Menopause and Anxiety: The Night Terrors

Posted on Aug 17 2008

We Venuses may not all have suffered daytime panic, but each of us had nocturnal visits from a variety of rest-sucking fears we call the night terrors. Our specters included anxiety and worry, instant replays, and the list of undones. Some of us got all three of these lovelies, occasionally all in the same night. Along with insomnia, these visitations disrupted our sleep profoundly, leaving us more vulnerable to all the other emotional and physical changes that afflict us during the daylight hours.

Initially, I was feeling rather smug during the onset of menopause because I did not find myself bursting into tears or excessively cranky like some of my menopause goddess sisters. However, I made up for this initial blessing in spades during the night time.

In the wee hours of each morning, I would wake to find myself aboard the Fretliner Express, my own personal bullet train to anxiety and worry. While I would have no memory of embarking or even purchasing a ticket, I’d suddenly be speeding straight on to worst-case scenario with no stops at logic, rationality, or probability statistics.

“But this is not me!” I’d cry out silently. “I just don’t worry.” I think I’ve mentioned before that this phrase could be the mantra of mid-life women “This is not me.” Alas, it is you. And me. Now.

Back to the Fretliner - as always, I am alone and the train is whizzing past stops so fast I can’t tell where we are. Of course it is an underground train - eerie and dark and forbidding. My heart races, and I worry. About everything, it would seem. My kids - where are they right now? Either sound asleep, like I ought to be or partying the night away with their friends or mates. In any case, they are thousands of miles away, living their own lives. But I worry about unseen, amorphous dangers they might encounter. I worry about my health, my husband’s health, the health of my island or the planet. I fret about global warming and whether Friendly Market will have mahi-mahi for tomorrow night’s dinner. I worry about aging in general. I worry that Island Air will be late when we fly to Maui in 2 months, though we have no particular schedule that would be affected if it were late. All these worries are equal somehow. Equal as in HUGE. So I lay awake - worrying and fretting and desperate to get back to sleep. The worst part is that all this worry is aging me further! As much as I lose my train of thought these days, I can’t seem to lose my nocturnal journeys on the Fretliner Express train.

Instant Replays are another hard-to-swallow flavor of the night terrors for us menopausal goddesses. Like a curmudgeonly version of the movie “Groundhog Day”, you are forced to relive over and over some insignificant event. The repetition can drive you stark, raving mad. Ordinary moments play over and over in your brain like visual earworms. You re-view the dinner where you had an extra glass of wine and told an overlong albeit amusing story about your cats. You see yourself over and over again saying something stupid to your neighbor. A little episode of mutual crankiness at the dinner table plays ad nauseum. Even a mundane phone conversation with your mother is stuck on repeat.

Yet unlike that uplifting movie where Bill Murray learns the meaning of life and love, you just keep viewing the same loop with no resolution in sight. And in the morning you know it will strike you as inconsequential and meaningless, even silly, but right now in the dark of night, it won’t leave you alone. It drones on like a mosquito, bent on sucking the rest right out of you.

Then there is the dreaded “Night of the Undones”, a B-grade subplot of the horror movie that is menopause. The Undones. Those things you forgot to do, should have done, or worry that you might need to do - like thought zombies that parade through your night, jostling you, keeping you awake with silent incessant nagging. Did I pay last month’s phone bill? I can’t remember seeing it. I forgot to call the plumber or clean the catbox. I should have bought computer paper. When did I last check the oil in the car? What am I going to do with all those Christmas cards I bought, now that it is mid-January? Did I buy laundry soap? Did I clean the lint catcher in the dryer? Did I set the Tivo to record Desperate Housewives?
The litany goes on. And on.
If I get up and write these little reminders down, I’m up for a while. Usually, I focus on them, try to commit them to memory, in case they might be important. And this takes long enough that, I’m up. Or should I try to ignore the Undone zombies, they just keep lurching into my consciousness and you guessed it, I’m up.

Undones from the Future come to plague me as well. If they visited me over my morning coffee, I would consider them fodder for a walloping big to-do list. But of course, I’m too exhausted from the previous night’s visitations in the morning, to have a single productive thought in my head. Like their counterparts from “Night of the Living Dead”, my middle-of-the -night, synaptic zombies shuffle, lurch, and drag inexorably on through my sleep-deprived brain.
LURCH Order more diet cat food from the vet.
DRAG Check the chemicals in the hot tub.
SHUFFLE Look for the little dual voltage travel water-heating thing so we can take it to Thailand.
LURCH Remind Dewitt to find and put up the motion sensor light outside.
DRAG Trim dead bird-of-paradise blooms in front garden.
And so on. Don’t even suggest one of those little light pens that you can use to write down your list in the middle of the night, guaranteed to keep from waking your spouse and to allow you to fall right back to sleep, safe in the knowledge that you have corralled and organized the zombies. Suffice it to say that I fumble around in the dark, knocking all other implements from my bedside table to the floor, searching for this small item that if I weren’t so irritated would help me so much. But now, I am frustrated and heading toward pissed off, so once again I am AWAKE. and up for a while. The only thing that seems to help dissipate the nighttime anxiety IS anger.

And the one thing that truly makes it all bearable is that I’m not the only one. Even though I don’t see you on the Fretliner, I know you’re there - in some other car, riding along with me, sharing my sweats and terrors. The movie is easier to handle when we know what to expect and when we experience it together.
(material partially adapted from “The Big M” - available in the next 2-3 weeks - stay tuned.)

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Menopause Is A Scary Business

Posted on Aug 08 2008

Anxiety may literally be the most unnerving of the emotional traumas visited upon menopausal women; certainly it’s one of the least recognized or discussed. Although I touched upon it in a previous blog entry “(Menopause Has Got Me Worried” Sept. 7, 2007), it seems like it is time to talk about it again. Just recently, I’ve encountered a number of goddesses struggling with this frightening symptom.

First and most important, anxiety that comes out of nowhere when you enter perimenopause and menopause is NORMAL! Not every woman will suffer it, but those who do can take heart that it is just another in the panoply of maladies that accompany our transition. Second, it is TEMPORARY! It will get better. Most women I know have anxiety issues that last 6 months to 2 years. (If you’ve just started having anxiety episodes, you may be screaming inside “Two years! I can’t take two more years of this!”) Oh yes, you can. And you will. And there’s help.

The biggest help we found was the discovery that we were not alone. Other midlife women, who previously had never suffered from anxiety and fear, found them selves terrified driving on the freeway or over bridges, petrified for no reason on a daily basis, even experiencing full-blown panic attics in the absence of any recognizable threat.

The Venuses don’t really know of any ingestable remedies that decrease the anxiety of menopause per se. Sure there are some herbal anti-anxiety supplements but we felt we just didn’t know enough about them. Kava kava, for example, relieves anxiety but may damage our liver. (Although that may be dose related - Fijians have been using it for decades on a daily basis - they seem to have a decent life span.) As always, when trying something like this, let your health care partner/practitioner know and monitor your symptoms and dosage carefully. If your MD is not acting as a partner, but as a parent or ultimate authority, find one who will. I can tell you as a health care practitioner myself that the amount we DO NOT KNOW about menopause and many of the complementary therapies would fill a library. Or two.

While you may consult your health care practitioner/partner about your anxiety, be wary of pharmaceutical intervention as a first answer. Tranquilizers and other drugs such as Prozac may be helpful, but may cause other problems or adverse effects. Remember, we’re women. We can handle a lot. We do every day. As long as we know it’s NORMAL and TEMPORARY.

As a group, the Venuses’ fretting was rarely overwhelming, but it was scary and disturbing. If it had been worse, we likely would have seen therapists. (Differentiation note: If you are frightened and jittery, that’s normal. If you cannot leave the house because of fear, or are unable to conduct activities of daily living, that’s not normal and professional help is needed.)

We did practice giving ourselves and each other little “reality checks” when our worrying was excessively annoying. We practiced asking, “What is happening right now, this moment?” (Usually the answer was “Nothing.”) “Am I safe, alive, comfortable, etc?” Then we took deep breaths and decided not to panic until we had something to actually panic about, rather than a mental litany of “what ifs”. This actually helped ease our jitters quite a bit, although some days our practice worked better than others.

Above all, be gentle with yourself. Give your fear a name. Invite it in for tea. Recognize it as another part of this roller coaster ride we call Menopause - remember right after the scary climb up, anticipating the drop, comes the thrill of a great ride. Let’s do it together - it’s easier to share both the fear and the fun.

(Stay tuned for a future blog entry regarding the Night Terrors, a nocturnal flavor of anxiety.)

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Menopause Insomnia? Sleep Pretty in Pink!

Posted on Aug 01 2008

You’d be surprised how many men read our blog. Some seriously want to understand what’s happening with their wives, some are just curious, and some actually have help to offer.

When Doug Pick contacted me after reading our blogs on menopause and insomnia, he wanted to introduce menopausal goddesses to his “For Women Only” earplugs and sleep mask. “Hey,” I wrote back to him. “I’ve been using your earplugs for years.”

I consider myself somewhat of an earplug aficionado. Bizarre but true. I’ve tried them all over the years! And the Sleep Pretty In Pink plugs are quite simply the best! I can’t stand those waxy ones or the ones that are shaped like a beige cylinder (hello, ear canals get smaller as you go in - they’re not the same size as the opening. So a cylinder shape doesn’t fit, no matter how much you try to squish it down or force it in.) And the decibel reduction has to be over 30 or you might as well put cotton balls in your ears.

Doug had a new product I’d never heard of: Sleep Pretty in Pink gelcaps. Basically, they contain l-tryptophan, the natural ingredient that is purported to make you drowsy when you eat turkey. I know, some say that whole premise is hogwash and the full Thanksgiving stomach is what really makes you sleepy while l-tryptophan has no real effect, but I like to check things out for myself. On myself. Which is the only way to find out what works for each individual.

I’ve not had insomnia for awhile, knock on anything handy. But I knew we’d be going to France and any time zone changes completely disrupt my sleep patterns. I’d be able to perform an acid test on Sleep Pretty in Pink gelcaps.

All I can say is: amazing! I found myself wide awake at midnight Paris time, but dutifully put on my nightgown, sleep mask, and pink earplugs after popping 2 gelcaps. I lay down and woke up refreshed the next morning at 730 am. No residual grogginess (someday I’ll tell you my story of taking melatonin on an earlier trip to Europe. Suffice it to say, GROGGY was the name of my game.) I repeated my pink scenario the next several nights until my body adjusted completely.

I generally don’t need the gelcaps at home, but they are a mainstay of my travel kit. I have to pack a few extras for my husband who, jealous of my ease in sleeping, finally tried them for himself. He was understandably wary after the melatonin debacle, but is now a true believer.

Doug was kind enough to send us some samples, so for the first 10 menopausal goddesses who contact me (click on the Contact Us button at the top) with their address, I’ll send out a package of 30 gelcaps with a set of Sleep Pretty in Pink earplugs. For the next 10 goddesses, I'll send out 4 pair of Sleep Pretty in Pink ear plugs.

And let us know how they work for you. This is how we get our real information about remedies and helps for menopause and midlife: from one another. You have probably noticed that we do not have ads on this website. We don’t take money from advertisers because we want to recommend only those things that we have actually tried and found helpful.

I’ve included a link below to the website for those who’d like to purchase the pink sleep products. Or you can visit your local Walgreens, Rite Aid, Longs Drug, Wal-Mart, Raleys, or Target. And there are online saving coupons for the gelcaps (Walgreens, Rite Aid, Wal-Mart and Longs Drugs) and the sleep mask (Wal-Mart only). Pink Dreams!

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Menopausal and Midlife Women: Study Us, Please

Posted on Jul 29 2008

You all know that I’ve been pretty vocal about the dearth of research devoted to menopause and midlife women. (Witness the most recent blog entries on Menopause and Immunity.) I guess it pays to climb on the soapbox and vent every now and then, because I was just contacted by researchers from the University at Texas School of Nursing, Austin regarding two studies they are conducting via the internet on -you guessed it- menopausal and midlife women. The study is funded by the NIH (National Institute of Health) and NINR. Primary researcher is Eun-Ok Im, PhD, MPH, RN, CNS, FAAN.

Study 1 concerns physical activity among women aged 40-60 years. Study 2 specifically focuses on menopausal women and their symptom experience - age group also 40 to 60 years of age. They are looking at diverse ethnic groups in these studies: differences and similarities as well as cultural effects. They have enough Asian and Caucasian women represented in the study but seriously need more Hispanic and African-American women to participate for the data to be complete so pass the word to all your Hispanic and African-American goddess friends and acquaintances. I’m including the study website links at the end of this blog entry.

They tell me that each participating goddess will be reimbursed with a gift certificate of $10 per internet survey, and an additional gift certificate for $50 if they join the online forum discussion, which lasts 6 months. They didn’t specify where the gift certificate was redeemable, but it is worth our while to participate for FREE if it helps us learn more about our transitions.

If you wish more info, I’ll be happy to send you all that they’ve sent me - just click the “Contact Us” button at the top right of the page and let me know where to email you. For now here are the links and thanks for spreading the word!

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