Five Ways Perimenopause is Punking You Daily
If you’re a woman in your 40s or 50s (perhaps even 30s) who no longer feels like yourself, you could very well be in perimenopause. Perimenopausal symptoms are surprising, odd, and annoying, and they all leave you asking, WTF? Read on for a handful of examples.
- You experience nausea & vertigo. At some point in your life, you’ve likely awoken at 3 a.m. with your head spinning and your head hanging over the toilet as you pay the price for having overindulged in alcohol previous night. When you wake up in the middle of the night with nausea and vertigo and you’ve not had a drop of liquor, that’s bullshit. Actually, no. It’s perimenopause.
- Your monthly cycles change. When I say your cycle “changes,” I mean significantly. It’s not like you go from using a light tampon to using a regular tampon or that you shift from three- to four-day cycles. No, I mean you go from bleeding like a normal menstruating woman to bleeding so heavily that you question if it’s wise to leave your house at all. (Note: You will want to invest in period underwear and always keep an extra pair of pants in your vehicle.)
- Your spouse pisses you off (even more than usual). If you constantly find yourself squelching the urge to tell your spouse to shut up and go away, that’s perimenopause at play. Even the sound of his voice or sight of his face may be too much for you sometimes. And stuff that before may have slightly peeved you in the past may now send you over the edge. For instance, sometimes my husband likes to sit in close proximity to me when I’m writing, which is sweet, I suppose. But when I’m trying to concentrate, I don’t want to hear his sighs, sneezes, or sniffles. I just want to be alone so when he insists on sharing space with me, my teeth start clenching. Your bandwidth and tolerance for certain people, annoying conversations, and dumbass situations diminish significantly as your hormones are in flux. Tip: This might be the perfect time to take up kickboxing to let out some of that pent-up anger.
- You rage over little things. I’ve never been one to get too worked up over stuff. I’ll let most things roll off my back because in the final analysis, most things that piss me off are not that big a deal. However, one day a couple of summers ago, I asked my boys to pull weeds out of our flower beds. This was a task that could have been done with bare hands, but for some reason my twelve-year-old son decided to get a shovel for this endeavor. Next thing I knew, he had severed one of our landscaping lights. I feel it’s important to note that I had been asking my husband to install landscape lighting for five years, and he had finally done it a few months prior to this incident. So, in my mind, when my son cut the line, I figured this meant another five years of exterior darkness in front of my home. This did not make me happy. I. Went. Off. I can’t recall exactly what I said as it was a bit of an out-of-body experience, but I was livid. I now know this extreme reaction was a result of perimenopause.
- Your self-esteem is in the toilet. My self-esteem has never been stellar, but holy shit—during perimenopause, it got appallingly worse. Perhaps this is because my estrogen was fluctuating, and I had no testosterone—as in, zero. I thought I was sad because now that I had reached middle aged, I felt invisible to the population. The fact that I hadn’t had a restful night’s sleep in roughly seven years probably didn’t help. Suddenly, I found myself thinking about how lucky Sleeping Beauty was to not only get to catch a ton of Zzzzs but to look so damn good doing it.
Has perimenopause commandeered your body & your brain, wiped you of your energy & enthusiasm, wreaked havoc on your sleep & sex drive, and left you feeling like a shell of your former self? Are you feeling confused, stuck, isolated, unseen, misunderstood, exhausted, and ticked off? If so, Why Did I Walk into This Room? Finding the Humor When Perimenopause is Kicking Your Ass is for you. This relatable read not only shares helpful insights on how to find relief from perimenopausal symptoms but it also promises plenty of laughs along the way—all while reminding you that you are not alone during this precarious perimenopausal journey. You’ll laugh out loud as you read this collection of essays, all while saying, “Same, sister!”, “Amen, mama!”, and “OMG, yes!”
If you’re looking for hope, humor, and healing as you navigate perimenopause, Why Did I Walk into This Room? is just what the functional medicine doctor ordered. Order your copy today through Amazon, Barnes & Noble, or Braughler Books: Why Did I Walk into This Room? – Christy Heitger-Ewing