Why Stress Is Your Enemy During Menopause
Why stress is your enemy during menopause
With midlife comes that marvellous experience: the menopause. Thankfully in recent years the attitude to menopause has changed and it’s become somewhat demystified and acceptable to talk about in general conversation.
If you are experiencing menopause then it’s likely you have any number of the 34 symptoms that it comes with it like joint pain, irritability, weight gain, low mood, hot flushes and night sweats. It’s a time when you really can feel somewhat betrayed by your brain and your body.
The endocrine system and hormones
To understand why stress is so bad during this season of your life it’s important to understand what the menopause actually is:
The menopause occurs when your ovaries stop producing eggs. As a result, your levels of estrogen, progesterone and testosterone fall.
Estrogen, a term for 3 female sex hormones, has a function in EVERY part of our body, and is responsible for among other things, regulating mood and body temperature, maintaining memory and cognition, lubricating the joints and maintaining strength.
Testosterone helps with improving concentration & memory, improving a sense of wellbeing, improving bone growth, strength and muscles mass. So just looking at what these hormones do you can understand why there are so many menopause symptoms.
Because the sex hormones are also produced in body fat, skin, the brain, the adrenals and other sites, our bodies are capable of coping when the activity in the ovaries slows down. This means that if all our other glands are working well, we can continue to produce all the hormones we need. This is why we need a healthy endocrine system for physical wellbeing during our menopause journey.
What happens when you experience stress
To understand what happens when we are stressed we need to look at the adrenals, which are also part of the endocrine system. The adrenals produce the stress hormones: adrenaline (fight or flight) cortisol (steroid that raises blood sugar level to fuel muscles). So when you are stressed your adrenals are working very hard for you. But another function of the adrenals is that they take over from the ovaries to produce estrogen.
So if they are exhausted from working overtime to cope with stress, they will struggle to take over estrogen production from the ovaries. I will add a caveat that some doctors say that adrenal exhaustion doesn't exist so I invite you to come to your own conclusion about it. However, what I know from my own experience is that when the stress went from my body, so did my menopause symptoms. I believe I was experiencing adrenal fatigue and as a result my dropping oestrogen levels weren’t being topped up by the adrenals.
The Adrenals
Let's look at the symptoms of adrenal exhaustion:
Fatigue, low stamina, depression, mood swings, addiction to coffee/sugar, headaches, dizziness, hot flashes, high blood pressure and facial/body hair growth.
Now look at the causes of adrenal exhaustion:
Chronic illness/allergies, depression, environmental pollution, excessive amounts of stimulants, excessive exercise, inadequate sleep, light-cycle disruption, overwork (physical and mental), unhealed trauma or injury and surgery.
All of these things cause stress in the body so if you are experiencing menopausal symptoms, I invite you to look at the stress in your life because reducing it may make a difference to how you feel.
Remember...
Everyone has stress in their life. Healthy pressure is what actually keeps us alive. And a healthy fatigue should follow the healthy stress, with resting as the remedy.
Stress becomes a problem when it is cumulative and we don’t experience the resting phase.
So when you examine the stress in your life also look at when you rest and restore. It’s the yin to the yang and essential for a healthy balance.
One simple thing you can do
Keep a journal for a month and see if you can see if there are any changes you can make that will improve your symptoms.
