Cooling Solutions

Hot flushes and night sweats are the most common symptoms that women experience during the menopause years. There are many ways you can help yourself through these debilitating, embarrassing and exhausting symptoms. Here are some tips that women have found useful:

• Stop smoking if you can; ring Quitline on 0800 002200 for help.
• Increase your water intake to 8 medium-size glasses per day, preferably filtered or glass bottled water.
• Have luke-warm drinks rather than piping hot ones.
• Eat regular small meals, reducing blood sugar dips and the potential a large meal has to trigger a hot flush.
• Try power walking (fast walking, swinging your arms back and forth as you walk along) to remind your body how to cope with temperature extremes and to help with weight loss, which also reduces hot flushes in overweight women.
• Establish a daily relaxation practice (particularly during your hot flushes) such as deep abdominal breathing techniques or visualisation. This will also help to reduce your stress levels, which can make hot flushes worse.
• Eat plenty of phytoestrogens daily. Tinned beans such as red kidney beans are the easiest to regularly use in your meals.
• Try to avoid the foods which trigger hot flushes, such as hot spicy food, black pepper, alcohol, or caffeine.
• Wear natural fibre, loose fitting, layered clothes so you can easily remove and replace them to maintain the right temperature, for example cardigans and scarves.
• Wear moisture absorbing sleepwear; see the wonderfully comfortable, pretty range we supply.
• Buy a fan to carry with you or a static one for your bedroom or office.
• Avoid having hot baths, showers, saunas and steam rooms.
• Consider changing to loose sheets and blankets, rather than a duvet. Try sleeping with the window open so that you can control your temperature more easily.
• Try using a Chillow pillow, a fluid-cooled memory foam cushion which keeps you cool by absorbing your heat. A cooling-bottle rather than a hot-bottle!
• Consider buying a Ladycare magnet, a small discreet magnet that attaches to your pants, which many women find helps with hot flushes.