Nas, these were my worst symptoms... sorry to say, only raising estrogen quite a lot has helped.
I do think cortisol was involved but not as the cause but as another symptom. As in - insomnia itself raises cortisol. I think sex hormones drop which causes cortisol to go high.
I was taking everything that exists to lower cortisol (zinc, ashwaganda, Alpha GPC etc) and targeting the times of day when mine was high and it wasn't doing anything with my sleep. Only getting estrogen up has helped but I still have residual symptoms and would like to go even higher - but I'm waiting for results of bloods I'm getting done next week because my dose is high.
I was generally fine during the day (albeit a zombie from lack of sleep), then at night:
- As soon as I got in bed and laid down and started to get sleepy, my heart would race up to 95bpm - including during my sleep. (My resting heart rate in my sleep is usually around 40bpm, which is very slow, so this was ridiculous.)
- My heart would also feel like it was beating really hard. If I looked down at my chest, I could see my aortic pulse and if I turned on my side I could hear it in my ear on the pillow.
- I would have inner tremors which sometimes came on early evening in my feet but got worst at night. At their worse they felt like they were in my core, as if the bed itself was moving under me.
- I would also get hypnic jerks or startling awake every time I began to fall asleep. I would startle to any noise in the house (even if it was a normal house hold noise I wasn't bothered about). Sometimes this was a physical jerk of muscles and sometimes it felt like a psychological startle where I was suddenly awake.
These are/were my awful nighttime symptoms I have been on a quest to address for years now. And as I said only getting my E into the 450-650pmol range (estimated - TBC next week) has helped. But I think maybe you can't take E, so not sure that helps much. I was prescribed bisoprolol (beta blocker) which did pretty much nothing so gave up on that.
