Ep 78 Taming Unexpected Fears in Menopause: From Driving and Flying to Health Anxieties

Meegan Care: Hey friends, welcome to the podcast. I’m excited about our topic this week, and it’s come out of conversations with women who are in perimenopause and postmenopause, and also my own experience through that arc of life as well, which obviously I’m still in, and it is around the unusual, unexpected fears that arise in perimenopause and postmenopause.

And I’m not bringing this topic up to alarm you or to layer on more fears. I actually want to speak to it. because if we understand the context of why these are arising, that it’s a very normal part of perimenopause and early postmenopause, then we can understand them better.

For example, if I experience intrusive thoughts, if I know where they’re coming from, , be it a historical trauma or perimenopause, which is another normal psychological experience that arises in perimenopause. If I know where they’re coming from and why they’re happening, it’s much more easy.

It’s much more easy to challenge those thoughts with reality. Right. So those are the. Studies show that that’s an important piece to it. To challenge those thoughts with the actual reality. To look around and see reality and remind your brain, tell those thoughts that, that This is not the truth of what’s happening right now.

It doesn’t need to be worried about right now and be quite strong and firm with your brain. And also it means that we don’t have to layer on another

level of worry around what’s going on in our brain. So we’re going to talk about some of the fears that arise, some that I’ve heard from other women, some that I’ve experienced. We’re going to talk a little bit around what the research tells us about what’s happening, why they’re arising. There is so much more research to be done though.

It’s very early days on understanding when estrogen starts to decline and progesterone starts to decline, what happens to our brain. We’re early days in that research, And then we’re going to look at some ways that we can empower ourselves if this is our experience. But I think if you’re not experiencing this, it’s also a very, very important piece to understand should it ever arise for you in perimenopause midlife through that arc of midlife. Alright, so what are the some of the fears that I’m talking about?

Well, there’s a fear of driving, Fears of flying, fears about our health, fears that we’re just going to drop dead.

They may have been completely not present for you prior to this experience of them,, or in the background, easier to navigate or ignore, and perhaps just showed up a little more loudly at different times of the month.

So in terms of the fear of driving and flying, so they’re all under that arc of increased anxiety, Which is fairly well explained in terms of our menopause experience. But if we get more specific about it, a number of women I’ve spoken to, that have been discussing the topic online as well, Talk about that they suddenly, out of nowhere, have a fear of driving. Or a fear of driving over a bridge.

Or a fear of flying, which they haven’t had before. So mine wasn’t so much a fear of driving, I had that when I had really heightened anxiety in my twenties, when I was unwell with Crohn’s disease, I had a big dollop of anxiety that went with it, and what accompanied that was a fear of driving long distances actually, and there wasn’t a specific time where I resolved that fear.

It was something that I kept trying to challenge, manage, and navigate, and eventually it faded. As my health increased, as my generalized anxiety decreased, the fear of driving long distances got way, way less. To now it’s just a little bit of a background hum sometimes and I can easily focus on the excitement of arriving, of my destination, of where I’m going to, of the fun of a road trip.

But for me, fear of flying became quite pronounced in perimenopause, kind of out of nowhere. And I felt that it wasn’t so much driven by my brain or my thoughts, that I was thinking my way into this fear. But rather, It just arose out of nowhere in my nervous system and suddenly I was so afraid of flying and

I flew fairly frequently for a while, and that fear remained. So it got worse over time in perimenopause, and that fear remained. And I did all the things that you can possibly do to support yourself if you have a fear of flying from a psychological perspective. So The meditations and the rescue remedy and the self hypnosis and the countering those worried, fearful thoughts, all of those good things.

And they didn’t really make much difference, if I’m really honest. It didn’t stop me from flying, but oh my goodness, I was just through a loop having to fly. And I knew logically it didn’t make any sense but my body was just not listening. So that’s a really common experience for women in menopause, and the rate of anxiety for women in perimenopause and postmenopause is very high.

50 percent of women surveyed reported that they had an experience of moderate to severe anxiety during that midlife arc. And because these fears sort of sit under that umbrella of anxiety, we can see why Suddenly we’re experiencing these fears seemingly out of nowhere.

Another fear that arises under that anxiety umbrella for women is fears around their health and fear of death. And I’ve linked those together because I think that they are interrelated And it’s a bit of a sneaky one, that one, because I’ve seen it with a lot of women. I experienced it myself as well.

I saw it in my mother from that menopausal time right through until she did pass away.

And it can sneak in because we are experiencing more challenging physical symptoms, we are experiencing heightened anxiety, and so that can get channeled into fears around our health, and for some women, fear of death. And what I mean by that is, what they experience is that they are consumed with worry that they have a A terminal illness that they don’t know about that is just going to pop out of nowhere and their life is going to be over. Or that I’m just going about living my life and this fear arises that I’m going to die somehow. Medical event, injury, accident.

And in terms of the fear of health, because it does sneak up on us, what that can look like is that we spend a lot of time researching our health, we spend a lot of time researching the symptoms that we’re experiencing, we spend a lot of time looking for alternative and medical treatments online, so we’re Googling it.

Our mind is consistently consumed with worry about our health. So it’s right to the surface, your resting mind will go directly there. And you might recognize that for yourself if you have a cupboard full of supplements, but you still have that anxious worry inside of yourself that has you researching for the next supplement.

And how I know that so well is that that has been a part of my experience also. Now I’m not discounting this because I really do understand having gone through the experience of Crohn’s disease and very early menopause where I I did a lot of research to try and help myself and this can be, on the one hand, somewhat useful, but we need to recognize when it flips over coming from more of the brain’s anxiety and fear response and stress response than a strategic way to help our health.

And you can recognize that from A, what I said around having the cupboard full of supplements and yet you’re still researching more and more and more. You’re grabbing hold of every new thing that comes along and I know we’re flooded with all of that information online so it’s easy to get pulled into it.

And the other piece that I would look out for is if that, is if you are doing that in isolation. If you’re not reaching out and seeking help from a trained, qualified professional to support you on your health journey. So there’s some, we can see how some of it’s very natural and normal and an expected response to what’s going on with our health and energy and vitality.

But our brain crosses over that line and we’re moving into the territory of anxious patterns. And why this is important to understand is because when these fears take up so much psychological focus of your brain, if they’re intruding into your day, very frequently, I think it’s time to talk to somebody who’s a professional that understands absolutely that is not going to diminish or Undermine your fears and anxieties, but that also understands them in the context of what’s happening for us hormonally.

Another big one that comes up for us in this time of life is social anxiety and agoraphobia, where you’re avoiding going out, you’re avoiding certain places for fear of that anxiety arising. So that can be another one that is a slow creep. So at times of my life where I’ve had more anxiety as a young woman, those two were very present for me managed largely by use of alcohol and drugs.

Or at least I tried to manage them with alcohol and drugs. But then I outgrew that and things settled and I didn’t have that experience anymore until I came into perimenopause. And I noticed that as I was moving around in town, when I was walking down the street, Old pattern of social anxiety arose again inside my nervous system.

Very fight and flight, very much not wanting to look at people in the eye, not to make contact, not to say hello, feeling quite anxious for a lot of clients I hear that going to the supermarket really triggers that for them. And so this again can creep in, in perimenopause, and if you think about, we’ve got the slow creep of this, this social anxiety and this agoraphobia, and then if I’ve also got these physical symptoms going on of perimenopause, heightened generalized anxiety, hot flushes, memory problems, fatigue, sleep issues.

You can see how our world can get so much smaller very, very quickly. We start isolating ourselves because we feel better in our own company at home. So whilst that might feel better for your nervous system for a period of time, it is not going to make you feel better in your life overall, over the arc of your life.

So this is where. If you’re using social isolation to try and manage the symptoms, we need to be speaking with a professional about it.

Because our goal in midlife is to navigate those physical symptoms well, to understand what’s happening with our brain, And to navigate that well, with whatever support that we need, so that we can step into this next phase of life, which can be incredibly empowering, incredibly vital, and filled with so much meaning and purpose, but we are not going to get there by isolating ourselves and continuously trying to protect ourselves against those fears. So that’s where it’s important to work with a professional or even just talk with a friend who understands you, who understands what’s going on, who can hold space for you and support you to step outside of your comfort zone because once we’ve reached a certain level with these fears, it’s going to make a difference.

Breaking through that barrier can take a little bit of work, but we can absolutely move through them and come out the other side. Okay, so I’m not wanting to sound all doom and gloom, but what I want to do is to highlight what can happen in terms of fears and anxieties. It’s fairly common. It’s not well researched yet, but what’s happening is that because estrogen is not only declining on the decline, but it’s also fluctuating quite wildly in perimenopause, and then you’ve got that slower decline of progesterone, these hormones are protective against stress.

So there’s a relationship between estrogen and cortisol, so when estrogen goes down, cortisol can go up much more easily, right, so stress hormones. So to understand that because we’ve got that hormone decline, decline in perimenopause, and those hormones act as a protector against stress.

Then our resilience for stress is a little lower at this time. Therefore, these fears and anxieties show up more front and centre. Our brain has more trouble regulating back to a neutral place for a period of time.

The other things that can impact this, this, are life transitions, there may be separation, divorce, there may be, well, aging concerns, right, for ourself, our body absolutely does start to change in perimenopause. This can give rise to some of those fears because of the decline of estrogen and those protective hormones.

We might have some trauma lurking in the past that then starts to rear its ugly head and that can show up in some of these fears and anxieties and I’m going to talk more about that in a future episode because that’s a very important piece for us to not only navigate, but it can be a really empowering piece.

You know, if.

If trauma does start to show up in perimenopause, how, I want to talk about how I, we can navigate, how we can navigate through that and actually take this opportunity to once and for all heal the impact of that trauma, but that, that’s for another episode. How these are managed. So we have the medical pathway, which finally now.

We’re hearing that HRT is helpful for this, right? So if our hormones are lowered and they’re not protecting our brain in the same way, then if we give those hormones a little bit of support, then for many women, that is going to be protective. Often though, SSRIs are used down that medical pathway and there’s evidence there, of course, that they help with anxiety but If it was me, I’d be talking to my doctor.

I would be making sure my doctor is is up to date with current treatment protocols around HRT primarily. So if we’re going in we’ve got perimenopausal symptoms arising and they can include some of those brain symptoms, those psychological symptoms of anxiety and fears and low mood and they’re just giving us SSRIs,

I would be getting a second opinion. And that’s just my opinion, of course, that is not medical advice at all. CBT, Cognitive Behavioural Therapy, there’s some research around that has been helpful for hot flashes actually, but also mood disturbances in perimenopause menopause.

However, If, like me, you have those very normal budget constraints, and I’m talking upwards of 200, a session with a psychologist to to learn how to do CBT, I think what I read was recommended sessions, 10 to 14 sessions. That’s a lot. So many of us will have budget constraints around that. Of course there’s herbal remedies that can support in dialing down that nervous system response that is giving rise to those fears and anxieties.

And some at home strategies for managing fear and anxiety can be mindfulness and meditation.

I’ll link a couple of meditation, guided mindfulness based at the end of the podcast. So you can use those at home. They’re very simple. The meditations that are based on mindfulness practice that is helpful for reducing anxiety and stress. So they can be helpful to use every day because what you’re doing is you’re bringing in some more of that parasympathetic rest and relaxed response into your body. You’re accessing that Through the cause and effect of your mindfulness meditation practice and that’s going to help and give a little bit more Protection for some of those fears and anxieties that arise I will say that, you know, when it’s a really big fear situational base, like for me, the fear of flying piece, I did the meditations, I did the self hypnosis, I did all the things, and it probably did help to turn the volume down a bit, but what was going on in my nervous system was way stronger than what was going on.

Mindfulness and meditation could manage and could help with at that time because of that situational fear that was arising. And I’ve meditated for 30 plus years. So my nervous system is very adept at coming into that parasympathetic response. But I’m not writing it off. I think it’s still very, very useful.

 Other at home strategies that we can use that are really important and helpful is having that support system. Having a friend. I mean, speaking about those fears around the fears around my health, that kind of thing. Having that person that can understand, that can be that steady presence who can help you reality check is very helpful.

[00:21:37] Meegan Care: And then, of course, of course, fostering that growth mindset. So understanding that midlife perimenopause, early postmenopause is a magnificent time for transformation and growth. Yes, what comes along with it for many of us are difficult body and brain symptoms. Things are being shaken up in our psyche because of what’s happening in our body and our brain and so we can take that and use it as a tool for our own growth and Development and that’s very much what we do in my program the midlife upgrade course We access this time of change which can very Feel unstable and we use this time of change to create transformation and to create growth and development within our psyche.

And I think rounding up to really remind ourselves to understand that Increase in fears, phobias, anxieties in midlife, in perimenopause, are absolutely commonplace for a large proportion of women at this stage of life, but remembering that they will not for the most part stick around for the rest of our life.

Just because you’re experiencing this now, It doesn’t mean that it’s going to be with you for all of your life. It means that we can take the time to seek help from a professional, that we can use this time of change for our own growth and development, we can use this time to look at past traumas and hurts that maybe we haven’t healed, that maybe we haven’t integrated.

We can remind ourselves that Yes, my brain is not as protected as it once was, so it moves into a fear state much more easily, but there’s things that I can do to support it, to, to challenge those thoughts to check in with reality, to gain support and gather support around me.

And I know that there are ways that I, that can be used to help treat that, either through the medical pathway or the natural medicine pathway. And I also know that as I come out the other side of postmenopause, that my brain will start to stabilize. Those connections will stabilize. more and I will come into this much more even stable state in later postmenopause.

And that time frame is different for every single one of us, but I want to remind you that if you’re not there yet, it does get better. It gets so much better that there is so much hope that you will live your life with so much more vitality. The fears will dial down. Your capacity for joy actually dials up, and there’s research around that which I just adore that our brain starts to do that in that later postmenopause phase.

This is what’s waiting for us, and let’s manage these feelings. fears, anxieties, and symptoms that are absolutely coming from the change of chemical balance in our brain, so that we can move through this phase and pop out the other side a much more joyful, kinder, happier side. Vital version of ourselves.

I hope that’s been really helpful if you’ve noticed fears, anxieties, it might be fear of driving, fear of flying, fear of being around other people, fear of being outside your house, fears around your health, fears around your mortality, if you’ve noticed those had a big upswing, and you’re in perimenopause or postmenopause, let me know.

Like, I’d love to hear. I’d love to hear your experience, and I think sharing our experiences is really helpful to understand this terrain. Alright my friend, go so so well, enjoy the rest of your week, and I’ll talk to you real soon. Thanks for joining me.