How Thoughts Affect Hormone Levels at Menopause
The “language” spoken by your autonomic nervous system is translated to the rest of your body by hormones. The primary messengers of the sympathetic nervous system are hormones called norepinephrine and epinephrine, which are often referred to together as adrenaline. They are produced in the brain and in the adrenal glands. Every time adrenaline levels go up, levels of another adrenal hormone, cortisol, also go up. (For more about cortisol levels in menopause, see chapter 4.)
If you persist in the perception that events and demands in your life are stressful and uncontrollable, you are adopting the mindset that continually whips your adrenals into producing more and more cortisol. Over time, your adrenals may become exhausted, losing their ability to keep up with the demand for increasing amounts of this hormone. This is often coupled with suboptimal nutrition, impaired digestion, and poor assimilation of nutrients, all of which go hand in hand with a stressful life. Insomnia is also very common in this situation. The resulting immune system incompetence increases susceptibility not only to infectious diseases, but also to autoimmune disorders and all cancers.
The overstimulated sympathetic nervous system also causes an imbalance in a group of hormones known as eicosanoids, resulting in impairment of the cells’ ability to metabolize fatty acids. This is associated with weight gain, as the body tends to break down muscle and replace it with stored fat and excess fluid. Imbalanced eicosanoids are also associated with tissue inflammation, which is now known to be the cause of nearly all chronic degenerative diseases, such as heart disease, diabetes, and cancer. Tissue inflammation also increases the discomfort felt in a host of chronic diseases such as lupus and rheumatoid arthritis, and has been shown to increase the speed of tumor growth in individuals already harboring cancer.
In a healthy, normal body, cortisol levels are highest upon awakening in the morning. During the night, the parasympathetic nervous system has done its job of providing rest and renewal to your organs. In other words, a deposit has been made into the “health bank.” The morning’s increased cortisol levels help you get out of bed and get ready for the day ahead. As you wind down in the evening, cortisol levels normally decrease, reaching their lowest at about midnight, easing you into a rejuvenative, restful night. For many stressed-out women, however, the rise-and-fall pattern of cortisol secretion begins to invert itself. Levels are lower in the morning, affording little or no “gas in the tank” to start the day, and they’re higher at midnight, making it virtually impossible to wind down and rest.
It does not end there. In addition to causing a deranged output of cortisol, overstimulation of the sympathetic nervous system also causes decreased production of progesterone, one of your body’s natural calming agents. The result is that women who are chronically stressed also tend toward hormonal imbalance between estrogen, progesterone, and testosterone (which is important in women as well as in men).
Soothing Your Emotions Before They Become Disease
First of all, there is nothing to be gained by categorizing emotions as “good” or “bad.” Instead, think of them as guidance. The emotions that feel good are guiding you toward health, while the ones that feel bad are trying to get your attention so that you can change either your perception or your behavior. It truly is as simple as that.
Emotions can also become toxic if they are allowed to persist unresolved, rather than being worked through fully and released. Consider, for example, the woman who lost a child and fifteen years later, now well into menopause, still hasn’t moved anything into that child’s room, keeping it exactly as it was the day the child died. The emotions that drive her to enshrine that room—the unresolved grief, the refusal to move forward in life, the denial—are toxic. They not only have robbed her of fifteen years of life, but also are setting her up for physical illness, especially given the intensity with which our unresolved baggage from the past arises at menopause.
The ill health and pain you may experience at midlife are caused not by difficult emotions per se, but rather by a willingness to let those emotions and the needs behind them persist unresolved—or by a misperception of what they mean in your life. Unresolved, “stuck” emotions keep setting up the same body biochemistry over and over again. The effect of negative emotions on our bodies can be likened to water in a river. Our bodies stay clean and fresh as long as our emotions keep flowing, triggering changes in our perception and behavior. The minute that water stagnates, all manner of decay and germs start to flourish.
One of my menopausal patients arrived at a wonderful insight. She began to realize that whenever she feels happy, she also begins to feel nervous, because it is her perception that whenever good things happen in her life, she has to leave behind past aspects of her life that have supported her. Getting a promotion at work, for example, had always been tainted with pangs of regret, because she knew that moving up changed the dynamics of her old relationships. The people she had been friends with before didn’t accept her in the same way anymore. I have certainly had the same experience in my own life. The silver lining in that cloud, however, is that by allowing yourself to continually move toward ever-increasing success and joy, you attract new friends and circumstances that support you fully for who you are becoming. The key for this woman is to focus on all the good that has come from allowing herself to become happier and more successful.
Psychologist Gay Hendricks, Ph.D., in his brilliant book The Big Leap: Conquer Your Hidden Fear and Take Life to the Next Level (HarperCollins, 2009), points out that we’ve all been programmed (sometimes starting in utero) with an inner thermostat for how much love, abundance, and success we are comfortable allowing into our lives. And when we get close to going beyond our upper limit of these good things, we unconsciously get back into our comfort zone by starting an argument, getting sick, having an accident, or sabotaging ourselves in some other way. Since midlife is designed to help us burst through the upper limits of the first half of our lives, it’s essential that we recognize our upper-limit problems and see them for what they are. This is the first step toward going beyond them.
Our beliefs, after all, have a very powerful effect on us. The work of Ellen Langer, Ph.D., of Harvard illustrates this beautifully. In one of her trademark mindfulness studies on how beliefs affect the body, she looked at two groups of hotel room attendants. One group was told that their work was actually vigorous exercise. The control group carried on as usual. At the end of the study, the group who were told they were exercising at work had lost weight and had lower blood pressure. Nothing was different between the two groups except their belief about the meaning of their work!18 Again, however, beware the oversimplification that “happiness” is good and “sadness” is bad. Both emotions are necessary to function as a normal human being. Without sadness, the experience of happiness would lose its sweetness. Health is enhanced by allowing all emotions to wash in and out like the tides of the sea. Just as the tides are essential for cleansing the ocean, our emotions cleanse our mind and body. At midlife, sadness and regrets from our past may take on a heightened role for a time, helping us to truly clean out the silted-up river bottoms of our emotional lives, thus pushing our upper limits higher and setting the stage for more fulfillment and joy to come in.
Are We Responsible for Our Health?
Critics of the mind-body connection say that focusing on the emotional dimension of illness makes people feel worse when they are already vulnerable, as though they are guilty of causing their own disease. I agree that there is the potential to carry this philosophy too far and blame ourselves for ill health. However, the value of the mind-body connection is too great to discard. The simple truth is that the people who heal fastest and remain healthiest the longest are those who feel that their lives are fulfilling and joyful. Even when they’re sick, they feel that their life has meaning and that they have some locus of control. Here’s an example: I recently came down with pneumonia due, in part, to a particularly rigor
ous travel schedule that included getting on a plane when I knew I needed to sleep and rest to get over a cold. I had scheduled a meeting in New York for which people were traveling from as far away as Thailand, so I didn’t want to cancel. But when I finally got home four days later, I ended up in bed for four days, and then had a cough that lasted for weeks. All I could do for days was take baths, read books, and sleep—all most unusual for me. My body was simply doing what it needed to do to get me off my feet to rest. During this time, my colleague Deena Spear, a vibrational healer, told me that my illness was a sort of “energy upgrade” or transformation and that my body needed rest in order for this to happen. I can’t prove that, but what she said felt right and it was far more empowering than believing I had caught some random bug that was going around. I cleared my schedule of everything that could be cleared for the next several months.
Those who think, “I catch everything that is going around no matter what I do,” or “The world is doing it to me…. There’s nothing I can do about it…. I can’t get a break…. The world is out to get me…. This is just the way the world is,” et cetera, are disempowered by their thoughts and perceptions. This directly contributes to an imbalance in the autonomic nervous system and associated hormonal systems. Twenty-five years of medical practice have shown me so clearly that emotions are the primary energy at work, tipping the scales one way or the other, toward illness or toward health, and that the victim mentality from adverse childhood programming is at the root of many illnesses. Cellular biologist Bruce Lipton, Ph.D., has documented the most recent and groundbreaking research on the profound impact of our beliefs on our states of health in his book The Biology of Belief (Hay House, 2008). In almost every case, beliefs are more powerful than genes. In fact, belief and perception control how genes are expressed!
Despite what we learn daily about healthy exercise practices, healthy diets, and good medical care, the bottom line is that the most significant way of contributing to our own good health is through the quality of our thought processes. This power is a valuable gift, in light of the absolute lack of control we have over other aspects of life. Think about being on a turbulent flight in bad weather. You have no control over the winds, or the skills or the mental state of the pilot flying the plane. But you do have the power to minimize your discomfort. You can decide to read a book, strike up a conversation with the person next to you, take your antioxidants, wrap up in a warm blanket, sleep, listen to music, or watch the movie. Alternatively, you can listen to every engine noise and allow yourself to be debilitated by worry the entire flight. It’s your choice.
Ultimately, you are the only one who can make significant deposits into your health bank account. This is not the job of your doctor, your nutritionist, your lover, or your parents. There is no supplement, no health care provider, and no exotic herb that can possibly do for you what you can do for yourself.
The key is compassion for yourself. Dr. Hendricks has noted that any area of pain, blame, or shame in our lives is there because we have not loved that part of ourselves enough. No matter what you’re feeling, the only way to get a difficult feeling to go away is simply to love yourself for it. If you think you’re stupid, then love yourself for feeling that way. It’s a paradox, but it works. To heal, you must be the first one to shine the light of compassion on any areas within you that you feel are unacceptable (and we’ve all got them). The hormonal shifts you experience around the time of menopause can facilitate this.
HOW OUR MIDLIFE BRAINS AND BODIES
ARE SET UP TO HEAL OUR PAST
Though memories are distributed throughout the body and the brain, certain areas of the brain, notably the amygdala and hippocampus, are especially important for the encoding and retrieving of memories. Interestingly, these areas of the brain are particularly rich in receptors for estrogen, progesterone, and GnRH, the hormones that fluctuate the most during the perimenopausal years. Given the heightened activity of these hormones in these areas, it makes sense that memory activation and retrieval would be enhanced during the years immediately surrounding menopause.19 Hurts and losses we’ve managed to forget or minimize for many years, even decades, may suddenly become overwhelming—even if we think we should be “over” all that pain from the past.
RACHEL: Sudden Anxiety Strikes
Rachel was a strong, self-assured woman with a challenging job and a no-nonsense attitude. But around the time she turned fifty-one, all sorts of physical and emotional health issues started springing up. First, she began experiencing nausea and weight loss. Then her doctor found and removed a benign uterine polyp. But after her dentist pulled an abscessed tooth in what seemed like a fairly routine procedure, Rachel felt as though she’d gone off the deep end. She experienced such extreme anxiety, fear, and panic that she needed to receive treatment for post-traumatic stress disorder. Although she had no previous history of anxiety or depression, Rachel had completely lost her zest for life and felt powerless over the emotions she was experiencing.
FIGURE 5: WHY TRAUMATIC MEMORIES MAY BE RELIVED AT MIDLIFE
The brain’s memory centers are rich in receptors for the hormones that fluctuate in perimenopause.
I assured Rachel that she was perfectly sane and that what she was describing was a classic midlife example of how the past roars back to be healed. Though Rachel was willing to seek additional professional mental health counseling, if necessary, I first recommended the following: I suggested she pick a number from one to ten, choosing the first one that came into her head. Then I told her to think back to what was happening in her life when she was that age. A part of her childhood self may well have been traumatized, I told her, and was still running her central nervous system. Now that she had the life experience and skills to deal with this long-repressed event, Rachel needed to call on her fully functional adult self to take care of the situation and “grow up” the unhealed little girl inside her who was begging for attention and help. Whatever the trauma had been, Rachel was finally ready to feel it so she could heal it—and let it go forever.
I recommended that she follow the steps outlined in the magic garden exercise in the book Repetition: Past Lives, Life, and Rebirth (Hay House, 2008) by clinical psychotherapist Doris Cohen, Ph.D., or that Rachel contact Dr. Cohen through her website (www.healing repetition.com) to schedule a session with her. I also suggested she learn about the Divine Love healing process from the World Service Institute (www.worldserviceinstitute.org).
CHRISTINE: Midlife Brings Self-Healing
On the tenth anniversary of the day she was raped, Christine wrote, she awoke with a greater rush of energy than ever before. These torrents of feeling had become increasingly powerful as she advanced through perimenopause, like exaggerations of the hormonal crests and troughs of the monthly cycles she described as “like PMS times ten.” Uncomfortable physical symptoms increasingly accompanied these waves, as her body begged for attention to the wounds left by her sexual assault.
Headaches, body aches, queasiness, insomnia, anxiety attacks, diarrhea, toothaches, and many other symptoms manifested themselves along the way to my recovery again and again. Over time, I learned to quiet myself and fully experience what I was feeling as each of these “illnesses” struck me. Each time, strong emotions came up and were eventually released, sometimes within minutes—and the symptoms disappeared.
Christine’s openness to the messages being sent by her body helped facilitate her healing.
The most incredible insight that became clear to me during the process of discharge, release, and healing that occurred time and time again was that I am my own healer. It was amazing to me how interrelated my emotions were with the various symptoms I was experiencing.
SUSAN: Standing Up for Herself at Menopause
At forty-five, Susan wrote, “Menopause for me is the courage and push I’ve needed all of my life.” Both of Susan’s parents were weekend alcoholics, and while they “partied,” she and her brother took care of their younger sisters. She
left home at eighteen to marry.
Naturally I married an alcoholic, but I didn’t know it until years later. The relationship was very controlling and abusive—mentally, emotionally, and physically. He controlled my every decision, from when I could see my family to where I worked, what furniture to buy, what cars I drove, and the decision to not have children. I convinced myself that we had a wonderful, close relationship. We became my parents, partying and drinking on weekends just like they did—I drank to keep my husband company and to be “part of” something. I also started smoking up to two packs a day. When I became pregnant at age thirty, he convinced me to get an abortion, saying he was under too much pressure, promising we’d try again the following year. Instead, he had an affair. I hung in there, and eventually he ended it and came back to me. I took this to be proof positive that he truly loved me.
Four years later Susan sought couples therapy, but at the last minute her husband refused to go. Rather than cancel, she went alone. Through her counselor, she started attending meetings of Adult Children of Alcoholics and Al-Anon, where she learned that she was not alone. This marked the beginning of a new life for her.
For Susan, the first major milestone was talking about her abortion. Next she quit smoking. “That opened up a whole new world for me. I no longer had to stuff my feelings and light up a cigarette. I had a mouthpiece. I had something to say, and oh, I said a lot—I had diarrhea of the mouth. And such honesty!” Then she quit drinking. “My husband didn’t like this new me at all. I no longer was a party girl, at his beck and call.”
The Wisdom of Menopause Page 9
