Real Help for Post-Menopause Blues and Blahs, Part One.

The other day, I did an online search for the term, “post menopause feel like I don’t have any purpose.” Or something like that. The results that came back were nothing short of irrelevant and abysmal. They were all pep talks about how great life after fifty is, because women supposedly suddenly have so much more freedom than they’ve ever had. They can jump into hobbies they’ve been yearning to try, travel the world, get involved with community events, re-ignite the romance in their marriage or, if they don’t currently have a spouse, start dating again.

I wonder what planet the writers of those articles are living on. Besides the fact that a lot of Gen-X women didn’t begin having children until their thirties, so that by the time they hit menopause, they still have teenagers in the house, many women in their fifties have to go to work. If they have a nest egg, even in conjunction with that of a husband, it’s nowhere near big enough to allow them to retire. No freedom there.

Second, many, many post-menopausal women are suffering physically due to The Change of Life. If nothing else, they’re tired all the time, and that’s even if they’re one of the few, the proud, the merrily able to get eight hours of sleep every night. When you’re fatigued, you do not feel as if you have any freedom. In a very real sense, you are enslaved to the tiredness. You can barely drag yourself out of bed just to perform your daily duties. You couldn’t care less about starting a new hobby, often don’t feel like working on any hobbies that you’ve held dear for a long time, and the mere idea of having to drive to the airport, fly to somewhere new, and navigate your way around an unfamiliar place exhausts you.

Constantly being tired leads to depression. Period, end of story. There’s no “can” about it. If you are chronically fatigued, you will get depressed.

(Before you continue reading, please read the disclaimer at the end of this article and agree to it. The disclaimer pertains to all four articles in this series. Thank you.)

A lot of neurotypical women suddenly develop sensory issues and short-term memory problems, and those of us who are neurodivergent find our sensitivities growing to uncomfortably intense levels and our short-term memory failing us more than ever. Digestive issues with no apparent organic root cause turn eating favorite healthy homemade meals into a literal pain, leading you to near panic when someone suggests they take you out to eat.

For some women, HRT resolves all of those problems. For many, it does not, and for many more, HRT is not an option either for financial reasons or because they know about the potential side effects and want to avoid them. You can only take medically prescribed HRT for so long, and as soon as you’re off of it, the unwanted symptoms return.

If you resonate with anything I’ve written above, if you’re a post-menopausal woman who is living with a continual low level of depression because you’re always tired, and/or health anxiety because of the strange and uncomfortable symptoms that keep cropping up out of nowhere, if you feel like you couldn’t find a purpose in life if someone paid you a billion dollars to do so, keep reading. I don’t promise to solve all of your problems in one fell swoop, but as a neurodivergent post-menopausal woman in her mid-fifties who went through perimenopause hell and continues to struggle with feeling content about life in general, and her body in specific, I think I can give you more realistic help for navigating this period of your life than what I’ve been able to find online.

This article is the first in a four-art series of tips on how to feel better after menopause (they’ll work for the perimenopause years, as well), so be sure to click on the link to each subsequent article at the end of each post.

The most important tip of all…

I will begin and end the first article in the series with the most critical tip I have for starting your journey toward feeling more balanced and healthy after menopause, and that is this: Get your hormone levels tested.

Likely as not, the root cause for most of your physiological problems is being low in one or more of the major reproductive hormones, or having an imbalance of them. Ideally, a hormone test would include estrogen, progesterone, and testosterone. Including a vitamin D serum test might be helpful, as well, because low levels of vitamin D not only equate to a weakened immune system (which post-menopausal women have by default), but also to greater fatigue.

Don’t be like me and assume that you know where you’re imbalances lie and try to fix them with over-the-counter remedies. For a long time, I was convinced that I was low in both progesterone and estrogen, and was therefore shocked when I finally broke down and had a test done and discovered that my estrogen levels were actually normal.

The health testing website EverlyWell will send you a saliva sample test that you send back to them, and you pay only for the testing, not for clinic overhead. However, their menopause test does not include testosterone.

Once you have your results, you can make better decisions about how to go about remedying your hormone imbalances. Progesterone cream is easily available online and at health food stores, and I tell you from personal experience that it works. If you’re low in estrogen, eating more plant foods and/or using estradiol cream can help. Of course, if you have a gynecologist who does the testing and you want to try HRT, your doctor will prescribe the balance that you need.

Increasing the levels of reproductive hormones in your body usually goes a long way to alleviating symptoms. But whether you take a pill, use a cream, or drastically change your diet, it will likely be weeks before you notice the hot flashes dissipating, the mood swings calming, the random aches and pains evaporating. And even when the hormone therapy fully kicks in, it won’t keep your body from aging. There will still be obvious signs that you’re not thirty anymore, signs that will gradually grow in both number and intensity.

Thus, the remaining tips in upcoming posts are ones to help you slow down the aging process as much as you can, as well as to help you navigate life so that you can feel contented and fulfilled despite any persistent and lingering menopausal symptoms.

Don’t miss them. Click here to read the second article in this series.

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DISCLAIMER: This series of articles is NOT intended to offer medical advice or treatment. Rather, I want to share what I've learned, and am learning, from my own experience. I don't guarantee that any of the tips in any of the articles will impact your life in a positive way, and you and you alone are responsible for what you do with the information found within the articles.