Managing Your Menopause MESS: 10 Tips to Help You Go from Surviving to Thriving After “The Change”

By Emily Josephine

Menopause doesn't have to be the worst time of your life!

 

If you've hit those lovely years known as "perimenopause," or you have already hit the mile marker of menopause, allow me to reach out and give you a virtual hug. I know what you're going through. I not only have been there, but, as I write these words, am still there. 

 

*Irrational irritability or anger? Check.
*Digestive discomfort and new and unimproved poop problems? Check.
*Hot flashes? Check.
*Unaccountable aches and pains? Check.
*Mood swings? Check. 
*Crashing fatigue? Check.
*Lack of purpose and motivation? Check.

 

And this is only a partial list of perimenopause symptoms and menopause issues that I have dealt with since my mid-forties. For many women, managing menopause is a job they're thrust into against their will, as well as a time of life that younger health care professionals can't properly and fully understand because they've never been through it.  

 

If you're a perimenopausal or post-menopausal women who is struggling with both physical and psychological symptoms, who can't see the light at the end of this ink black, light-years long tunnel, this book is for you. It provides tips that may help alleviate some of your symptoms, as well as tips that encourage you to take care of yourself. It helps you release the stress caused by the constant fear that this will never end.

 

Best of all, it helps you to know that you are far from alone. I and countless other women are right here with you.

 

The book is an easy read, and may be the beginning of a much better life for you. Download it, and gain a happier perspective on your time of life today.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Emily Josephine
• Release date: Jun 26, 2024
• ISBN: 9798227922151

Book preview

Introduction.

P ost menopause can’t find purpose in life.

This is the search term that I put into the search engine box a while back. I was feeling not so much down as frustrated because I was going through one of those periods when I can’t settle as to how to make the most productive use of my time. I had a dim glimmer of hope that by some miracle, a fifty-something woman’s blog post would come up, and the post would be about how she’d been struggling with purpose or calling or the meaning of life. I didn’t care whether she’d overcome the challenge or not, whether she had tips for other women in that boat or not. I just wanted to see that I wasn’t the only one.

My glimmer of hope was dim because the Internet landscape has changed drastically since the mid 2010s, and small blogs where real people talk about real life have either been abandoned, or don’t show up in search results because the bloggers don’t have the time and/or money to jump through all the hoops to make search engines happy.

The hope was snuffed out altogether when all the results that came back were irrelevant. The articles which the search engine presented were pep talks about how great life after fifty is for women, because we all supposedly have so much more freedom than we’ve ever had. We can jump into hobbies that we’ve been yearning to try, get involved with community events, travel the world, re-ignite the romance in our marriages or, if we don’t currently have a spouse, start dating again.

I wonder what planet the writers of those articles are living on. First, a lot of us Gen-X women didn’t begin having children until our thirties, so that by the time we hit menopause, we still have teenagers in the house. A much bigger constriction for most women who are young post-menopausals is that they still have jobs. If they have a nest egg, even in conjunction with that of a husband, it’s nowhere near big enough to allow them to retire. Either being a parent of a teenager or having a job precludes the grand freedom we theoretically have.

Third, and perhaps most important, many perimenopausal and post-menopausal women are suffering physically due to the changes in hormone levels. If nothing else, we are tired all the time, and that’s even if we’re one of the few, the proud, the merrily able to get eight hours of sleep every night. When you’re constantly fatigued, you do not feel as if you have any freedom. In a very real sense, you are enslaved to the tiredness. You can barely drag yourself out of bed just to perform your daily duties. You couldn’t care less about starting a new hobby, often unable to work up the motivation to engage with any of the hobbies that you’ve held dear for a long time. The mere idea of having to drive to the airport, fly to somewhere new, and navigate your way around an unfamiliar place exhausts you.

Constantly being tired leads to depression. Period. End of story. There’s no can about it. If you are chronically fatigued, you will get depressed, because the fatigue affects your brain chemistry.

Many of us deal with symptoms that go well beyond feeling tired all day. A lot of neurotypical women suddenly develop sensory issues and short-term memory problems, and those of us who are neurodivergent (read: have