Feeling Afraid of the Menopause? Then Read This…

How are you feeling about the menopausal journey that lies ahead of you? Are you feeling afraid? Do you watch those changes happening in your body and panic, thinking that life and age has finally caught up with you, and worst of all, that this is the beginning of the end?

If so, be assured that you are most certainly not alone. It’s completely normal and almost expected to feel apprehensive or even plain scared when faced with a life transition like this. I’ve lost count of the number of women I work with who feel exactly the same as you are right now.

However, it’s vital that you work towards overcoming this fear and instead embrace this brand new era of your life, for the sake of your health and also your happiness.

Because not only does fear affect the way to feel on a day-to-day level, it will also create exactly the thing you fear- a difficult menopause.

Today I’d like to show you this fear can actually create the exact thing you are fearing the most- a difficult menopause- and how you can take steps right now to overcome it.  Let’s take a look.

The power of negativity

Have you even woken up with a sense of dread in your stomach, feeling very sure that you’re going to have a terrible day?  You somehow drag yourself out of bed only to find that your blender has blown a fuse, your coffee is too cold, and you’re out of eggs. Then a huge traffic jam makes you late for an important meeting at work, that bright sunshine you were hoping for turns into torrential rain, and you tell yourself ‘I just knew it!’

And so the day continues to go from bad to worse. You program yourself to believe that the day will be terrible, so it actually is. You feed yourself negative information, interpret your experience of the world through a negative lens and reinforce the negative loop with negative feedback.

This naturally shapes your behaviour and thus your whole experience which impacts upon the rest of your life.

The Reticular Activating System

This whole process happens thanks to something called the reticular activating system (RAS) which helps to filter and prioritize the information entering your brain. It helps you to decide how to best invest all of your energies and also influences the final outcome. This process works the same with both real events and situations, and also the psychological ones, like fear, hurt and worry.

Your thoughts told you that the day would be bad, so that’s exactly what your brain experienced.

Fear and the menopause

It’s exactly the same when it comes to our experience of the menopause.

Because most of us have heard such negative stories from friends or family about those women who have struggled long and hard against their symptoms- they piled on the weight, watched their relationship with their partner break down, battled hot flushes and found the whole thing and incredible struggle.

We’ve heard the jokes, noticed the attitudes and we dread all of these horrible things happening to us too.

So as a result, we actually expect that the same things will happen to us. We prepare ourselves for the worst, we ready ourselves for battle and our behaviour changes too. We interpret every symptom or natural shift in our bodies as ‘a sign’ and we continue to believe all of the scare stories we’ve ever heard about the menopause, preparing ourselves for a long hard fight.

How fear impacts your physical symptoms

As you might remember, the stress created when we feel like this has an enormous impact upon your overall experience of the menopause and often influences whether you sail through without a care in the world, or struggle through the battle on a physical level too.

When you’re stressed, your body prepares for fight or flight, and so releases hormones such as cortisol and adrenaline to deal with the threat. Whilst doing so, it also diverts blood away from your vital organs towards your limbs, worsening any imbalance of hormones, aggravating your symptoms and generally making you feel terrible.

A combination of both the physical and the psychological is what will impact upon your experience.

So what can you do about it?

How to overcome your fear

Even though it might feel that you’re fighting a losing battle when it comes to your fear of the menopause, be assured that you’re not. You have the power to shape your attitude towards the menopause, shift your perception of your symptoms and also calm and heal your entire body.

Be calm
Take time to sit quietly and accept the period of transition you are now entering. Be calm and breathe. Stop fighting and calmly accept this new era of your life. It might not always be comfortable, and challenges might arise, but know that you can do it.

See the positives
Even if it might be hard to see it now, there are some positives when it comes to the menopause. For example, you no longer need to worry about ‘mistakes’ and can enjoy a new kind of freedom. You will no longer be at the mercy of your monthly cycles, you don’t need to fork out for sanitary products and you know what, sex can be even more satisfying.

Empower yourself
Even if you can’t stop those physical transitions and fluctuations, you can change your attitude.

You are in control. You can change your attitude towards the menopause. You can decide to feel good or bad, to struggle or to sail. It’s up to you. It’s time to be the master of your own destiny and use this time as an opportunity to grow and develop as a person.