The brain of a peri-menopausal woman

I was in the supermarket yesterday, list in hand, going up and down the aisles and checking things off.  When I looked into the cart, I realized that all I was buying was food for dinner that night.  Since I hate and abhor going grocery shopping, I thought to myself, I should really buy some more ingredients for more meals.

I was stumped.

I looked around, I wracked my brain for some ideas, and I realized, I had nothing.  Zip.  Again, I glanced at my list, hoping that it would grow some more entries -- something that I could follow, because damn my brain had gone cold.

I used to zip around a store and make up meals in my head as I went around.  I never wrote a list, ever.  I am a creative cook, and that followed me right into the store -- I would see what type of meats looked good and then go from there.  I would see what was fresh in the produce department ... and go from there.  Even if I went in with a list for a particular dinner, I could still supplement as I went along.  That seems to have disappeared.  Totally.

It's kind of weird.  I mean, it feels weird, it feels as though something is going on in my brain, and because I have all sorts of other things going on (that I won't share, you are welcome) all one hundred percent related to "the change," it only makes sense that the erasure of my mad skills at making meals off the top of my head has to do with that as well.

According to an article "How Menopause Affects your Brain," by More magazine author Kathryn Olney, the chemical shifts of menopause do change how a woman's brain works.  Which if you think about it, is really quite freaky.

**
As excerpted from the article:

Q. I really identified with your patient Sylvia. Like her, I am suddenly irritated by things my husband and three kids have done for years, things that didn’t get to me before. I’m 50. Is this shift is due to changes in my brain?
A. Yes, you are leaving your "mommy brain" behind. Before menopause, the brain is constantly triggered by and reacting to the needs of others, particularly children and husbands. As you go into menopause, the highs and lows of estrogen and progesterone that have been cycling through your brain since puberty come to an end. That means your brain is on a more continuous footing, hormone-wise. Note that I’m not saying "more stable" footing, because that implies that previous to menopause you weren’t stable.

 **

It is one thing to read something like this, but to actually feel it is quite another.  I no longer have a family to feed on a regular basis (forget the fact that I was at the store yesterday because all of the chicks I felt I flung out of the nest seem to flock back every other weekend or so!) but it appears my brain has thoroughly concluded that this aspect of my life is over, and that super skill has been eliminated (clearly to make room for something much more meaningful, though to be honest, I kind of liked having it!)

**
Q. So is that why I feel as if I can draw boundaries better than before?
A. Exactly. Before menopause, a woman’s hormones encourage her to avoid conflict. Our estrogenized brain circuits cause us to respond to stress with nurturing activities that are intended to protect our relationships. From puberty to menopause, a woman walks a fine line between making sure she’s at the center of her relationships and risking pushing those relationships away through anger or aggression. The urge to walk this line doesn’t stop until the hormone supply that fuels it is cut off, which happens in menopause. As the ratio of testosterone to estrogen rises, the anger pathways in a woman’s brain become more like a man’s. Now she gets angry, whereas before she may have just bitten her tongue. At the very least, she’ll stand up for herself and say, "I’m not doing that anymore."

**
(Okay, to be perfectly clear, I kind of always felt that way ... but let's go with the whole nurturing aspect, makes me sound better!)

**
According to the article, less estrogen means less oxytocin, the hormone that promotes feelings of caretaking. Oxytocin is manufactured in the brain, and the cells that make it are stimulated by estrogen. So, before menopause, when Sylvia had higher estrogen levels, her brain would dial up these caretaking hormones and pump out more of them. After menopause, this occurs less often: Women are more interested in others taking care of themselves. The tugs they used to feel at their heartstrings to care for children lessen. One patient was shocked to find herself only half-listening to the minute details of her daughter’s life when she called from college, whereas before she had hung on every word. When her daughter was out of the house, that urge was no longer being fueled. The brain circuits are still there, but in menopause, the fuel for running the highly responsive engine that tracks the emotions of others begins to run dry. That causes a major shift in how a woman perceives her reality.

**
But that is only one article and really, what I have found is that the majority of discussions about the changing patterns of women's brains during peri-menopause and after (menopause itself, or the stopping of the menses) tends to be more about the woman throwing the leg of lamb out the window.  There is this tendency to humorize the situation, and well, it's not always funny.  It's not funny to start crying when you accidentally pour half of the coffee grounds on the floor.  There is no way to underscore how devastating this can be ... it means having to get out the vacuum, it means that your actual cup of coffee and the enjoyment thereof, has been hijacked by the NEED to clean something up; something that didn't need cleaning up before it was spilled.  THIS is the shit going on, the really not so amusing minutia of a day hijacked by fluctuating hormones.  It's not funny, it's hard.

So is laying awake at night, in a hotel room in Boston, with this feeling of doom.  Waking up from a dream about a fire and being sure that your house is burning down while you lay there.  And then trying to look at it, not from an emotional view point, but intellectually ... I am fucked up in the head because of this shit going on inside of me, and none of this is real and nothing is burning ... and feeling more stressed because you've gone from really cool sex dreams to this crap.  It's not funny, it's hard.

One of my favorite people/authors is Dr. Christiane Northrup -- I have been reading her books for years and gleaning so much wisdom from them. According to her,

**
Our Brains Catch Fire at Menopause

Our brains actually begin to change at perimenopause. Like the rising heat in our bodies, our brains also become fired up! Sparked by the hormonal changes that are typical during the menopausal transition, a switch goes on that signals changes in our temporal lobes, the brain region associated with enhanced intuition. How this ultimately affects us depends to a large degree on how willing we are to make the changes in our lives that our hormones are urging us to make over the ten years or so of perimenopause.

There is ample scientific evidence of the brain changes that begin to take place at perimenopause. Differences in relative levels of estrogen and progesterone affect the temporal lobe and limbic areas of our brains, and we may find ourselves becoming irritable, anxious, emotionally volatile.
Though our culture leads us to believe that our mood swings are simply the result of raging hormones and do not have anything to do with our lives, there is solid evidence that repeated episodes of stress (due to relationship, children, and job situations you feel angry about or powerless over, for example) are behind many of the hormonal changes in the brain and body.

This means that if your life situation--whether at work or with children, your husband, your parents, or whatever--doesn't change, then unresolved emotional stress can exacerbate a perimenopausal hormone imbalance. In a normal premenopausal hormonal state it's much easier to overlook those aspects of your life that don't really work, just as you can overlook them more easily in the first half of your menstrual cycle--the time when you're more apt to feel upbeat and happy and able to shove difficult material under the rug. But that doesn't mean the problems aren't there.

**
Northrup goes on to explain that during our younger years, if we are not addressing this unresolved emotional stress, then it will manifest with a good case of PMS.  I personally did not have PMS except for seasonal, and that was understandable to me because I have always found the changing of the seasons stressful (except for spring into summer, and so I didn't have the issue then.)  She explains that PMS is one way a woman's body reminds her every month of the growing backlog of unresolved issues accumulating within her.

Next is postpartum depression, and she says that it is well documented that women who have significant PMS are also more apt to suffer from this.  She says that it is often a sign from a mother's inner wisdom that she isn't getting the support and help she needs at this time.  This is interesting because I suffered from an incredible bout of postpartum depression after I had Hallie.  I would sit on the couch and look up at the huge pine trees on the hill across the street and wish for them to fall down and crush me.  At this particular time, Peter took the week off after Hallie was born as his company was progressive and offered "paternity leave," which he took as a most obvious time to build the front porch on to our house, with his father.  As I sat amidst the sounds of compressors and hammering, meals were brought over by my mother-in-law, who would say that the men must be starved after all the work that they had done.  There is a deep rooted anger within me just writing this -- my inability to not stand up and scream STOP DOING ALL OF THIS NOW and let me heal -- just squashed down, probably because I liked the idea of a porch?  Who the hell knows, but these were the people in my life -- who couldn't see that this entire thing might not be helpful.   I remember the look of horror on my midwife's face when she came several days after the birth to do a follow up home visit, and she had to walk in amongst the bedlam of a construction project, only to find me inches away from it all, on the other side of the wall, clearly distraught and unable to communicate that.  Well, alrighty then ... going to let that go now!!!  Because I was much older when I had the next batch of kids, and because I was clearly scarred from this, I made huge demands before I would even agree to getting pregnant.  The good news is that I learned from this, and did not suffer from depression on the two subsequent pregnancies.

So if you ignored your PMS symptoms, then Northrup says your body would send a louder wake-up call on a yearly basis in the form of seasonal affective disorder, otherwise known as SAD, which she says is a profound example of how women's wisdom is simultaneously encoded into both our monthly cycles and the annual cycle of the seasons.

She calls perimenopause the mother of all wake-up calls, and it can often be experienced as PMS times ten, which she says is particularly the case for those who hit the snooze button instead of heeding their monthly and seasonal wake-up calls.

**
This is not to discount the direct physical effects of changing hormone levels. However, it is a safe bet that any uncomfortable symptoms that reveal themselves during times of hormonal shift will be magnified and prolonged if a woman is carrying a heavy load of emotional baggage. Throughout a woman's childbearing years, a kind of "debt account" is established where existing and future issues accumulate, compounding interest with each passing month that the debt goes unpaid.

Thus the average woman, blessed with approximately 480 menstrual periods and 40 seasonal cycles to bring her to the threshold of menopause, gets about 500 progress reports. How is her physical health and nutrition? How are her emotions? What's happening in her relationships and her career? There have been approximately 500 opportunities to resolve those issues or sweep them under the rug.

At perimenopause the process escalates. The earnest, straightforward inner self, which has tried for years to get our attention, makes one final hormonally mediated attempt to get us to deal with our accumulated needs, wants, and desires. This is likely to turn into a period of great emotional turmoil, as each woman struggles to make a new life, one that can accommodate her emerging self. Externally and internally, this period is a mirror image of adolescence, a time when our bodies and brains were also going through major hormonal shifts that gave us the energy to attempt to individuate and become the person we were meant to be. At menopause we pick up where we left off in adolescence. It is now time to finish the job.


It should be no surprise, then, that research has documented that those women who experience uncomfortable--even severe--symptoms of PMS are often the same women who have a tumultuous perimenopause, with physical and emotional symptoms that become increasingly impossible to ignore.

**
I copied the above not because I feel this reflects my own experience, but because I think it reflects the situation of many people I know, and those people are less likely than I am to actually find this information, and yet it is very illuminating.  With that said, of course, like the tidbit I shared above, I have my stories, my unaddressed traumas, but I did not experience PMS or SAD and feel that I constantly questioned the situations in my life that I wasn't happy with.  (Yes, I am perfect, I know!  But let's get back to the brain drain issue.)

According to Northrup, what has been well documented is that the brains of women who suffer the most from PMS-like symptoms are more susceptible to the effects of fluctuating hormone levels. In other words, it is not the hormone levels per se that are the problem; it is the particular combination of a woman's hormone levels and her pre-existing brain chemistry, along with her life situation, that results in her symptoms. It is estimated that 27 percent of all women who become depressed premenstrually will be very sensitive to the hormonal changes that occur at menopause.

She goes on to say that though we tend to blame perimenopausal symptoms on hormonal shifts in the body, their origins are far more complex.  Changes in reproductive hormones alone do not account for these symptoms. They are signals from our mind and body that we have reached a new developmental stage--an opportunity for healing and growth.


Until midlife, it is characteristic for a woman's energies to be focused on caring for others. She is encouraged to do so, in part, by the hormones that drive her menstrual cycles--the hormones that foster her instincts for nurturing. But for two or three days each month, just before or during our periods, there is a hormonal interlude when the veil between our conscious and unconscious selves is thinner and the voice of our souls beckons to us, subtly reminding us of our own passions, our own needs, which cannot and should not always be subsumed to the needs of those we love.

I like to think of the first half of our cycles as the time when we are both biologically and psychologically preparing to give birth to someone or something outside of ourselves. In the second half of our cycles, we prepare to give birth to ourselves. It is at this time that the more intuitive parts of our brain become activated, giving us feedback and guidance about the state of our inner lives.

At midlife, the hormonal milieu that was present for only a few days each month during most of your reproductive years, the milieu that was designed to spur you on to reexamine your life just a little at a time, now gets stuck in the on position for weeks or months at a time. We go from an alternating current of inner wisdom to a direct current that remains on all the time after menopause is complete. During perimenopause, our brains make the change from one way of being to the other.

Biologically, at this stage of life you are programmed to withdraw from the outside world for a period of time and revisit your past. You need to be free of the distractions that come when you are focusing your mothering efforts solely on others. Perimenopause is a time when you are meant to mother yourself.
It may be no accident that the word "menopause" invites the association "pause from men." In truth, you are being urged, biologically, to pause from everyone in order to do important work on yourself. Perhaps as a result of this, one of the most common threads running through women's descriptions of how they feel during the menopausal transition is the longing for time alone, for a refuge that provides peace, quiet, and freedom from distractions and demands.

It's a wistful dream, seemingly out of reach in this busy age if multidirectional tugs-of-war. But those who have the yearning often believe that their uncomfortable menopausal symptoms would simply dissolve if only they had the luxury of shutting out the world so they could tune into the growth process occurring within themselves. This wistful dream is real. It comes from your soul. I've come to realize that you can trust it and believe in it--and that you must do its bidding.


Even if this dream seems out of reach, the simple truth is that every woman
can find refuge within her existing environment. Even if you can't charter a plane to a deserted island, odds are that if you acknowledge and validate your need for solitude, you can clear some time and find a private corner to which to retreat daily. You can insulate yourself from noise, telephones, and interaction with others. I encourage every woman to find a way to do this on whatever level is possible. When we commit to taking this first step, we have the chance to develop a newfound sense of ourselves and our life's purpose, which gives us an exhilarating sense of what is possible for us during the second half of our lives.
**
So this is where it truly resonates.  My cravings to be alone now are huge, and I really like the concept of mothering yourself, and giving birth to yourself.  I strongly feel that our lives are comprised of acts, and each act is a chunk of time devoted to a certain aspect.  My first act as an adult was a combination of working and mothering -- an experience that solidified in my mind that it is a brutal and probably worthless struggle because you can NOT do both full time.  Then the pursuit to balance and do each halftime is yet another parody of our society, because the truth of the matter is, you CAN do both, but you will be failing one or the other, or both, nearly all of the time.  The rest of the time you are just kidding yourself.  And that is fine -- staying at home with children is not for everyone and we all have our paths.  I am not criticizing, I am just commenting on how it feels to me after having done it.  If I had it to do over again, I can't possibly see what I would have done differently, but you have to be a certain type of person to let your career future go in order to half-time it and watch it stagnate for years.  Now it is all easier because telecommuting is the norm, whereas back then it didn't even exist.  But I've worked from home with the kids there, and again, I won't change my opinion.  Ignored kids at home are probably not better off than kids at daycare with constant activity.  But that part of my act one morphed into my stopping the work thing and concentrating on them, and that was the right thing to do.  I believe that our young adults/teenagers need probably more of our time and wisdom than smaller children, based on my own experience.

Act two is there, she dances, a wispy figment of my imagination at times, a solid old woman sitting crosslegged and staring at me, waiting for me to act, at others.  Sometimes it feels tangible, other times it feels impossible.  But after reading the above wisdom, it all makes sense.  The fact that the kids keep coming back means the cords have not been cut as fully as I had thought they had been -- another message to ruminate about ... that we don't just become other people overnight -- it is a process, a journey, and no matter how hard we want our babies to join us when we are pregnant, they can't come out and do so until they are fully formed.  So next time I am standing in the supermarket wondering why I can't do what I used to do so well before, I will just remember that giving birth is a slow and painful process, and thank god this time it's more metaphorical!