Are wicking sheets the answer to Tamoxifen night sweats?

Quick poll: holler if you get enough sleep every night and wake up feeling refreshed every morning!

… Yeah, me neither.

Learning I had cancer meant that anxiety pretty much took over my life. Yes, it was understandable, but all the understanding in the world didn’t change the fact that my reality was waking up every night at 3am with nightmares and insomnia.

And as Tamoxifen side effects gradually transformed my body into a menopausal inferno, my partner spent more and more nights perched on the opposite edge of the bed, trying to build a buffer between him and his pizza oven of a girlfriend.

(Sidenote: even when my body is a solar flare, my feet are still frozen. Life definitely isn’t fair, people.)

Best sheets for menopause hot flashes

As humans, we are intended to spend about a third of our lives asleep, and with good reason. Our bodies need sleep to heal, and if your body is anything like mine, it needs all the healing it can get. So it adds insult to injury to note that we cancer patients report insomnia up to three times more often than the rest of the population. If you’re missing out on sleep, your body is missing out on a lot of good stuff, from immunity to metabolism. What’s more, your sleep-deprived body has a hard time regulating these hormones:

If that isn’t scary enough, one study linked lack of sleep to breast cancer recurrence. EEK.

At its essence, sleep=quality of life. And who couldn’t use more of that?

My favorite place to sleep is snuggled into my boyfriend’s armpit, so our opposite-edges sleeping arrangement was far from ideal. In the pursuit of temperature regulation, we installed a ceiling fan and put an AC unit in the bedroom window, but I’d still wake up sweaty… and with my BF out of reach.

He and I are both athletic, so we totally understand the importance of performance wicking fabrics to stay comfortable when we work out. (When I see someone sweating through an actual sweatshirt, I die a little inside.) So why did it take me so long to connect the dots that wicking sheets could be the best sheets for menopause?

Cooling sheets for hot flashes

Enter the Original Performance Sheets from SHEEX, a luxury performance sheet brand that was founded by two women (Susan and Michelle) who are waaaaay smarter than I am! The sheets are made from moisture-wicking fabric to help hot sleepers chill out. Wicking sheets seemed like exactly what my night sweats needed, and I couldn’t wait to try them out.

best wicking sheets for menopause hot flashes
My cat can’t wait to try them out, either.

The ladies at SHEEX have definitely managed to marry form and function. Our bed looks all dressed up, and the sheets are SO SOFT. And maybe it’s just me, but I am SO TIRED of fitted sheets slipping off the mattress—but SHEEX stay put really well. I even let the kids jump on the bed as a test, which SHEEX passed with flying colors.

But would the cooling sheets keep me cool enough for an all-night snuggle? There was no better time to test if they performed when the thermometer hit triple-digit heat where I live.

Spoiler alert: they performed.

Three remarkable things happened my first night of sleeping in these sheets:

  1. I didn’t wake up sweaty.
  2. I snuggled!
  3. I slept for OVER ELEVEN HOURS.
best cooling sheets for menopause hot flashes
#sleepgoals

So if you’re a hot flashing, night sweating, man repelling tropical storm of a menopausal insomniac like yours truly, you should seriously think about slipping between some SHEEX tonight.

BRB, going to go spend a third of my life under these sheets.

Best cooling sheets for menopause hot flashes

wicking sheets for hot flashes
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