Women's Bodies, Women's Wisdom (126 page)

Follow a diet that normalizes blood sugar and insulin and also decreases inflammation. (See
chapter 17
.) High blood sugar and high insulin levels skew hormone metabolism toward too many androgens. Also take a good multivitamin-mineral supplement.

Lose excess body fat.

Decrease stress. Stress hormones make
everything
worse and may even be the reason for the hair loss in the first place. As already stated, hormones produced by excess stress skew hormone metabolism into the androgen range. And if your diet is high in sugar and refined foods (alcohol, white bread, chips, and so on), then you have a double whammy. Massage and foot reflexology can help with stress.

Take supplemental iodine. (See Eat to Flourish, page 729.)

If these approaches don’t work within three months, try the following:

Use laser acupuncture or traditional needle acupuncture.

Use the Chinese herbal nutritional supplement known as shou wu pian. This supplement, if taken regularly for at least two to three months, can restore the natural color of hair if it has gone gray, tends to increase overall energy, and also helps restore hair growth in many individuals. (To order shou wu pian, call Quality Life Herbs at 207-842-4929 or visit
www.quality life herbs.com
.)

MOOD SWINGS AND DEPRESSION

Research shows that menopause itself does not contribute to poor psychological or physical health. In fact, menopausal women age forty-five to sixty-four actually have a significantly lower incidence of depression than younger women. Moreover, the major stress in the lives of menopausal women is most often caused by family or by factors other than menopause.
⁹⁷
For example, approximately 25 percent of women in the menopausal years are caring for an elderly relative, according to some studies, which certainly can be stressful.
⁹⁸
Sonja McKinlay, Ph.D., formerly an associate professor of community health at Brown University and currently president of New England Research Institutes, who researched a group of healthy menopausal women who were not seeking medical advice, says, “For the majority of women, menopause is not the major negative event it has been typified as. That is basic mythol ogy.” She noted that only 2 to 3 percent of the women in her study expressed any regret at moving out of their reproductive years. One unique feature of this study is that it was done on healthy women who were not seeking medical advice. Clearly, many physicians have a neg ative view of menopause in part because they see only women who have menopause-related complaints.

As I pointed out earlier, however, menopause is a time when we may come up against the unfinished business that we have accumulated over the first half of our lives. We may find ourselves grieving for losses never fully grieved, wanting to get a college degree that we never completed, or longing for another child or a first child. It is as if we have gone down into our basement and found boxes and boxes of stuff to be sorted through and weeded out. If a woman is willing to deal with her own unfinished business, she will have fewer menopausal symptoms. She will find that her symptoms are messages from her inner guidance system that parts of her life need attention. And her changing hormones will provide the impetus to make long-needed changes.

Treatment

When a woman is willing to resolve the unfinished emotional business of her life, often no treatment of her mood swings is necessary. The inner work discussed in part three of this book is a good place to start. (There is a full treatment of this in the
Wisdom of Menopause
[Bantam, 2006].) Dietary improvement and exercise can often work wonders. Many women with depression have been following a diet that is so low in fat, they can’t make the proper brain chemicals to lift depression. (See
chapter 17
.)

Other women will need physical support of their endocrine, energy, and emotional systems through hormone therapy, homeopathy, acu puncture, and/or other approaches. Among the botanicals, Remifemin can help to allevi ate these symptoms.
⁹⁹
St. John’s wort
(Hypericum perforatum)
has also been shown to be very helpful in mild to moderate depression, allowing many women to get off their other antidepressant medication. Look for a standardized 0.3 percent formulation. The dose of St. John’s wort is 300 mg three times per day with meals.
¹⁰⁰
The herb
Pueraria mirifica
has also been shown to help with mood problems (see page 557).

Hormone therapy lifts depression in some women but has no effect on others. Each case has to be examined holistically to determine optimal treatment.

FUZZY THINKING

Many women talk about a perimenopausal change in their thought process. This “fuzzy thinking” is most commonly described as an inability to think straight, and is a normal development that is self-limiting. Marian Van Eyk McCain, in her book
Transformation Through Menopause
(Bergin &Garvey, 1991), calls this “cottonhead,” or feeling unable to use the left brain or intellect for such tasks as balancing the checkbook or getting organized.
¹⁰¹
I have asked many women about this and have found it to be common. Many are very relieved to find that it is normal, because they are afraid they are getting Alzheimer’s disease. There is no evidence to support the commonly held myth that women (or men) normally lose their memory or get “senile” as they age.
¹⁰²
In fact, a very reassuring 2009 study of more than 2,000 women, headed by Gail A. Greendale, M.D., from the David Geffen School of Medicine at the University of California, Los Angeles, shows that while learning abilities decrease during perimenopause, they rebound to premenopausal levels afterward.
¹⁰³

After I read about “cottonhead,” I realized that I had felt this same way after having my children. I seemed virtually unable to concentrate on linear tasks. My brain felt fuzzy. I wanted to watch movies, be with my baby, and not have to think, at least in the limited way that our culture defines thinking. The way I understand this “cottonhead” state is that it may disconnect us temporarily from our frontal lobes, the part of the brain that is involved with rational, linear, planning-for-the-future thought. We now have a chance to think with our hearts. If we allow this process to unfold, if we don’t fight it or see it as a dysfunction, it can be an initiation into a whole new way of experiencing the world, a far more intuitive way. For many women the ability to express themselves in art, writing, or sculpting comes from allowing their “cotton headedness” to center them and help them withdraw from the world ruled by the steely organized intellect. Neuropsychiatrist Mona Lisa Schulz, M.D., Ph.D., author of
The New Feminine Brain
(Free Press, 2005), points out that temporarily forgetting names or where you put the phone is not caused by memory loss per se. These lapses are related, instead, to attention. Many perimenopausal women turn their attention deeply inward—a natural way to do healing work.

When Peggy, a fifty-eight-year-old kindergarten teacher, went through menopause, she began to experience an inability to concen trate in her classroom. “After thirty years as a teacher,” she said, “I couldn’t remember the names of the kids in my classes, and sometimes I couldn’t even remember how to spell words.” Every fiber of her being told her to take a sabbatical from teaching to give her inner life some attention. Her “thinking” problem became so bad that she eventually started crying in front of her classes. She realized that she needed a change. She left her job, traveled to California, and lived in a small cot tage near the beach for a year. During that time, she began to knit. She found that knitting was exactly what her brain needed for meditative activity.

On a hunch, Peggy began to teach senior citizens the knitting tech niques she was learning. She found that her skills were in great demand. She mailed a beach chair to me. She had hand-knitted the seat and the back in beautiful and unusual designs. In addition to her knitting, she allowed herself to grieve fully for the end of her marriage ten years before. She forgave herself for the impact that it had had on her son. By the time I saw her a year later, she was a healed women with a great deal of trust in life. She had accepted the challenge of menopause, moved into her intuitive side, and begun a whole new life. She now spends half the year in California and half the year in Maine. She is back to a small amount of teaching, on her own terms. She no longer forgets names or class plans.