How to Remain Upbeat About Menopause
There is a lot of misinformation around about the "dreaded" menopause. This, in turn, takes a perfectly natural occurrence in women's lives and turns it into a disease or a syndrome needing treatment fast, making women anxious about what to expect. Yet, menopause is a natural and inevitable part of women's lives, something to be celebrated and respected rather than feared and rejected. Unraveling social and profit motives for making menopause into an ogre requires taking a few steps back and looking at menopause with better informed eyes. Happy journeying!
Steps
- Avoid the horror stories. Women's magazines find all the women who have suffered shocking menopausal changes and put these stories out there as the average experience when they are clearly unique and contextual.
- Avoid the temptation to take treatments at the first hot flash. The pharmaceutical companies want women to fear the oncoming inevitably of an important life shift because it primes clients to want hormone replacement therapies (no matter the risks accompanying these artificial solutions to a principally emotional and societal problem).
- Look for alternative treatments. There are numerous plant-based remedies available for helping ease the symptoms of menopause. This is an article in itself and it is a good idea to see both an alternative therapist and to speak with your doctor. Be careful - plants remedies have their own issues and potential for toxicity. Other alternatives include looking at eating a nutritious and healthy diet, exercising regularly, and doing nothing about the changes but just letting them happen. Radical, but it's what most women have done throughout history. The problem is often in our perception that menopause needs treatment. On the whole, for the majority of women, it simply doesn't. What might need treatment are the symptoms that accompany it: the anxiety, the sense of purposelessness, the worry about self-esteem, etc. Reflect on this carefully.
- Keep in mind that you're still a woman. Society creates anxiety about losing a sense of womanhood because a woman is no longer fertile; yet you are no less a woman than prior to menopause! You are simply a woman who has undergone reproductive changes, not changes to the essence of what makes you a woman.
- Get informed. If you don't know what menopause is, you will be vulnerable to the stories, the pressure to undergo HRT, and the worry that your changes are out of your control. Information is power; power to make informed choices, to understand what is truly involved in menopause and to look around and realize that many women have passed through this passage of life and come out the other side just as wonderful as they were prior to menopause. Knowledge also lets you be the judge of when your menopausal symptoms do need real medical intervention because they're making you miserable for whatever reason, be it hormonal, depression, or pain induced.
- Learn to use anti-stress techniques. If you feel stressed during menopause, the fluctuating hormones are probably going to simply add to these feelings. Rather than reaching for a pill, consider ways to reduce the stress. Can you handle your workload differently? Can you take up yoga, meditation, a gym class? Perhaps you might be in need of offloading a lot of negative self-talk that has built up all these years - getting counseling can be a good way out for someone in this position.
- Embrace change. We're not very good at embracing change at any time of our life. Many of us would rather shut our eyes and be there already doing the new way of life in the future, without having to go through the transition period. That's only natural; change can be painful emotionally because it challenges us and presents us with the unknown, the new. This is why being informed is important. But it is also important to actively embrace change and to be accepting that this is the next important and valid stage in your life. It is also a time when more freedom comes for many women as families grow up, and a new independence can be one reward of life at this time
- Keep enjoying life. The best thing is this - you're alive. Appreciate that and love it. Many women find that this is a time for reflection about where they have been and where they are headed. It can mean the end of some relationships, careers, lifestyles, and the start of completely new ones. It can mean that you finally do what it is you always wanted to do. Much of the reflection comes from the fact that menopause is a real mortality reminder; that feeling that we're here for so long, so we'd better make the most of it
Tips
Know your facts. Most women tend to go through menopause in their forties, with the last period happening around 49–51 years of age. Smokers tend to have earlier final periods and lower bone density as a result of the smoking. These are only averages; a number of women experience their periods finishing a lot earlier. The important thing is to not listen to Great Aunt Agatha without doing your research. Family experiences are not necessarily yours.
Know your symptoms. All women are different – some women experience few or no symptoms, other women experience many, and others are in between. Typical symptoms include:
- Hot flashes (approx. 40% of women do not have this experience)
- Night sweats
- Vaginal dryness
- Periods can vary all over the place: lighter, heavier, flooding, erratic, regular, more frequent, total disappearance
The completion of menopause is said to be when you have not had a period for 12 months.
You still have estrogen after menopause. It is just not being produced by your ovaries anymore, in anywhere the quantities prior to menopause. The hormone androgen (produced by the ovaries and the adrenal gland) gets converted into estrogen still. As this conversion occurs in body fat, women with higher body fat ratios tend to produce more estrogen post menopause.
Warnings
- Don't rely on not getting pregnant during menopause. While it is highly unlikely, it does happen and is not a great form of contraception. Increased likelihood of birth defects occur in older mothers (and fathers).
- There are plenty of things that might or might not be caused by menopause. For example, night sweats can be a sign of an illness such as cancer. If you're not sure and are worried, seek medical advice. You might need to be very assertive though if your doctor tries to pinpoint the problems on menopause when your hunch is that it is something else. Ask for second opinions, specialist advice, tests, etc.
- Don't confuse menopause with stress or aging. Stress and aging carry their own bundle of challenges, which include irritability, forgetfulness, depression, anxiety, disinterest in sex etc. While studies have tried to pinpoint these feelings on menopause, there is no absolute causal link (for example, refer to the 1987 study performed by Sonja and John McKinlay in Massachusetts). The reality is that it's a complex bundle of all of these issues – menopause causes you to reflect about aging which in turn adds to existing stress. And if you were stressed easily prior to menopause, that won't change; your perspective can, however, provided you want to work on it.
How To Conquer Menopause
"If I'd only had this before I suffered for two years with hot flashes and anxiety attacks. I am experiencing such relief just by trying a few of the alternative treatments that are available in this eBook."
- Ginger W. Lenxa, Kansas
