Anxiety in Menopause | 5 Tips to Help
How to positively pause menopause anxiety symptoms?
Stomach-churning menopause anxiety is one of the earliest and most under-estimated symptoms, usually starting in perimenopause. You know the physical signs! You know how it makes you feel and the impact in can have on your daily life, self-esteem and self-confidence.
We asked qualified coach and accredited NLP practitioner, Debs Davies to shares some practical steps to help reduce feelings of anxiety in midlife menopause and beyond.
Debs passionately believes that it's possible to thrive in midlife and not just survive it and her mission is to help as many women as possible gain the insight, knowledge and tools that will help them to make positive changes in their lives.
When you’re struggling with anxiety, it seems difficult to believe that it’s your brain’s way of trying to protect you and keep you safe. It’s the very same hard-wired survival instinct - the fight or flight response - that helped our ancestors survive back in the days when threats posed by dangerous animals were clear and present.
So why do we feel so anxious nowadays when there’s no woolly mammoth or sabre toothed tiger chasing us? Well, our brain perceives more things as threats in our information overloaded lifestyles and we’re constantly activating this stress response. Instead of being chased by tigers, we’re being chased by Facebook, our bank balance, our boss or by our menopause. It’s keeping our brain on high alert, leaving us feeling stressed and anxious.
Before long it feels like it’s taking over our lives and we:
Worry about what might happen - what if, what if, what if ?
Stop doing everyday things, going to new places or meeting new people
Stay in jobs, relationships & other situations longer than is helpful to us
Develop unhelpful habits & coping strategies such as comfort eating & drinking which usually only serve to exacerbate the problems
Get stuck in a rut, wanting things to change, but fearful of taking that first step
The experienced anxiety in perimenopause and menopause may feel like a life sentence, but it doesn’t have to be and getting back in control of it, rather than it controlling you is not as difficult as you might think.
5 steps to manage anxiety in menopause:
Focus on your breathe!
When we’re anxious, we tend to breathe from our chest in fast and shallow breaths and this increases our anxiety.
To decrease it, focus your attention on your breath and:
breathe from your belly. Imagine there’s a balloon in your belly and each time you breathe in the balloon inflates and when you breathe out it deflates.
Slow your breathing down. Count to 5 on the inhale and 7 on the exhale
Practice this often so that it becomes a habit that you can easily activate when you feel anxious.
How are you really feeling?
Get more connected with your feelings and the language you use to describe them.
We use the word ‘anxiety’ liberally and very generically, often to describe a range of emotions.
Just as the words love, communication and purpose mean different things to different people, so does the word anxiety.
So what are you really feeling? Worry, panic, fear, disappointment, sadness, guilt, anger or something else?
Why does this help? If we can pinpoint our emotions more accurately, not only does it calm our nervous system down, but it helps us to get a better understanding of why we feel as we do and we feel more able to take action.
Try it today and see how it changes things for you.
Give up the fight!
Sounds counter-intuitive, right?
Especially when, in popular culture, we’re constantly being told that fight our anxiety is what we need to do. We use combative words that paint a picture of a battle to be won.
In battle there can only be one victor.
The truth is that treating it as the enemy is the very thing that’s most likely to make it stronger. Where your attention goes, your energy flows and by focusing all your efforts on your anxiety, you’re actually giving it more attention, more focus and ultimately more power.
The point is, you’re not at battle with yourself or your anxiety. Remember that your brain is trying to protect you & to keep you safe, so your anxiety is there like an alarm clock trying to wake you up to the fact that there’s something not quite right. But, when you’ve spent a long time fighting, resisting, blocking and numbing those feelings of anxiety, it’s easy to be out of touch with that.
The way to take back control is to accept that it’s there and to become a detective and work out why it’s there and what’s not right. Which leads me to……..
Don’t believe everything you think!
We’re often frightened of feeling anxious because it makes us feel helpless and out of control. This makes sense when you consider that we’re taught from an early age that it’s the events & circumstances in our lives that make us feel a certain way.
We carry that belief into our adult life without question, but it’s not the case. It’s not our boss, bank balance, the menopause or our teenagers that cause the anxious feelings, it’s our thoughts about them.
It can be tricky to see this at first, partly because we’ve been conditioned to believe something different, but also partly because our thoughts often don’t sit in our conscious awareness. We’ve thought them so often and for so long they’ve become an unconscious and habitual.
Once we bring those thoughts into our conscious awareness and truly see how they create our feelings, it changes our relationship with anxiety for good.
So, try it out: the next time you feel anxious stop, pause and see if you can notice what you were thinking before you felt that feeling.
My work with clients focuses on breaking unhelpful habitual patterns of thinking and changing their relationship to their thoughts. Not changing the thoughts themselves, not blocking them or resisting them, but changing the client’s relationship to them. You don’t have to believe everything you think!
And finally,
Pause and change
Many women report an increase in anxiety during peri-menopause. While the reduction in oestrogen undoubtedly plays a part in this, midlife is often a time when life demands the most from us and the anxiety we’re feeling can often be a sign that we’re ignoring something in our lives that’s not working or needs our attention.
Often we’ve got a bit stuck in a rut, in jobs, relationships or other situations that we don’t enjoy or that we’ve simply grown out of.
We know, deep down, those things that aren’t right for us anymore. But that feeling starts as a whisper and, if ignored, it gets louder and louder and louder until it’s like a sonic boom that you can’t ignore any longer.
A few years ago, I had to face the fact that the career I’d once loved no longer felt like me. On one hand, I knew it was time to make a change, but on the other hand, I felt a huge amount of fear and resistance. This constant tension created a whirlpool of thoughts in my head and I felt more anxiety than I’d ever felt in my life before.
It’s easy to let the fear and resistance stop us from making a change in our lives, yet pushing through that resistance and changing my career was the very thing that released me from the anxiety I’d been feeling.
In the days when our life expectancy was 50, we could be forgiven for sticking with what we had and not making a change. But now, when menopause comes around, we’re only just over half-way through our life.
That’s why it’s more important than ever for us to make menopause a time where we quite literally pause, reflect and work out why we feel like this: what’s not working, what unmet needs do we have, what lies beneath that anxiety we’re feeling
And then make a change.
Don’t you owe it to yourself to make the next part of your life the best part?
So, why not make the time to take charge of your anxiety? It’s in you.
Debs Davies
Jan 2020
If you’d like more help with anxiety, stress, panic attacks & feeling stuck in life and menopause, book a free initial consultation with Debs Davies or get in touch by email at debs@debsdavies.com
