Aging can bring so many meaningful benefits: a deeper understanding of who you are and what matters to you, greater respect for personal boundaries and the ability to implement them, and hard-earned resilience developed through life’s challenges.
But there may also come a day where you wake up and realize your 45 year-old body is definitely not the same as your 28 year-old body – and it can come as quite a shock!
Perimenopause is defined as the 10-13 years leading up to your final menstrual period. This typically starts for women in their mid-40’s, but it can start as early as the mid-to-late 30’s for some women.
Throughout a woman’s peak reproductive years, estrogen and progesterone levels naturally rise and fall in predictable ways. Moving into the perimenopausal transition, the ovaries begin to make less estrogen. This leads to wonky, fluctuating levels of both estrogen and progesterone, causing changes in the menstrual cycle as well as other symptoms.
In a 2003 article titled Health-Care Seeking for Menopausal Problems, the article states that menopausal symptoms drive almost 90% of women to their doctor’s offices seeking advice on how to cope with the symptoms.
Symptoms can range in severity and also may be intertwined with other conditions. Vasomotor symptoms such as hot flashes and night sweats can be intertwined with hypertension and an over-active sympathetic nervous system. Hot flashes can worsen sleep disruption, leading to depressive symptoms.
Irregular periods, join pain, headaches, urinary problems, anxiety, irritability, vaginal dryness, and decreased libido can also occur due to the fluctuating hormone levels experienced in perimenopause.
How East Asian medicine can help
East Asian medicine takes a highly individualized approach to treating perimenopausal and menopausal symptoms. Each patient’s experience is unique, influenced by the type and severity of their symptoms, underlying health conditions, and medical history. This personalized treatment strategy—a cornerstone of East Asian medicine—allows practitioners to target each individual’s specific needs and constitution.
A combination of acupuncture, bodywork, herbal medicine, targeted supplementation, exercise, and lifestyle/nutritional guidance can lessen symptom severity and improve quality of life.
Patients who are using hormone therapies to help ease the transition can also greatly benefit from adding acupuncture into their treatment regime.
Treatment helps patients experience deeper sleep, reduced physical discomfort, milder menstrual symptoms, improved emotional balance, and an overall sense of wellbeing in both body and mind.
Breaking free from perimenopausal suffering
Hormonal fluctuations during the perimenopausal transition can be highly disruptive to one’s quality of life.
The 30’s, 40’s, and 50’s are an extremely busy season of life for many women with kids, pets, peak career and peak earning potential, parents getting older, relationship and marital ups-and-downs, financial planning, burnout, mid-life ruminating, transitions and impermanence. And while there is so much to attend to in the outside world, there can be these huge psychological and emotional shifts in your own internal landscape.
But life is too short to spend so much time feeling miserable, at odds with your body, and totally depleted. Especially during a time of life that can also feel vital and generative.
