say all the time now: sedation is not sleep.
How I think about my own health
This is just my philosophy, and it’s what I follow in my own life. Start with what’s free. Light. Rhythm. Going outside. Exercise. These are things everyone has the opportunity to do. After that comes functional support, the building blocks. And after that, if it’s needed, mainstream medicine. It is needed, just maybe not in the way we’ve used it in the past. I think we’re skipping so many steps.
I also know all our bodies are different, and what works for me might not work for you. But over the past few years in the circadian world, I’ve heard the stories of so many women who had terrible hot flashes, started living a circadian lifestyle, and watched them go away. The same goes for night sweats. We can take anecdotal evidence, which is really just someone else’s lived experience, and get curious. Will this work for me? It might.
1. The 3am wake-up
Everyone talks about 3am wake-ups. “It’s your cortisol.” It is. “It’s your blood sugar.” It could be. But the thing the food and workout conversations rarely cover is the impact of light on your entire body and system.
First, how common is this? If you’re a perimenopausal woman, about 56% of us are sleeping less than seven hours a night. You’re not alone, and you’re not broken. This is something we were never taught.
Yes, your cortisol is rising. But why? Stress is the big one, and apps to de-stress help. There’s also a biological piece. Deep in your brain you have a master clock, and it runs on natural light from the sun. Special cells in your eyes pick up blue light, around 460 to 484 nanometers, and send a message back to that clock: it’s daytime.
Light carries data. Every time you turn on a lamp or step outside, that light travels straight to your master clock and helps decide what happens in your body at that time of day. It’s a biological signal, not just something that helps you brush your teeth or make dinner.
Melatonin isn’t a sleeping pill either. It’s a timing signal. Your body temperature drops, bottoming out around 4:30 in the morning, and then cortisol starts climbing to wake you up. Every cell in your body has its own clock. When those clocks are confused, because you were on screens too late or indoors all day, I call it clock chaos. The signals collide around 3am. Your body is trying to send the cortisol because it doesn’t know it’s 3am. As far as your cells can tell, it’s 6 or 7.
What I do about it. I go outside every morning. I try to be in my backyard with my dog, barefoot in the grass, and the beach is my absolute favorite. If I have to be at work early, I work it into my life, because I’m a nurse and I get it, we all have places to be. Unless it’s pouring rain, I don’t wear sunglasses, and I drive almost everywhere with my window cracked or down. Windows and sunglasses both block certain wavelengths of light, so the goal is to let natural light actually reach your eyes. I prioritize light at every moment of my day.
Fun Fact: One night of only four hours of sleep can drop your natural killer cells by 70%. One night. Seventy percent. Those are the cells that help keep you healthy and fight off the colds, flus, and viruses going around right now. Sleep isn’t a luxury.
I can’t prove that keeping my circadian rhythm on schedule is what stopped my 3am wake-ups. What I can tell you is that I don’t need an alarm clock anymore. My signals are so on cue that, unless I’m sick like I was last week, I wake up at about the same time every day, between 6 and 6:30. I can’t tell you how much better that is for my system than the jolt of an alarm. You just wake up naturally and know: oh, it’s daytime.
2. Hot flashes and night sweats
I’ve had a handful of hot flashes, never to the point of being drenched. For those of you who experience that, I’m so sorry. I have had a few night sweats too, and here’s the interesting part. They showed up when I got really sloppy with my circadian rhythm. Some of that was just life, right? But I wasn’t making it a priority. When I got back on schedule, they went away.
And as I said earlier, in some of the circles I’m in, other women have shared the same thing. So I’m here to share my experience and echo theirs.
I wouldn’t be The Sleep Nurse if I didn’t sprinkle in a little science, so here it is. Your body temperature runs on that same master clock, the suprachiasmatic nucleus. When the clock is steady, and we’re mindful of our light, the temperature swings tend to be far less extreme.
Estrogen plays a role too. In perimenopause, as estrogen declines, our temperature tolerance window narrows, so small fluctuations that wouldn’t have made us blink in our younger years now feel like extremes. There’s a correlation there. The good news is that aligning your clocks is a bit like when we change the clocks in the fall so we’re all on the same time again. Your body does that every single day, and when it does, the extremes shrink.
A 2024 review in Menopause found that around 69% of women report sleep disturbance at this stage. Back in 2006, a study linked severe hot flashes with chronic insomnia. It only makes sense. If you’re having hot flashes and night sweats, you’re not going to sleep well. You could call them sisters of the same issue.
I know some women have found relief with HRT, and that’s awesome. I just like to fix the root. One of my coworkers told me she’s struggled to get her patch because so many women are asking for them right now. That’s one reason I love starting at the bottom with the free things. If you can’t get your patch, you may still be okay. We’re trying to shrink the extremes by getting those clocks aligned.
Here’s the part I love most. It’s free. It isn’t harmful. It doesn’t react or interact with any medication you’re currently taking. So many of us ask, “How is this supplement going to interact with that medication?” This doesn’t do that. It asks you to go outside and be mindful of your natural light and your artificial light.
So what if you got curious? What if you committed to it for 21 days? Morning light. Dim evenings. The same bedtime. How would you feel? In my life, when I lead with curiosity, that’s when the magic happens. And when I take the time to listen and be still. Those are the two times I’ve seen the biggest shifts.
3. Saying goodbye to my glasses
This last one is a little crazy. It lines up exactly with when I became consistent and intentional about going outside in the morning at sunrise.
My husband would say correlation is not causation, and I understand that. But again, this is free. It doesn’t hurt you. It doesn’t interact with any medication. So why not get curious? What’s the worst thing that happens? I’m still wearing my glasses and I’m still having hot sweats.
There is some science worth watching here. Researchers are starting to look at how red and near-infrared light affects the eyes. A team at University College London has studied it, and that work measured changes in color contrast, not reading vision, so I’m not telling you it replaces glasses. I’m telling you it’s an area getting attention.
Just look at social media. I see ads for red light panels everywhere. Med spas have popped up all over, and they charge a lot of money to sit you under a red light panel inside their office. You can go outside and get red and near-infrared light from the sun for free. Panels may help some people, and I’m not knocking them. I just like to start with free.
Here’s one more thing I find interesting. When you walk in nature, plants reflect a lot of that near-infrared light back to you. And in Japan, forest bathing, called shinrin-yoku, is a recognized practice. It’s mostly studied for stress, but it shows how seriously the idea of nature as medicine is taken.
What ties it all together
Light. Consistent light. That’s the thread. It’s not once a week, and it’s not perfection. When you make it a consistent practice, that’s when you’ll see change. That’s why I keep saying: get curious, and give it 21 days.
Start realistically. You don’t need a perfect routine, just one that works with your schedule. If you can roll your window down on the way to work like I do, roll it down. Take your sunglasses off. If you have time to step outside and look at the sunrise, go look at the sunrise. That’s the whole point.
There’s also a national movement called Nature Is Medicine, and I’m completely behind it. It wants you to get outside, go for walks, and be more conscious of your sunlight. Part of me wonders whether we really need our physicians to prescribe going outside in nature. That’s one of the big reasons I’m building this community. I’m excited about how we can support one another, and with the right tools, how we can all start to feel much better.
A quick recap
My birthday was fabulous. My family treated me so well, and my oldest daughter, who’s studying abroad in Europe, called me first thing in the morning. It was wonderful.
The three things at 54 that I don’t struggle with are:
I don’t get up at 3am, unless I’m sick, and even then it’s rare.
I rarely have hot flashes or night sweats.
I no longer need my glasses, which is kind of odd at 54.
What I hope you take away is the importance of morning light. It’s the anchor of everything I talk about here. Light is the foundation of sleep, and sleep is the foundation of health. It starts with light, just like Genesis Started With Light. Sleep 101 goes deeper into how light affects our biology and why we need to respect it, whether it’s natural light or artificial light.
Get curious
What would happen if you took 21 days to build a consistent morning light routine? I know everybody says this, but I hope you understand the why. It resets your clock. It helps your entire body function the way it’s meant to.
What would happen if you dimmed the lights at night and respected the darkness, so you could make more melatonin and get your cortisol and melatonin back in balance? What would happen if you stuck to a consistent bedtime? That’s another way we ground our routine in our bodies.
This was meant to be a casual conversation with a friend, sharing the wins I’ve had by being consistent and intentional with my light. It all started with light, and I’ve added things on from there.
One more thing. I’ve been quietly testing something new called Alignés. It’s the French word, and you’ll hear more about it soon. I think it’s really special, and I can’t wait to share it with this community.
I feel so much better than I did last week, and I’m grateful for the chance to share all of this with you. So go get curious, and see what a consistent light routine looks like for you.
Align your day. Restore your night.
This post is for educational purposes only and is not medical advice. Talk with your healthcare provider before making changes to your health routine.
References
Irwin, Michael, et al. “Partial Sleep Deprivation Reduces Natural Killer Cell Activity in Humans.” Psychosomatic Medicine, 1994.
Jeffery et al. (UCL). Research on red and near-infrared light and retinal mitochondrial function.
Ohayon, Maurice M. “Severe Hot Flashes Are Associated with Chronic Insomnia.” Archives of Internal Medicine, 2006.
“Sleep Disturbance Associated with the Menopause.” Menopause, 2024.
Vahratian, Anjel. “Sleep Duration and Quality Among Women Aged 40 to 59, by Menopausal Status.” NCHS Data Brief No. 286, 2017.
