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Category: Blog
Re-energise Your Relationship
Have you found that menopause symptoms have had a bad effect on your personal relationship? Poor sleep, anxiety and mood swings can have a negative effect on you and all areas of your life, leaching out all of the fun and joy.
When your lover doesn’t know whether they are getting ‘happy you’ who will hug them and dance with them, or ‘raging you’ who might bite their head off, they start to avoid you. The same goes for your kids and your friends, unless they are incredibly understanding or are going through similar symptoms.
When you are in a relationship there are three elements: you, your partner and the relationship between you. Sometimes when a relationship is not going well it’s not that you or your partner are ‘to blame’. The focus needs to be on nurturing the relationship.
How kindness can re-energise your relationship
Kindness is an essential element in nurturing your relationship. This starts with being kind to yourself so that you have the resources to be kind to your partner. Remember ‘you can’t pour from an empty cup’.
And by the way, couples in long-term relationships who are kind to each other have better heart health because they have less calcification of the arteries. They are literally less ‘hard-hearted’.
8 Top Tips for creating the habit of kindness in relationship
1 Practice self-care. Manage you time so that you can take time out to be kind to yourself. Say ‘no’ to things you don’t need or want to do so that you have time for the one you love.
2. Build your self-esteem. Be kind to your body through exercise, healthy eating and a bit of pampering. When you love yourself it is easier for others to love you.
3. Do something different with your partner – regularly. To keep relationships fresh it is essential to regularly do different activities together and create new happy memories. You might arrange date nights, meals out, walking together, or going to a movie.
4. Give compliments. Find something kind to say to your partner every day. It could be a simple ‘thank you’, an appreciation for something they have said or done, or a compliment about their appearance.
5. Have a hug. Hug your partner every day, even if you are busy. Hugging releases the hormone oxytocin into your bloodstream that helps to bond you with your partner. Psychotherapist, Virginia Satir, says that you need 4 hugs a day for survival, 8 hugs a day for maintenance and 12 hugs a day for growth. That’s a lot of hugging!
6. Connect with your inner child. Your inner child loves playing and exploring. Have fun. Have a laugh and a smile with your partner to release the hormone serotonin that makes you feel good. Watch something funny on TV or a funny movie or go out with friends who enjoy a laugh.
7. Keep talking and listening to each other. Don’t just wait for your turn to speak. Really listen to what your partner is saying. Use active listening skills such as maintaining eye contact and reflecting back words and sentences that your partner has used. DO NOT keep one eye on your mobile phone while you are listening.
8 Enjoy intimate contact. This is not just about sex. This is about kissing, cuddling, holding hands, and affectionate touch. If sex has become difficult because of menopause symptoms, such as loss of confidence or vaginal dryness, be open and talk about it.
By sharing kindness to your partner you will not only strengthen your relationship, you will also improve your menopause symptoms. Win win!
For more help with your improving your relationship contact me to talk about how I might help you.
ps Dr David Hamilton’s inspirational new book, The Little Book of Kindness, is available now on Amazon
Ease The Anxiety
Increased levels of anxiety may come as shock to many women at menopause. More celebrity women, such as Carol Vorderman, Mariella Frostrup and Gillian Anderson, have been speaking openly about their own experiences of menopause anxiety and that is helping to raise awareness of this issue.
The causes of anxiety at this stage of life are complex. It can be the result of hormones changes, poor sleep, low mood and stressful situations at home or work. It can be aggravated by poor nutrition and lifestyle choices.
Symptoms of anxiety include:
Panic attacks
Insomnia
Poor appetite or over-eating
Inability to cope with day-to-day living
Loss of confidence
Hot flushes
Avoidance of new situations
All of this can be difficult to cope with on top of the physical symptoms of menopause. And if you are experiencing panic attacks they can be frightening and exhausting. It can leave you feeling overwhelmed.
Suggestions for dealing with anxiety
1 Acknowledge your feelings. The more you try to ignore and suppress your emotions the more they will keep trying to get your attention.
2 Seek help. It may be that you just need to have an open conversation with a trusted friend. But if the anxiety is impacting on your life and you are having frequent panic attacks you may need to talk to a medical practitioner or therapist.
3 Talk to your manager. If your anxiety is being triggered by workplace stress it is time to have a conversation with your line-manager before it affects your health.
4 Create some ‘me-time’. Support your emotional health through regular exercise, meditation and breathing exercises.
5 Live well. Avoid or reduce caffeine and sugary foods. Cut down on alcohol. Stop smoking. Establish a relaxing sleep routine and bedroom environment. Regular, good quality sleep is essential to easing your anxiety.
For more help with your anxiety contact me to talk about how I might help you.
Solutions for Menopause Fatigue
Since you entered perimenopause, have you noticed a dip in your energy? Does it feel like someone turned on a tap in your toes and your energy has just drained away?
The years around menopause are a busy time for women as you juggle work, family and relationships. You may be trying to deal with teenage children and elderly parents as well as maintaining your career. It can feel like being the filling in an unpleasant sandwich. And all the time your life is being disrupted by irritating symptoms.
Causes of Fatigue
Tiredness and fatigue at menopause may be due to a variety of factors:
- Hormonal imbalance and lower levels of estrogen
- Poor and interrupted sleep
- Nutrition deficiencies
- Higher levels of stress
- Lifestyle choices including smoking cigarettes, drinking alcohol and lack of exercise
- Negative mindset
- Health issues such as an underactive thyroid, diabetes, anaemia, adrenal fatigue or sleep apnoea.
The common symptoms of fatigue are drowsiness, irritability, lack of concentration, memory lapses, apathy and crash of energy after eating.
Solutions
If the fatigue you are experiencing has gone on for some weeks and is seriously disrupting your life or causing low mood, talk to your doctor. It may be time to have your blood and thyroid function tested. For less severe symptoms there are actions you can take to boost your energy:
1 Adopt a regular, relaxing bedtime routine. Avoid late night news programmes and stimulating books. Enjoy a warm bath or shower. Read an amusing novel. Leave mobile phones outside the bedroom.
2. Use relaxation techniques such as mindfulness, meditation and breathing techniques. Try a yoga or Tai Chi class.
3 Stabilise your blood sugar levels by reducing your consumption of cakes, biscuits and confectionery. Eat complex carbohydrates such as wholegrain cereals, bananas, nuts and seeds.
4 Avoid caffeine in the afternoon and evening. Try a herb tea or naturally flavoured water as an alternative.
5 Stop smoking
6 Reduce your stress levels with some basic time management techniques. Create a to-do list for the following day in the evening and prioritise your tasks.
7 Have a 15/20 minute walk every day, preferably outside in the middle of the day. It will release endorphins into your bloodstream and increase your energy levels.
8 Stay well hydrated. Your body and mind only function effectively if you drink plenty of water. Start your day with cold or hot drink of water flavoured with a slice of lemon and fresh ginger.
9 Take a food supplement. Even if you have a healthy balanced diet you may still be deficient in some minerals and vitamins. Iron and vitamin B complex can be helpful
10 Take a power nap. A 5-10 minute taken in the early afternoon can improve your energy levels.
If you need more help with your menopause symptoms contact me to discuss your options.
10 Top Tips to Clear Brain Fog
You know that feeling you get when you just can’t think straight? Your brain is wading through treacle and you can’t make a decision. Your memory is not what it was. You keep forgetting things: people’s names, items on your mental to-do list, something you were going to say, where you put your keys. It’s starting to get you down. It saps your energy and you feel tired all the time. Who knew that would happen at menopause?
Menopause Brain Fog Brain fog is a common side-effect of the physical changes that occur at menopause. In my late 40s, as I entered peri-menopause, I felt like I needed a new pair of glasses to help me think straight see the world clearly. But it wasn’t my eyesight that was the problem.
Causes of Brain Fog
Brain fog is not just a result of the reduction in your reproductive hormones. It can also be related to:
- Increased levels of stress
- Lack of sleep
- Lifestyle
- Deficiencies in nutrition
If you’re experiencing brain fog and it is disrupting your life then it’s time to take action and start to think clearer and feel more energised.
Top Tips for Clearing the Fog
- Review your sleep pattern. It is helpful to keep a sleep journal for two weeks to see if there are any patterns that you can identify and take action on. (See ‘Sleep – The Wonder Drug)
- Use some basic time-management techniques to help reduce your stress. Create a To Do List every night for the following day. Prioritise the list and do the most important and urgent things first – even if they are not the easiest tasks.
- Learn to say ‘No’ assertively so you don’t end up over-committing. Say @no@ as soon as you can in the conversation. Be polite and firm. Suggest alternatives if you can.
- Reduce or eliminate alcohol. Alcohol is a depressant that has an adverse effect on your brain function. Find something else that you can drink that you would enjoy.
- Stop smoking. The chemicals in cigarettes stress your system and deprive your brain of the oxygen it needs to function effectively.
- Eat foods that are rich in Omega 3 oils that help support brain function. such as oily fish, linseeds, chia seeds, walnuts, tofu and avocados
- Take a food supplement. Zinc, magnesium and vitamin B6 have been found to be beneficial as aids to concentration.
- Stay hydrated. Lack of water to the brain can cause symptoms such as lack of focus, memory issues, brain fatigue, headaches and depression. Drink plenty of water or non-caffeinated drinks during the day.
- Take regular exercise. Exercise that raises your heart rate and breathing rate increases the flow of blood to your brain and helps to create new neural connections. If you exercise first thing in the morning it can help you with those first difficult tasks of the day.
- When you are tense or worried parts of your brain shut down and you enter the fight/flight/freeze state. Relaxing allows your brain to function at it’s best. You can use simple breathing exercises, meditation, yoga, Tai Chi or Pilates.
There are lots more tips and techniques in the 30 Days To A Smarter Menopause Programme
Sleep – The Secret Wonder Drug
Regular good quality sleep is often the first victim of menopause. It takes many women by surprise as it is not often talked about as one of the common symptoms but it is estimated to affect over half of women.
Poor sleep can give rise to other symptoms such as brain fog, memory lapses, reduced energy, low mood and difficulty maintaining a healthy weight.
There are a number of reasons why poor sleep can occur at this stage of life. Menopause is a time of major physical and psychological changes brought about by the reduction in the reproductive hormones, estrogen and progesterone. One side-effect of these hormonal changes is night sweats which can disrupt sleep several times a night.
A significant number of women experience higher levels of anxiety during menopause. This can be the result of the hormone changes and also the general life pressures of midlife from work, teenage children, older parents and relationship issues.
Good sleep is essential for your physical, mental and emotional health. There are five areas where you can make simple changes that will help to improve your sleep.
1 Bedroom Environment. Make your bedroom a sleep haven. Remove your mobile phone and any other electronic devices that might disturb you. De-clutter the room so that the air and energy flow unobstructed. Keep the room cool, dark, quiet and well-ventilated
2 Bedtime Routine. Create a regular, relaxing routine. Lower lighting levels as the evening progresses. Watch or read something funny or non-stimulating. Don’t watch the evening news. Have a warm bath or shower. Go to bed at a similar time every night and get up at a similar time in the morning.
3 Review what you eat and drink. Avoid coffee after mid-afternoon. Notice if there are certain foods that disturb your sleep or cause night sweats. Common triggers are spicy foods, red meat, chocolate and sugar-rich foods. Reduce alcohol because it causes poor quality sleep and hot flushes.
4 De-stress. Incorporate some basic time-management techniques into your daily routine. Exercise regularly. Attend a yoga or Pilates class. Have fun time with your friends.
5 Adopt a positive mindset. Before you lie down to sleep, make a note in a journal of three positive things you have noticed during the day. Practice simple breathing exercises to help you to relax when you get to bed or if you wake up during the night. Use a relaxation recording
Sleep is a natural process. Your body is programmed to rest and recuperate at night. Help it do it’s thing.
Why Menopause In The Workplace Matters
Imagine if every woman sailed through their menopause, it was talked about openly with no embarrassment and it didn’t get in the way of life. If 3 out of 4 experience symptoms, 1 in 4 don’t. So why can’t we all to sail through it? We hope that with the right awareness and education, we can.
Back in my mid-40s I struggled so much with period pains I ended up in hospital. It wasn’t just the pain, I had crashing fatigue and would spend at least a weekend a month in bed. The doctors prescribed painkillers which ‘zombied’ me out even more. Then acne flared up, which apparently a lot of menopausal women get.
To top it all it was getting hard for me to manage at work. I had a senior job, with long hours, busy teams reporting to me, and grueling deadlines.
After a year (and redundancy) something had to give. Instead of masking the problem with painkillers, I reluctantly went private and got to the bottom of what turned out to be hormone problems. I know it now as perimenopause, something I knew nothing about then.
The thing that upset me most was that I thought I was handling it but my husband told the doctor that I was a nightmare to live with and my relationships were struggling. News to me and it goes to show that you sometimes need others to tell you the things you can’t see yourself.
Hormone replacement therapy changed my life in a month and I couldn’t understand why I hadn’t had this offered to me before by my own GP. I was mid-40s so a prime age for menopause symptoms.
How much of a difference would awareness and education have made to me then, and how much of a difference can it make to us all if we all know about menopause, its symptoms and how to manage them?
In 2013 I founded Henpicked.net and then we joined together with T4W in 2016. Henpicked focused on the menopause when we noticed that whenever we published an article, traffic to the website spiked and there were loads of comments on social media. The struggle, lack of awareness and understanding was shockingly clear and we decided to do something about it.
We have the website, and now we’ve written a book Menopause: The Change for the Better, with clinicians and natural practitioners giving clear guidance and information, and women sharing their menopause stories.
But we want to change the culture of the UK for good and we needed to find a way to reach even more people.
ITV asked me if I knew any companies who had menopause policies so I asked the HR Directors I know. Resoundingly, the answer was ‘no’, but some wanted to know more. We talked to the University of Leicester team who were researching the Government Report. Their evidence-based research made the reasons why organisations should take menopause seriously clear. It’s good for their colleagues, good for an inclusive culture and ultimately it’s good for their bottom line.
It became clear to us that while many companies were willing to introduce menopause policies, not many knew how to start. We decided to use our expertise to educate organisations about what types of support they could introduce, and how.
We created Henpicked: Menopause In The Workplace to help make it easy, to provide the support and training that those organisations need.
Our target was to talk to 100 companies in a year and we did more than that. It may be just the start but when you add up how many employees were reached, it’s a good one.
We held our second annual Menopause in the Workplace conference in January 2018, where the fantastic companies we’ve worked with shared their case studies, helping educate other organisations on what they did, how they did it and the results they’ve seen. The results are brilliant.
We’ve now increased our target to 1,000 organisations in a year, kicking off our Menopause In The Workplace events across the whole of the UK will help us do that. We really enjoyed our first on in London on the 5 December and we’ve now organised events in Manchester, Birmingham, Swansea, Edinburgh and York. Other locations and dates are being confirmed.
In changing the culture of the UK we all have a role to play. We love working with organisations because by educating their support functions, line managers and colleagues – men and women – we can achieve this faster.
The pay off for businesses is healthier, happier more productive staff, less time off, avoiding women leaving because they can’t cope with their symptoms and of course – the stick – if they don’t do it, they risk employee relations’ issues and being taken to tribunal.
Surely it’s an easy decision to make.
Deborah Garlick, Founder of Henpicked
Action is Everything
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Not Just Hot Flushes
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Menopause, What Menopause?
As women, we know we are going to go through menopause at some time but we don’t really want to think about it, right? We’ll deal with it when it happens. Why would you want to start thinking about it before it happens?
From my conversation with women in their 40s I know that many women have very limited understanding of menopause. It’s not their fault, there is still a bit of a taboo about talking about ‘women’s things’. And there’s this sense that menopause is about ageing and an end of something. It’s just not sexy.
I started wondering what menopause was all about and what mine would be like when I was in my 40s. My mother had a hysterectomy in her late 30s so she couldn’t advise me. I had no close female relatives to learn from and friends weren’t interested in talking about. It was time to do my own research.
My first sortie into the world of menopause was a weekend event run by a woman’s magazine called ‘The Time of Your Life’. I came away from that with some basic information about the female hormones and hormone replacement therapy and a desire to know more. Since then there have been many books, internet research and courses.
When I became a therapist it all came together for me in a way that meant I could manage my own experience and support my friends and clients.
In my view, knowledge is power. When you understand what is happening to your hormones and how that affects your body, your mind and your emotions it has lots of positive benefits.
- You can prepare for the years around your menopause so that you enter this stage of life in the best possible physical health.
- You can recognise the symptoms and not be worried about them.
- You can take action to make adjustments to your nutrition and lifestyle to support your body.
- You understand when to seek help
- You can have an informed conversation with your Doctor or other medical professionals to discuss the options for treatment.
- You can advocate for what you need
- You don’t have to suffer unnecessarily
- You can get on with enjoying your life
- Your loved ones can get on with enjoying their lives
It’s never too early to start planning for a healthy menopause and it’s never too late to adopt a healthy lifestyle.