Wide awake at two, exhausted at the same time. Two systems, not one problem.
Being tired and being able to sleep are two different systems, and they can fail independently.
Tiredness is pressure that builds the longer you are awake. Sleep needs that pressure and a nervous system that has actually stood down. If your day runs on constant low-level demand, the standing down does not happen automatically when you get into bed.
So you lie there exhausted and alert at once. Or you fall asleep easily, then wake between one and three with your brain running a list.
This is common, it is not a character flaw, and it is not solved by trying harder to relax. Here is what is usually underneath it.
Your nervous system does not separate physical work from mental work. It responds to demand.
Holding a running list of everything that could go wrong is a form of vigilance, and vigilance has a physical setting. Muscles hold slightly more tone. Breathing sits slightly higher in the chest. The system stays part-way switched on, ready, because from its point of view the next thing is always coming.
Fifteen minutes of that costs nothing. Fifteen months of it is a different proposition.
A body that stays part-way on does not switch off cleanly at night. That is the mechanism behind exhausted and wide awake at the same time.
Sleep runs in cycles, and you surface briefly between them all night without noticing. Whether you go back under depends on what your system does in that gap.
If it is settled, you turn over and it is morning. If it is running warm, that brief surfacing is enough for it to come fully online, and once it is online it starts working, because working is what it has been doing all day.
Nothing has gone wrong. You are awake in a gap you would normally sleep through.
She is tired and switched on at once. Not relaxed and tired. Wired.
Then the thing that surprises people most. One good night does not fix it. She gets a rare full night, wakes up, and still feels like she has not slept. That is the tell. The deficit is not from last night. It has been building for months, and a single night cannot pay it back.
This is where standard sleep advice breaks down. Nearly all of it assumes you control your own night. Wind down earlier. Get off the screen. Keep the room dark. All reasonable, and all beside the point, because the thing waking her is not a screen. It is another person, and that person is not taking advice.
So there are two problems wearing the same clothes. The quality of the sleep she gets, which she can influence. And the fact that it keeps being broken, which she largely cannot.
Most women only work on the first, because it is the only one anyone offers help with. Then they conclude they are doing something wrong.
They are not. The tank is not slow to fill because she is doing it badly. It is slow to fill because someone else keeps emptying it.
In the first year, a mother's recovery is not independent of her baby's nights. The two run off the same tank.
Any plan that treats her sleep as her own problem to solve is missing half of the problem, which is usually why nothing she has tried has worked. It is not that the advice was wrong. It was written for someone whose nights belong to them.
Naming that out loud changes what a reasonable expectation looks like. The goal in this stretch is not eight unbroken hours. It is building enough capacity that the broken nights cost less.
We test heart rate variability. It is a simple, non-invasive measure of how readily the body moves between effort and recovery.
It matters here because tiredness is a hard thing to talk about. Everyone with a baby is tired, and by this point she has usually stopped expecting anyone to take it seriously, including herself. A measurement puts something concrete in the conversation.
It does not tell us how she feels, and it is not a diagnosis. It is one more piece of information sitting alongside what we find with our hands, and something we can look at again later rather than relying on whether she happened to have a good week.
If you are in your forties, disturbed sleep and early-hours waking are commonly reported features of perimenopause. That conversation belongs with your GP, and it is worth having, because there are options.
We are not hormone experts and we will not pretend to be. What we can speak to is the other half of it, which is what a body carrying sustained load looks like from the table.
Both things can be true at once. Treating one of them has never fixed the other, which is why the GP appointment and the structural assessment are not alternatives to each other.
Take pressure off the system, not off the calendar. The commitments that cost most are not the important ones. They are the ones that arrive at short notice into a week that already had no gaps. Those get counted least and cost most.
Give the system a real off switch. Twenty minutes where nothing is asked of you and nobody can reach you. Not scrolling on the couch with one ear on the house. Actually off. If that sounds impossible, that is the finding, not the objection.
Load your body deliberately. Push, pull, squat, carry. Twice a week. Building capacity is the one thing here that raises how much your body has to spend, rather than rationing what is left.
Make the GP appointment if you are in that age bracket.
If you have been running on broken sleep for months, if ordinary days take longer to recover from than they used to, or if you are carrying tension you cannot put down, it is worth understanding what your body is currently holding.
That is what an assessment looks at. Not the tiredness. What sits underneath it structurally, and where capacity has been drawn down.
You are not imagining it and you are not doing something wrong. Two things are pulling at the same few hours, and each thing you have tried was aimed at only one of them.
If you would like an assessment, call the clinic on 08 6280 1210 or book a visit online.
Dr Kyna Hamilton is co-founder of Wild Chiropractic in Shenton Park. She is Webster Certified, trained as a birth doula before she trained as a chiropractor, and has spent over a decade working with pregnant patients and families.
Wild Chiropractic is a nervous system-led chiropractic practice in Shenton Park, Perth.
