At some point in the last year a woman in the largest perimenopause community posted that she had started eating a little applesauce when she woke at three in the morning, and that it put her back to sleep. We have not found her original post. What we have is the thank-you note.
THANK YOU. I bought applesauce pouches and have been eating them when I get up between 2-3 am. I eat one, go pee, wash hands, back to bed. I am out again in ten minutes and I can sleep another 3-5 hours (work alarm depending). It's been a week and I can't believe it works!
The title was Whoever posted about 3 am applesauce. It scored 1,318 and drew 255 comments, which put it among the ten highest-scoring posts of the year in that community. Nobody selling anything was involved. It is a peer-developed experiment, and it is worth reading closely, including the two comments that push back on it.
Does eating something before bed, or at 3 a.m., stop the wake-up?
Eating something small at the 3 a.m. wake-up is reported by some women in perimenopause communities as getting them back to sleep within minutes, and one thank-you post about it scored 1,318. It does not stop the waking itself in any of the accounts we read; the women describe still waking, eating, and then falling back asleep faster. Nothing in the thread is a trial, and one of its comments is a woman with a glucose monitor whose own numbers did not support the usual explanation. So the honest answer is that it is a cheap, reasonable thing to test for two weeks, written down, with your teeth looked after.
Two distinctions matter before you try it.
At the wake-up is not the same as before bed. The applesauce thread is about eating at three, not before sleep. The before-bed version is a different experiment, and it lives on our 3 a.m. page under the heading Let the second half of the night have some fuel: a proper evening meal with real protein, and a modest snack before bed if dinner was early or small. Run them one at a time or you will never know which one did anything.
Falling back asleep is not the same as not waking. Read the posts and the gain is in the second half: she still wakes between two and three, and the snack shortens the time awake. That is still a real gain. Twenty minutes awake instead of two hours is a different next day.
What the women in the thread said happened
The highest-scoring comment in the thread, at 36, was not about blood sugar at all.
I love that! My husband would act like a meerkat - turn up 2 inches from my face asking what I was eating and could he have some, too. I would be wide awake for at least an hour afterwards. 😁
It is the most practical line on the page. Whatever is helping in these accounts, it is quiet, quick and dull, and anything that turns three in the morning into a conversation undoes it.
Then the converts:
Holy shit. If this works for me?????? I will buy everyone in this thread applesauce
That scored 16. And a few comments down, at 3, the shortest result report in the thread:
Ate my first bedside applesauce last night at 2:30am. Ty. I slept till 5.
Others had their own versions. One, at 9:
A bit of juice also works. I call it my night juice.
Another, at 3:
I eat whole apples but similar
None of these is evidence in the sense a clinician would use the word. They are women reporting what happened to them, from bed, at three in the morning, and a good many of them say it worked.
Is the 3 a.m. wake-up a blood sugar problem?
Low blood sugar is the explanation the applesauce thread runs on: the idea that the tank is low by three in the morning and the body wakes you to deal with it. More Herself cannot tell you whether that is what is happening in your body, and we will not print a mechanism we cannot source.
What we can print is the most useful comment in the thread. It scored 9.
I use a continuous glucose monitor because I'm a type 1 diabetic, so I pretty much always know what my glucose is. I wake up between 2 AM and 4 AM on a regular basis (as I have been since I was about 44) and have seen no particular pattern of low blood sugar or falling blood sugar at all.
She was careful not to overrule anyone:
If it works for you, keep doing it!!!
and she ended with "basically: YMMV" (your mileage may vary).
That is one woman, with a condition of her own, so it does not settle anything for anyone else. But it is the only person in the thread with numbers rather than a theory, and her numbers say the 3 a.m. wake happened without the dip. Taken together with the reports above, the fair reading is that something about the snack helps some women back to sleep, and the community is not yet sure what.
That is exactly the situation in which a written experiment beats an explanation.
When it is not perimenopause
Before the experiment, the signs that mean this is not a snack question.
- If you have diabetes or take a medicine that lowers blood sugar, and you wake shaking, sweating, confused or with a pounding heart, contact the clinician who manages it. Do not treat it as a sleep hack.
- Chest pain, breathlessness, or fainting at night means emergency care. Go now.
- New, constant thirst, getting up to pass urine many times a night, or losing weight without trying. Book an appointment this week and say all three out loud, not just the sleep.
- Waking hungry every single night with no change to how you eat, or waking drenched, is worth raising rather than feeding.
- Snoring, stopping breathing, or morning headaches. Ask about a sleep study; the 3 a.m. page says why that request is worth making.
If none of those apply, the experiment is reasonable.
How to run the experiment this week
The point is to find out whether it helps you, not whether it helped a stranger. That needs one change at a time and a record.
Write the nights down first
For three or four nights before you change anything, write down when you went to bed, when you woke, how long you were awake and what you had eaten after six in the evening. A line each morning is enough. Without a before, you cannot see an after.
Then test the thread's version, quietly
Something small by the bed, so that you do not walk to a lit kitchen. Low light, no phone, no clock. Eat it, go to the bathroom, rinse, back to bed. That sequence is the original post's, and the order matters less than keeping it dull. Agree in advance with anyone who shares the bed that three in the morning is not a time for questions.
Look after your teeth
The second comment that pushes back came from a woman who said she was a dentist. It scored 11.
Please rinse your mouth with water or fluoride mouthwash while in the bathroom after these midnight snacks.
She said she was worried about cavities appearing out of nowhere from middle-of-the-night food. The reply beneath it, at 4, is the best line in the thread:
My teeth are plastic, but good advice
A glass of water by the bed and a rinse before lying down costs nothing. If you are eating during the night regularly, tell your dentist; the gums and dry mouth page has more on what to ask.
Keep the before-bed version separate
If two weeks of the 3 a.m. version does nothing, try the evening version from the 3 a.m. page for two weeks instead: real protein at dinner, and a modest snack before bed if dinner was early or small. This is also where weight-loss habits and sleep can pull against each other. A woman eating very lightly in the evening to manage her weight is running a sleep experiment too, whether she means to or not.
Change nothing else for the fortnight
If you start the snack, cut the evening wine and move your training in the same week, the record cannot tell you which one mattered. One change, two weeks, then decide.
Why a thread about applesauce matters
What is striking about this thread is not the applesauce. It is that a group of women, awake at an hour designed for nobody, worked out an experiment, ran it on themselves, reported back, and then let a diabetic with a glucose monitor and a dentist poke holes in it in the comments, and upvoted them for it.
That is how an experiment is supposed to go. It came free, it named its own limits, and nobody tried to sell anybody a pouch. If you try it, run it the way they did: honestly, written down, and with your teeth rinsed.