Ahaaa, Cortisol

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It’s been about two years now since I found out I’m in perimenopause. I had never heard of the term perimenopause before, no one ever told me about its existence, and I had no idea what it meant.

Category

perimenopause

Date

02/07/2021

Length

4 min read

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When I started reading about it, I had many anxious but even more surprised ‘ahaaa-moments.’ Ever since I regularly read about this phase, I recognize myself in many of the symptoms. I slowly began to understand how drastic it can be on women’s lives and also on mine. Perimenopause is a slow hormonal transition and can take up to 10 years before reaching the actual menopause. And, I thought, that moment would be somewhere in my 50s, which it probably will. About this seemingly important pre-menopausal phase, someone somehow forgot to tell me.

Today I’m sharing an ‘ahaaa-moment’ I had this week listening to a podcast by Taz Bhatia. I think it’s a significant one that I myself, but many women struggle with without really realizing what is happening to their bodies. By now, I have so many women in my life who are struggling with hormonal changes (including myself). Reason enough to share what I hear, see, feel and experience because I’m kind of messing around with my Endometriosis and hormonal changes these days and seek answers.

So I was listening to a Goop Podcast about perimenopause with Doctor Taz while spinning my bike. I don’t know about you, but I am pretty blue when it comes to connecting my changing hormones to my incomprehensible behavior. I am not yet at the point where I fully realize that my body is hormonally changing. I can see and tell the changes on the outside, yet I don’t really connect those with what’s going on on the inside. I still have to get used to the idea that I am in perimenopause. And that I am less or maybe not at all fertile anymore, that one day (hopefully not too long from now), my periods will stop.

But now about the ‘ahaaa moment,’ I had the other day while listening to Doctor Taz. Clearly, perimenopause is the phase all women go through; it’s when our hormones start to shift. Somewhere in our mid-thirties, things begin to shift. The exact age is different for all women; some start earlier, and others are a bit later. The first hormones changes are very subtle. Initially, they won’t be noticeable until we reach our forties, and they start to impact our life, how we feel, and how we see ourselves.

It is possible to be in perimenopause and be fertile at the same time. Something I never realized before, but I was most likely already perimenopausal when I got pregnant with Finn at the age of 39.

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"There is nothing wrong with going through menopause; it’s a natural part of being a woman."

AHAAA

According to Doctor Taz, the hormonal changes referred to as perimenopause start very little and increase as the years go by. Initially, the symptoms will not be very recognizable. For many women, between the ages of 35 and 40, this is the time when they would like to have a child or another child. Today, women are choosing motherhood later and later in life because they want to do other things with their lives first, and rightly so. All the more reason to talk about perimenopause much more openly. Because women must learn where they stand in life and don’t “miss the fertile boat” like I almost did, but also coming to understand the changes our bodies go through much earlier in life can help women live more consciously so that symptoms may be less later in life. We can control our hormones by how we live, how we eat, how we sleep, how we manage stress. The hormones levels in our body are very much a vital sign.

But when I heard the following, I almost dropped off my spinning bike. Doctor Taz: “Before the drop in progesterone is the cortisol dysregulation. You notice that your stress tolerance changes. Before, you could have handled a lot, like 50 projects at a time, and now the slightest thing is stressing you out. So even before progesterone levels drop, our cortisol levels drop. But when progesterone starts to go down too, even a little bit, we begin to lose sleep and suffer from waking up in the middle of the night. Not sleeping well can trigger our Cortisol levels again and can cause anxiety. Not sleeping well or/and waking up through the night can cause us to feel foggy all day.”

Ahaaa…

Some women catch it, and some women don’t; we are all different, but one thing is clear, I definitely caught it. So many puzzle pieces fell into place when I listened to the Podcast. And we laugh about it, my friends and me, the overall fog and fatigue, not being able to do more than one thing at a time anymore, feelings of anxiety, the sleepless nights. These days I have more and more trouble doing two things simultaneously; it causes stress (because it can’t seem to get it all). I sometimes get anxiety attacks because of it; I’m glad that I now understand better why. Fortunately, there is recognition, and recognition brings relief. Apparently, there are also solutions, and that means there is hope.

Taz Bhatia

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