Perimenopause Power: Navigating your hormones on the journey to menopause

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And I just found that so ironic because over the years I’ve had a lot of clients with low progesterone, struggled to get it prescribed when they were trying to conceive in their 30s. And that’s a rant for another day. I feel like I’m storing up a lot of rants at the moment. I feel like maybe there’s an episode of Maisie’s rants coming up where we’ll just get them all out at once. And it’s the same for me when I talk about being autistic. I don’t like the term ‘diagnosis’. And I’ll get onto that in a future date. I know a lot of you would like to hear more about this. I’ve been receiving a lot of questions about my so called autism diagnosis. Almost every woman I know of my age is feeling confused and in a state of transition even as most of us are at the top of our game in our careers, financially stable and pretty comfortable with being parents,” said Yvette, 43, a Californian who is the COO of a video game company. “I spend a lot of time with other friends of my age. We talk about the fact that we are widening and softening where we don’t want to and don’t know if it makes us shallow or not feminists to do something about it; the fear that we don’t know how to monitor our children’s screen time; the fact that we don’t really like or need sex very often; our worry that we are losing time to try our ‘dream’ job.” That’s how Good Morning America got the story. Everybody went insane,” she continued. “In that week, every American woman went to her cabinet and took out her hormone prescription and flushed it down the toilet. Which, of course, was ridiculous, because the WHI Part One was the only study that was stopped at that point. That was the oestrogen plus progesterone. The oestrogen-only went on for another two years. It eventually showed a decreased risk of breast cancer, not an increased risk of breast cancer.

Perimenopause Power: Navigating your hormones on the jo…

It also helps simply to understand what’s happening, which is why those delineated phases of perimenopause can be a light-bulb moment. ‘I think it’s helpful when we can name something, and say, “Maybe you’re in this phase, these are the common things that can happen, and this is what’s going on.”’ Menopause can happen naturally, or for reasons such as surgery to remove the ovaries (oophorectomy) or the uterus (hysterectomy), cancer treatments like chemotherapy, or a genetic reason. Sometimes the reason is unknown. Low levels of oestrogen can lead to many joints feeling stiff and aching. Vaginal dryness and changes in sexual function Have you ever wondered what perimenopause is and how to know if you're experiencing it? If so, today's episode is for you.A year or so ago, I began to think I was possibly losing my mind. I was feeling anxious, tired, and finding that I was forgetting even the simplest of things - people's names, things I'd promised to do at work, something somebody had literally just told me. I started googling early onset dementia, but it was when I was chatting with another friend about the menopause that she mentioned early symptoms like brain fog and forgetfulness and suddenly all the clues started to point in that direction. Perimenopause is when you have symptoms of menopause but your periods have not stopped. Perimenopause ends and you reach menopause when you have not had a period for 12 months. Gynaecologists I spoke to said they weren’t surprised that women were casting around for exotic fixes to their perimenopausal woes. Jacqueline Thielen, who works at the Women’s Health Clinic at the Mayo Clinic in Minnesota, said she sees many women in their 40s and 50s who tell her they’re scared of hormone therapy, but made miserable by symptoms and being swamped with responsibilities. Lubricants (lube) will make sex less uncomfortable if you feel dry in the vaginal area. However, this area often requires oestrogen therapy, which is given as vaginal oestrogen treatment - cream or pessaries. Oestrogen cream (as GINA®) can now also be bought from the pharmacy. Consider medication if needed There are lots of reasons why mental health can suffer in midlife. Some of it will be to do with changing hormone levels and the resulting influence on other chemicals in the brain. These are the physiological reasons that can impact on things like mood, anxiety, motivation, your ability to focus and things like memory recall and cognition. So it can be a time where there is less resilience because of the hormonal changes that are taking place. But this is also a phase in life in which we are usually stretched and the past year will have done so even more I suspect for many of you.

Perimenopause is a window of opportunity for Maisie Hill: ‘Perimenopause is a window of opportunity for

Women also benefit exponentially from sleeping more, Dr Pinkerton added. “It’s often the first thing to go, but it’s absolutely one of the things that can help you navigate this time. Then, stress reduction.” Now, the reason for this is that hormone levels fluctuate while in perimenopause. And sometimes they’ll be the same as someone who is premenopausal, as in not going through perimenopause. So blood tests just aren’t a reliable way of determining if you’re in the club or not. Now, there are times when they might be appropriate and useful such as if you’re experiencing symptoms kind of earlier than you might expect these symptoms to start appearing. Then your GP might recommend them.Okay, let’s get onto the big one, number four, true or false. HRT is dangerous. So I’ve already given you a little bit of a clue, but let’s get into it. So I’m going to guess that a lot of you think that I’m going to slate HRT but I am not. There’s a whole chapter about HRT in the book, so you can get the full lowdown when you read it. But the short version of it is that I am onboard with HRT. I actually prefer calling it menopausal hormone therapy, MHT which is how a lot of the scientific literature now refers to it. And I explain why in the book.

Perimenopause Power by Maisie Hill | Waterstones

Low doses of an SSRI or SNRI antidepressant can combat hot flashes, as can gabapentin (Neurontin). For heavy or irregular periods, Dr Minkin says you can take a birth control pill or get a progesterone IUD called Mirena. When it comes to herbs and supplements like evening primrose oil or bee pollen, there’s no proven benefit, though some women say that those things make them feel better. We ended up getting her into counselling as well as on to oral contraceptives. The contraceptives calmed the hormones down and then doing some counselling let her start to see some of the stressors that were hidden. Referring to 30 mins of a certain type of yoga affording the same benefits as 2 hours of deep sleep At some point, most women will experience symptoms related to perimenopause. While you cannot control whether or not your body goes through these changes, you can find ways to manage the symptoms. This makes them vulnerable, Dr Thielen said, to controversial things like subcutaneous hormone pellet therapy, inappropriate ovary removal, or pricey “vaginal rejuvenation”, which can cost a fortune and may involve shooting lasers into your vagina – one more thing I guarantee you our mothers did not have on their to-do lists.I rarely read non-fiction, but being a health librarian, when I became dimly aware I was perimenopausal a couple of years ago I started trying to research what I was going through. I was horrified by how little factual, unbiased, evidence-based information was out there. There's plenty of new-agey or militant feminist writing about the end of our fertile years, but actual facts rooted in research and lived experience? Not so much.

What you need to know about perimenopause - and how to get

Number one, true or false, menopause is something that happens in your 50s. So technically this is true, in the UK the average age of menopause is 51 but menopause itself only lasts for one day because it just marks the one year anniversary following your last menstrual period. So let’s say that you have your last period when you’re 50, then a full year passes, 12 months and on the day that marks the one year anniversary of that last period, that’s menopause, it’s one day long. After that you’re postmenopausal. There was a hitch in this: WHI had been looking at what the hormones did in women aged 50 to 79. The aim was to figure out if this type of hormone treatment could help protect these women from heart disease and other illnesses. It was not about short-term hormone therapy for treatment of symptoms in women in their 40s and 50s. But many midlife women heard only “cancer” and went off HRT immediately. Deciding when to stop contraception is more difficult if your periods have stopped due to your current contraception. For example, the implant, the hormone coil and some pills can cause your periods to stop. Another scenario is when your contraception creates a withdrawal bleed (such as a combined hormonal contraception) as this makes it difficult to tell whether you are still having periods. But I mean we’re doing the whole online learning thing at the moment with my son. And one of my son’s teachers when she’s teaching them phonics, because he’s four years old, she’ll come up with what they call alien words, words that aren’t actually real just so that they can practice sounding them out. And when she does an alien word we have to say, “What a load of nonsense.”And to be honest with you, that’s exactly how I feel about the main pieces of research around HRT which were done over 20 years ago now but which newspaper headlines are still largely based on. What a load of nonsense. So the whole HRT is dangerous, I’m saying that’s false. Menopause and perimenopause symptoms can have a big impact on your life, including relationships and work. Problems with sleep during perimenopause can be worsened by hot flushes, night sweats, and other uncomfortable symptoms. Weight gain Visit maisiehill.com/podcastlaunch to learn more about the contest and how to enter. I’ll be announcing the winners on the show in an upcoming episode. Hill also challenges a lot of historical and sexist language (and attitudes) that continue to pervade and permeate through our society.