Menopause: Hot Flashes and Other Symptoms of Menopause

The most important information you need to improve your health

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• Publisher: Adams Media
• Year: 2012
• eBook ISBN: 9781440561696
• Topic: Medicina
• Subtopic: Salud general

Looking for support during the transition of menopause? The Everything Healthy Living Series is here to help. These concise, thoughtful guides offer the expert advice and the latest medical information you need to manage your pain and lead a healthy life.Inside you'll find expert advice and helpful tips on ways to turn down the heat, hormonal and nonhormonal medications, and mind-body exercises to reduce discomfort. As you experience the hormone swings and changes that accompany menopause, the more you know about what's coming, the better you will be able to take charge of your transition.

Overcoming Mood Swings, Anxiety, and Depression

Many women experience depression, anxiety, and/or mood swings during perimenopause. Mood disorders can be triggered by many things, and if you suffer from them — at any time during your life — it’s important to understand where these problems come from as well as the best ways to treat them. Through medical treatment, stress management, and smart lifestyle choices, you can learn ways to regain control of your emotional stability.

Menopause and Emotions

Fluctuating hormones can cause emotional shifting. As anyone who has experienced premenstrual swings can understand, the effect of variable hormones on a woman’s emotional stability can be unpredictable and unnerving. It’s not just that your mood and behavior shift, but it’s how they shift and how fast they shift that can leave you wondering what hit you.

“I’m Feeling Hormonal”

Women are used to the jokes and comments that people make about “that time of the month.” Medical professionals are still studying and exploring the many ways hormones affect neurological processes, and in turn how women feel emotionally. It is usually the steroid hormones like estrogen, progesterone, and testosterone that get the attention around reproductive changes like menarche, puberty, and menopause. But there are many other hormones that change during these times and interact with brain functions, and these changes can cause strong emotional and behavior reactions.

Don’t Kill the Messengers

Hormones are essentially chemical messengers designed to enter the bloodstream and serve some specific purpose. Since they have many different purposes such as reproduction, growth, or regulating the metabolism, it is not surprising that one of the areas they act on is the brain and its functions. So when one “family” of hormones changes, as when estrogen begins to decrease, it has a larger effect as other chemical messengers shift to keep things in balance. In the process of all this shifting around, some messages can get a little scrambled. If those scrambled messages alter your neurological processes, you may experience unfamiliar or unwanted emotional states.

Most of these changes are temporary if they are adjustments to your perimenopausal metabolism. But temporary or not, they can be upsetting and stressful if they show up as episodes of sadness, or rage, or even irritability. Some women experience many emotional variations during this phase, and some glide through without noticing much difference at all.

Mood Swings

Researchers believe that the fluctuating levels of estrogen and progesterone many women experience during this time contribute to mood swings and other emotional symptoms, though there are no clear conclusions about how this happens. Doctors know, however, that estrogen is directly related to our body’s production of serotonin — an important chemical that works in the brain to regulate moods. As estrogen levels shift, so does the brain’s supply of serotonin — and therefore, moods can shift, as well.

But body chemistry isn’t the only thing that can trigger midlife mood decay. Women who are dealing with changing roles at home or at work or changing levels of energy, or who feel less fit or less healthy, may suffer from emotional upheavals and imbalances. Coming to grips with your emotional upsets by recognizing symptoms and tracking them to their source can be a first step toward solving the problem.

Which Comes First?

Just as mood swings in perimenopause can have both physical and emotional consequences, the causes of those mood swings can be both physical and emotional. First, consider that many of the symptoms of perimenopause can cause emotional distress. Hot flashes can lead to sleeplessness, fatigue, irritability, and anxiety. Those factors alone can make you feel angry, isolated, and under siege — and may contribute to occasional moodiness and transient depression. It is sometimes hard to sort out whether your moods swing because of other symptoms, or those symptoms come from your unpredictable reactions.

Fact

Mood swings are characterized by strong and sometimes rapidly changing emotional events. Women approaching menopause may report anxiety and panic attacks, bouts of sadness, or unexplained surges of elation. These emotional swings tend to be erratic and transient, not long-lived facts of life for perimenopausal women.

Tracking Your Mood Swings

Mood shifts are relatively mild changes in mood that can quickly take a woman from feelings of joy to anger, fatigue, or despair. The triggers for these responses can be unpredictable — and sometimes seemingly inconsequential. Perimenopausal women who report mood swings cite a wide range of stimuli for these events. If you’re swinging, you can be moved to tears by a song on the radio or the color of the light as evening falls over your backyard. You can become incredibly angry when a coworker asks for clarification of a point you made in a memo, when children or a partner fail to take care of their household responsibilities, or when you forget to stop and pick up the dry cleaning on your way home. Mood swings can sometimes be no more than a typical response, but more intensely felt.

You may be reacting to some source of irritation, unhappiness, discomfort, fear, love, joy, or longing. As estrogen levels rise and fall, serotonin levels can rise and fall, too, taking your mood right along with them. Mood swings can also be a response to a medical condition or chemical imbalance in your body — one, that might be treatable through counseling, medication, or other therapy. Your mood swings can teach you a lot about who you are, what issues and changes you’re dealing with, and where you want to go during this transition in your life.

You can expect some mood swings in your life, but many women in perimenopause develop mood swings that interfere with their daily living. Frequent or severe mood swings can create problems with family, coworkers, and friends. They can cause missed workdays, discourage participation in social functions or enjoyable activities, or create feelings of alienation, exhaustion, fear, and a lack of control. If mood swings are severe or frequent enough to get in the way of your full — and fulfilling — life, take action to bring them under control.

Essential

To get a handle on your mood swings, try tracking them for a month. Use a 1–5 scale, where 1 = happy and on track, and 5 = extremely negative, angry or sad. Record your mood at given times during the day or any times you notice changes. After recording for a month, look over your “mood map” and see if there are any patterns. Then talk to your health care provider about what might help.

Looking Stress in the Eye

Stress is a fact of life for everyone, and women approaching the age of menopause certainly aren’t immune to its effects. In fact, women in perimenopause may be more susceptible to the health-damaging side effects of stress than they had been previously.

Women in midlife can be faced with career and financial issues, body-image changes, emerging health problems, divorce, widowhood, struggles with teenage children, and increasing responsibilities for aging parents. The added stress of adjusting to hormonal fluctuations, hot flashes, weight gain, or other potential side effects of perimenopause can make the burden of stress even harder to bear.

Fact

Your stress may be connected to a medical condition or to the medication or treatment program you’re using to combat one. Your doctor or health care provider may be able to adjust your medication or offer additional treatment options that can help you reduce and manage any health-related stressors you’re encountering.

Some of the most common symptoms of stress include headaches, sleeplessness, indigestion, forgetfulness, an inability to concentrate, and ongoing feelings of anger and unhappiness. Stress can leave you feeling drained of all good feeling, and it can lead to overeating, drinking too much alcohol, or intensifying other unhealthy stress habits such as cigarette smoking. If you experience any of these symptoms of stress, you may have a real, health-threatening problem and can take action to determine its sources and potential solutions. Unless you find ways to eliminate or manage stress, you won’t be successful in combating the mood-related problems you may experience during perimenopause.

Managing Stress

You can’t avoid all sources of stress, but you may be able to find workarounds for many of them. If a hectic work and family schedule is depleting your energy and stressing you out, what can you trim from your list of daily activities? Can you ask a partner for help in managing household tasks or running errands? Can you afford to hire a service to do laundry, pick up and deliver dry cleaning, or take over major cleaning jobs around the house? If you have children, can you ask them to step up and take more responsibility for their own needs, or to help out more around the house? If aging parents are presenting increasing demands on your time, can you get any type of community support assistance, such as meal deliveries or the services of a visiting nurse?

Alert

Stress can trigger the biological changes that accompany depression, and it appears that hormonal shifts can trigger those changes, too. That’s why women with a family or personal history of depression must be particularly careful to monitor and manage stress as they approach the age of menopause.

Getting a Handle on Work Stressors

Evaluate your job and work habits to try to spot stress fixes there, as well. Can you ask your boss for flexible work times, so you can schedule your commute when traffic is less hectic, or even arrange to work at home one day a week? Can you find someone to carpool with? If you commute by train, can you do some of your work on a laptop computer and save time at the office? If you have problems with a coworker, can you schedule a meeting to try to resolve the issues, or at least to lessen the tension? Can a personal organizer, meeting scheduler program, or other software help you save time and cut down on unnecessary panic and last-minute emergencies?

Once you’ve pinpointed and reduced the stressors that you can, find ways to cope with the stress you can’t avoid. Exercise regularly, spend time engaged in leisure activities you enjoy, eat a healthy diet, and go easy on your mind and body — don’t expect to perform every task perfectly and on time.

The first key to addressing stress is to admit that stress is a real health risk — one you simply cannot overlook. Stress will wear you out, age your body and mind, drain your spirit, and cause lasting health problems. Though you may feel that you’re stuck with the stressful situations you currently endure, you do have options available to you. Talk to your doctor, a therapist, a counselor, a friend, a minister, or a trusted family member, and ask for help in finding ways to manage stress.

Anxiety

Anxiety is a natural, healthy response to certain realities of life — beginning a new job, meeting upcoming deadlines, passing examinations, and so on. But anxiety that interferes with your ability to function throughout your day and th...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Contents
• Introduction
• Coping with Hot Flashes
• The New You—Managing Physical Changes
• Managing Cognitive and Neurological Changes
• Overcoming Mood Swings, Anxiety, and Depression
• Also Available
• Copyright Page